Townsend High School

From 1950

Also known as Townsend, Townsend Girls' High School.

Government girls' high school in Bulawayo, established in 1950; its full history is in the senior-schools volume and is still to be read.

Townsend is one of Bulawayo’s girls’ high schools, and for twenty-one years it was the newest of them. When Montrose opened in 1971, its own history called it “the first high school for girls to be established in Bulawayo for twenty-one years.” That points back to 1950, the year Townsend was established.

What we know so far

Townsend has a full chapter in the same history of the country’s government senior schools that tells the stories of Hamilton, Montrose and Northlea. We have not yet been able to read it. Its list of illustrations, though, sketches the story the chapter tells:

• Miss G. M. Low, probably the first headmistress, and the original school block. The school hall is named the Margaret Low Hall.
• Miss J. Waudby, Mrs Celia Davies (the school library is the Celia Davies Library, with a mural), Mr R. A. Furber and Miss Brenda Phillips, successive heads, it seems.
• A Tennis Touring Team in 1963, and a photograph of the tennis tourists at Rhodesia House.
• A Scottish Dancing Club in 1964.
• Jean Fowlds, captioned “1972 Olympic team member”. Rhodesia’s team was barred from the Munich Games days before they opened.
• Archery, “introduced during the polio epidemic”.
• The twenty-first anniversary cake, the Anne Nash Centre, The House of Bernarda Alba (1975), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1981), and the school block and grounds in 1982.

Every one of those is a story we would like to tell properly.

What we don’t know yet

• Who Townsend was. The school’s name has an origin, and we don’t know it yet.
• Where it began, and who its first girls were.
• Townsend since 1982.

If you were a Townsend girl or taught there, especially if you remember the polio years, the tennis tour or the Margaret Low Hall, please tell us.