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Perth College
Battye 1912-13:
SCHOOLS OF THE SISTERS OF THE CHURCH.
February 4, 1901, was the birthday of Perth College, the first Western Australian school of the Sisters. It stepped into existence modestly enough, at St. Mary’s Hall, Colin Street. There were thirty-two scholars on the opening day, and a few months later, when a boarding school was opened, there was one boarder. In spite of these very humble beginnings, the Sisters felt justified in making their venture of faith, and looked forward with persistent hopefulness to a time when Church of England parents would rally round them strongly, realizing the importance of religious education for their children. Then the school would grow and prosper. It did grow, for by the end of the first twelve months there were eighty-five pupils, but none the less years of stress and struggle lay before Perth College, and it would be hard to give any adequate idea of the way in which it had to battle for its life. The principals were constantly beset with money difficulties. Perhaps the college attempted too much, certainly it damaged its own prospects seriously for a time by endeavouring to accomplish a well-nigh impossible task. Brighter days dawned, however, and the teaching Sisters are now able to devote themselves wholeheartedly to educational progress. Year by year strenuous efforts are made to improve the teaching staff, the methods, the arrangements, and so by degrees to reach up to the Sisters’ ideal of what “higher education” really means for their girls. Many pupils study for the University Examinations, and successes in the Higher Public, Senior, and Junior Examinations are recorded annually. Among the first applicants at the new Perth University will be an undergraduate from Perth College. The great hope of the Sisters now is that before many years have passed the college may be able to build or buy a school instead of renting houses as at the present time. Mr. Thring, of Uppingham, used to say, “If we would have learning honoured we should build it a fitting habitation,”
In 1902 the second school of the Sisters of the Church (Girls’ High School, Kalgoorlie) was undertaken at the earnest request of the Rev. Gordon Saville, who felt strongly the need of religious education for goldfields children. Here the commencement was rough in the extreme; the schoolroom was of corrugated iron, the old desks appeared to have come down from pre-historic times. The Sisters’ own dwelling-place was so astonishing that a French lady upon seeing it remarked, "Mais c’est une souriciere!” A few years later it became possible to build a nice house at Kalgoorlie, and the “souriciere” was no longer recognizable.
In 1907 St. Alban’s Preparatory School began its career in a good Church Hall in Beaufort Street, Perth. It stands almost shoulder to shoulder with a State school on one side and a Convent school on the other, but yet some fifty little Church of England children gather under its roof.
In 1908 the Sisters bought the goodwill of Miss Best’s Central High School, one of the pioneer schools of Western Australia, and continued it under the name of St. George’s High School. The Bishop wrote on this occasion: “I am grateful to you for having undertaken to carry on this important work. I feel sure that under your management the school will continue to flourish. I am convinced that parents who entrust their daughters to your care may feel certain that their moral and religious education will be the best possible. This is, of course, of the utmost importance. I wish you every success, and I shall have great pleasure in helping you in any way in which I can be of use.”
In 1909 the Misses Scott not only amalgamated their own large school with Perth College, but also offered their services to the Sisters. One of these ladies, “Sister Bessie,” has now joined the community as a professed Sister, and is in charge of Cowandilla. Perth College and Cowandilla practically form one school. At the former all the older girls are educated, and at the latter the juniors from kindergarten to class iv. are taught.
The Sisters undertook work at the Lady Margaret School, Guildford, after repeated requests from various residents. Girls wishing to be prepared for University Examinations usually move on to Perth College when old enough. The school is named after Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, whose saintly character, love of learning, and zeal for education made her an example worthy of the imitation of all women and girls, and whose honoured name is borne by so many colleges and schools in England.
This group of six schools is so organized that when parents find it convenient or necessary to move their child from one to another it is conscious of but little difference. So far as is possible the same methods and the same books are used throughout the Sisters’ schools, and this unity of system is found to give strength and solidity to the work. None the less a healthy spirit of emulation among the scholars is encouraged, as it brings animation and interest. It is in their boarding-schools that the Sisters feel they can do most for the children entrusted to their care. Boarding-school work involves much anxiety and great responsibility, but also gives unique opportunities of influencing the children. The Sisters are enthusiasts for their schools, because they feel that Christian education is the grandest work in which anyone can engage, a work pregnant with glorious possibilities and results, a work that even angels might envy. (Battye 1912-13: 78-79)
Alexandra Hasluck 1981:
... I was then sent to Perth College, Mount Lawley, which was Anglican, run by the Sisters of the Church. It also was only about a mile from our house.
It was a big, raw, red brick building of no architectual merit whatever. An English foundation, the Sisters of the Church, had been invited by Bishop Parry of Perth to come and establish a school for girls where they could receive a Christian education. Three of the Sisters arrived in 1901, Sister Vera, Sister Rosalie, and Sister Susanna. They opened their school in 1902 but it was 1916 before the large school building in Mount Lawley was opened. When I joined, it must have been about 1918, the last year of the First World War. ...
I am not sure, even now, how I felt about Perth College. The religious head of it was Sister Vera, a tiny little old lady whom we all somehow knew had been born in Russia, while her father was British Ambassador there, but we never knew her real name. She had a beautiful voice, warm brown eyes, a rather hooked nose in a kind face, a black hairy moustache and false teeth with a gap in them in front, which forced her to suck through this gap in order to hold the teeth in while she said certain sounds. ‘Well, gairls,’ (suck, suck) she would say at Scripture lessons. She reverenced St Joan of Arc, and St Paul, and the ‘gairls’ of whom I was one, got a bit sick of them. The Sisters with one exception, gave religious instruction. The exception was Sister Susanna, reputed, in whispers, to be descended from Admiral Lord Nelson, whom we all knew to have been childless. Sister Susanna was large, lanky, plain, forthright, and very handy with the wooden-backed blackboard duster, which she would hurl at anyone who disturbed her teaching by entering her classroom on even the most official errand. It was a peril all avoided if they could.
But Sister Vera: few of us realised then what a cachet she gave to the school. It was only later that some of us realised what we had had in our midst — a great lady, whose influence permeated during her time. Dear Sister Vera, I have pleasant memories of her.
All the Sisters, for more came when the big school was in operation, wore voluminous thick black woollen habits and veils, with starched white banding over the forehead and round the chin. In summer they wore grey cambric, no less voluminous. The school uniform for the girls was a heavily pleated navy skirt of a springy fabric called lustre, a white shirt and navy tie. A hat with silver badge, a blazer — and gloves, on the wearing of which great emphasis was laid — were also part of the equipment. If caught not wearing one’s gloves in the tram or in the street, some penalty followed.
The real head of the school, however, was the Headmistress, Mrs Louisa Russell-Smith, M.A. Short, squat, with bulging grey, rather frog-like eyes and a bland frog-like smile, she was a marvellous influence in the school. She ruled, and I mean ruled, by her smile and her sarcasm, not gentle or kindly, but amusing and to the point. If one did not like being made to look ridiculous, even in a pleasant voice, one quickly amended whatever was wrong or out of order. I had the greatest respect for Mrs Lou, as she was known among us. A good headmistress is above rubies. The fault with a lot of teachers today who cannot control their pupils is not so much that the type of child is different, but that the teachers cannot put over their own personalities.
I was not renowned for working hard at school, but managed to get by without undue effort. My mother complained that I never seemed to have much homework, and I explained that I had done most of it in prep. Certain periods of the day when one did not take some subject or other were devoted to prep. Because geography lessons caused me many tears — it was a subject I just seemed to have no clue about — and the mistress who taught it was so strict and kept me in so much, I managed to persuade Mother to ask if I could give it up. Permission was granted, and because I was a Presbyterian permission was also granted for me to absent myself from classes on church dogma, although I had to attend ordinary Scripture lessons. It was during one of these hiatuses, when I was in VI C, the top form but two, that I was alone in the classroom one day happily preparing some lessons I had not given much attention to, when I heard a sort of scuffling in the large locker cupboards along one wall. Bravely flinging open the door (for it might have been rats), I found crouched inside a girl who much later became known to millions of readers throughout the world as the novelist, Lucy Walker, but then was known to me as Dorothy McClemans.
‘Whatever are you doing there?’ I said. She didn’t look a bit comfortable. She explained. Her father had been Archdeacon, then Canon of Christ Church, Claremont, and she was expected to religiously attend religious classes, and to be frank they bored her. So she hid and was trying to think up some excuse for apparent lateness. I don’t remember what happened to her, but I admired her for taking a stand, if her attitude in the cupboard could be called that.
Being a private school, one could, as well as dropping certain subjects, go up or down for classes. I went down a class for mathematics, a subject at which I was abysmally bad, to the great wonderment of my parents, both of whom were very good at it; but I was quite good at French and Latin, and although year after year the youngest of my class, would often come top in English. In fact the only prize I ever won at Perth College was what was called the V.L. Essay Prize. I never found out who V.L. was — some Old Girl — but the essay on a set subject was done when in VI A, the highest form. Prize-winners were sometimes asked what things they were interested in so that appropriate books could be chosen for them. I must have said Ancient History, and found myself walking up to receive a large red book with the school badge stamped in gold on the cover, entitled Ancient Greece, by H.B. Cotteril, and a smaller green book on Religion in Ancient Egypt, by W. Flinders Petrie. Tears of rage were shed over these books when I got home, and though I did try — and I can read almost anything, and could then — I never managed to read them. Dry-as-dust, they are still in the bookshelves here and I don’t even like to give them to Save-the-Children book sales because of the badge on the cover and the inscription. It is a slightly bitter recollection.
An even more bitter one remains to me. At the age of fifteen or even sixteen it was customary to sit for what was in Western Australia called the Junior Certificate Examination, in other States, I believe, called the Intermediate. I had just turned fifteen when I sat. I had to be coached in Maths, but I passed, and in nine subjects, the highest pass in the school. However, the girl with the next highest pass, in eight subjects, received a prize for the highest pass, it being explained to me that she, of course, was Church of England.-1 must say that rankled because it seemed so unfair and irrelevant. I never joined the Old Girls’ Association of that school but forever regarded myself as an Old Girl of P.L.C. for whatever that was worth, for it did seem a more honest school.
Schooldays were not unhappy, in fact I loved them and hated holidays. A small group of us in the upper classes used to sit on the grass under the trees at lunchtime and talk, mostly about books and poetry. We were very keen on two Anthologies published in 1923, Poems of Today and Poems of Today, Second Series, and discussed and quoted our favourites — Rupert Brooke, of course, Yeats and others — but sometimes we talked about our ‘thrills’, the name given for the Guildford Grammar School, or Hale School, or Scotch College athlete or dancing partner that one most admired. We called ourselves, with what we thought was originality, The Souls. Later reading has showed me that we were very out-of-date even then, for other groups in Britain and America of people who thought themselves sensitive and select had used the name a decade or more before us. Still we had some very good discussions and no hint of politics or of social disorders intruded to distract us from the purpose for which we were at school — to learn, to be informed, to use our minds, and not to go off half-cocked.
A couple of years after I had joined Perth College my mother planned to move from the William Street house. Traffic was increasing: William Street was rapidly becoming a major route and was noisy; and she had got tired of rented houses. She managed to persuade my father that the long walk to school was too much for me; I was growing rapidly and was very thin. A house should be bought nearer Perth College. So one was acquired in Clifton Crescent, Mount Lawley. It was a new estate opened up. Behind it lay bush, and it was about eight minutes’ walk from the Inglewood tramline on which lay the school. (Hasluck 1981: 74-78)
References and Links
Battye, J.S. 1912-13, The Cyclopedia of Western Australia, Cyclopedia Co., Perth.
Hasluck, Alexandra 1981, Portrait in a Mirror: An Autobiography, OUP, Melbourne.
Perth College history, on its website.
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 9 December, 2020 and hosted at freotopia.org/schools/pc.html (it was last updated on 6 December, 2023). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.