How old are our oldest schools, really?

 

It appears, from something I saw on Facebook, that Muir College is celebrating its 200^th anniversary this year. It will be the first South African school to do so which, obviously, makes it the oldest school in the land.

In my days as a teacher and rugby coach I visited Muir twice, once at the old school with its quaint pavilion, in Park Avenue in the middle of Uitenhage, and once at its new site up on the hill. I remember being awed by the sense of history and tradition about the place and by the generous hospitality we received.

Muir is unquestionably one of our finest schools. Whether it really is our oldest is, however, open to discussion. The Facebook post I saw included this graphic, listing the oldest 30 schools in South Africa. There are red flags all over it.

 

The age of an institution is tied to its establishment date and that is usually where things become unclear. It’s an area that I have researched quite a lot and written about from time to time. Many organisations began as something else and they can draw a clear line of succession from where they came from to where they are now. I decided, for my purposes, that a school’s founding date should be the day on which it became what it is now – when its current name was bestowed on it. Before that, it was clearly something else, and to add those years in at the beginning of its history is manipulation of the historical record.

So, is Muir really our oldest school and if not, which one is?

Here’s a blog I wrote in 2019 which outlines my views.

The announcement that Hans Coetzee will be going to Hoërskool Durbanville as a rugby coach (and that’s great news for him and the school) included the line that they are building towards a successful 200th Anniversary year in 2026.

That got some people doing arithmetic and they found it means the school was established in 1827, which puzzled a few associated with Cape Town’s SACS, the school that most people (me included) refer to as our oldest school – established in 1829.

On their website, Durbanville say they are SA’s second-oldest school – meaning that Muir is the oldest, I assume. Which makes SACS only the 3rd oldest, and that confuses matters even more.

It’s an old can of worms, one that I've researched before and I found then that the origins of most schools are shrouded in the mists of time and often a bit dodgy.

SACS is generally accepted as the oldest, but its early days were tied to UCT - they even have the same badge - and Paul Roos, similarly, was part of Stellenbosch University.

Jeppe and KES are both Milner Schools (established in 1903), yet Jeppe's Centenary was in 1989 and KES celebrated theirs in 2002, which means they both claim to have been founded prior to Lord Milners’s 1903 proclamation. They, like many of our older schools, trace their ancestry to earlier institutions (some of which can only loosely be called schools) from which they evolved.

Muir College's Website has their establishment date as 1822. But, according to Wikipaedia, Uitenhage’s first Free Government School was opened in 1822. In 1875, the school, then known as the Public Undenominational School moved to Park Avenue and in 1892 the school’s name changed to the Muir Academy. That makes them 130 years old this year, according to my reckoning.

It looks, from the history of the school on their website that Durbanville was once Pampoenkraal and a primary and high school were established there in 1827, so I suspect that they have taken that as the beginning of the current Hoërskool Durbanville.

Someone sent me a list of some 20, mainly primary, schools that were established before SACS, and Durbanville but I couldn't find any of them still operating under the names given.

It's not important really, our traditional schools have all stood the test of time.

And Hans Coetzee was, at Monument, the most successful school rugby coach Gauteng has ever seen. Durbanville will be good in 2026, not matter how old the school may or may not be.

 

The Gauteng schools are babes in arms compared to the really ones in the Cape. The older ones are proud of their ages and they all celebrate their anniversaries.

Here’s a bit I wrote about the ages, claimed and actual, about the schools up here. It illustrates how murky these waters really are:

 

JOHANNESBURG’S mining camp roots meant that it was a pretty rough town in the 1880s. It’s interesting that, along with the saloons and brothels that flourished in that roughneck environment, one of the earliest businesses to be established was a newspaper (The Star’s first edition was in February 1887) and shortly after that, the first school was opened. Within just a few years of a permanent settlement being established the Church of England clearly decided the children living in the mining camp needed a Christian education.

It’s significant that the first two schools established were both church schools, and both monastic (single sex) institutions. They are St Mary’s, founded by the church in 1888 and St John’s, established in 1898. 

There is some controversy surrounding the ages of Joburg’s other oldest schools – few of them were established with their current names, in their current locations. In most cases, the oldest among them trace their origins to some sort of educational institution established in those early days which then became something else, then something else again and, eventually, morphed into the school as it is today. Both St John’s and St Mary’ have had their current names from the start. So they can legitimately call themselves the oldest and second oldest schools in town, respectively.

Perhaps there was a need for redemption in those times, but the replication of the traditional British schooling system was obvious and intentional when the first schools were established, and it would have profound effect on education in the country in years to come.

The first of the public schools to be established in the city was Jeppe High School for boys, in 1890, they claim, and there the controversy begins. Jeppe also calls itself a Milner school (more of that later) and Lord Milner only came to South Africa in 1897. Jeppe, the school’s history recounts, had its origins in another church school, St Michael’s College. The name Jeppe first appeared in 1897 when a school called Jeppestown Grammar School was opened by the then education department. That school later split into the boys and girls high schools and the Jeppe Preparatory School, so all three of them began their history some time after 1897. 

The local German School – Deutche Schule Johannesburg (DSJ) – was also opened in 1890 and that reflected the cosmopolitan population of the miners who came here in response to the gold rush. The school was called DSJ from the beginning so on that score it is Joburg’s third oldest school. It hasn’t been operating continually, however. The school was closed from 1914 to 1918 – the First World War years – and the teachers, all German citizens, were thrown in jail. Interestingly, by 1939 and the outbreak of WW II, pro-British political sentiments were apparently no longer as strong in Johannesburg and the school remained open. The DSJ celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2015.

Lord Milner, was the British High Commissioner of  South Africa during the South African (Anglo-Boer) War, and he established a number of schools at the end of the conflict, to be run according to the British tradition, with the objective of Anglicising the newly conquered territories.

There were 23 so-called Milner Schools in all, in the end, and four of them were in the old Transvaal Republic – Pretoria Boys’ High, Potchefstroom Boys’ High, King Edward and Jeppe. That also makes KES also one of Joburg’s oldest schools. It, too, traces its origins to an educational institution that was established in 1903. It was called Johannesburg High School for Boys and was located in a disused cigar factory in the town. It later moved into a mansion called Barnato Park and was a co-ed school then. The school moved to its present site in 1904 and the name King Edward VII School came in 1910. 

A school was established in nearby Heidelberg in 1903, called Volkskool. It still exists under that name so it, legitimately, can claim to be the 2nd oldest state school in the province, after Jeppe. It’s older than KES, which only took on its current name in 1910.

Our oldest schools have the right to claim their genealogy as they see fit, of course. What can’t be denied is that the oldest schools are generally also the most successful. The traditions at the schools mentioned above stem from their earliest days and from their roots in the British educational system.

It’s ironic that some of our schools (and some in Australia, the States and Canada) are more “British” in their educational outlook than those that exist in Britain today. I remember noting some time ago that the only schools in the world that still employ the old-fashioned English cricket coaching professional are in this country.

Through most of their histories, these old schools were elitist and wholly inappropriate to the social and political realities of South Africa. The best of them have since managed to blend necessary transformation with an adherence to the best of their traditions.