St George’s 1963 – 2011 (For the Year of 1963)

The ‘Tower Block’, still one of Harare’s landmarks.

I must try to limit myself to describing St George’s physically rather than attempt to offer opinions on internal changes of a more metaphysical and cultural nature. The world changes: if names so prominent in 1963 as J F Kennedy, Harold Macmillan, Charles de Gaulle, Nikita Kruschev, John XXIII, and closer to home, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Moise Tshombe, Kenneth Kaunda, Hastings Banda and Ian Smith have long been consigned to History Books, then should we be surprised if even St

George’s has seen a few changes in that time? (Interestingly enough, St George’s was selected as the school for two of Kenneth Kaunda’s grandchildren, and four of Ian Smith’s.)

The school leaver of 1963, returning to St George’s for the first time since then, would find the College instantly recognisable since it is still dominated by The ‘Tower Block’ from Neptune’s Lawn

The new Chapel taken from ‘tear-drop’ island

Monastery and Priory; the Common Room Block (now recolonized as classrooms, parallel with Monastery and Priory but a longer building, and along our northern border with the Botanical Gardens); and the Sports Pavilion on Madden field. A view taking in the new laboratories on the left, the Chapel on the right, the Bulawayo Wing with arched front between them, and the Common Room block behind.

the three structures of the Tower block (leading onto the ‘dormitory section’ and sickbay), the double-storeyed classroom block, and the Beit Hall. However in the mid-seventies the Trident Development Fund was responsible for a number of major additions: the new Chapel (located where the old swimming pool was); the new swimming pool (where the old printing club was); additional upstairs and downstairs laboratories connecting the edge of the classroom block with

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The Beit Hall

In 1982 / 83 a further structure, known as the Bulawayo Wing, was built to house an additional Biology Laboratory, a Lecture Theatre and additional rooms and classrooms that serve now as the hub of our ICT Department.

The only other major development was additional staff housing funded by the Old Georgians’ Association as its contribution in 1996 to our Centenary Celebrations. 10 houses were built south of Madden field to add to the four houses already in the same vicinity. The new staff houses, south of Madden Cricket Field

Fr O’Halloran, Rector 1977 – 1983, used to tease the old faithful here by stating that St George’s was really a Sports Club with a few classrooms. So needless to say this aspect of the College’s life and routines (encouraged by our super climate) has hardly been neglected: in the Winter Sports Season, shortly to be with us, we have four Rugby fields, four Soccer fields and three Hockey fields; in Summer, these become seven Cricket fields and a grassed Athletics track. Since our day, in addition to the new swimming pool, there are two squash courts, three basketball courts, three volleyball courts, eight tennis hard-courts, and the Beit Hall is used as a badminton court, when available.

Weaver Field, the venue of a very unorthodox religion.

Off campus, the College golfers are permitted to use Royal Harare (down the road from us), the Rowers (ie the Boat

Page 3 Club) use Mazowe Dam, and although the Water polo players practise in our pool, the pool sadly was not designed with water polo in mind, so they have to play off-campus. So sport interests are well-covered. Only shooting has fallen by the wayside, as that is an avocation the ruling authorities seem to reserve for themselves. The old armoury is now a computer ‘resource centre’ and the new armoury houses the College uniform shop. The swimming pool from the Tower looking towards the Basketball and Tennis Courts, with the Old Tuckshop still standing.

Our fields are in beautiful condition, and often commented upon, thanks to our six boreholes that feed water to one of the old reservoirs on campus and then re-pumped to each field as per need. (Provision of Municipal water is a somewhat tentative process in the modern Harare, as is the provision of electricity, but as we are on the cable that feeds the police, army and air force barracks across the road, and the State Residences next door, we are seldom disrupted.) Nevertheless we own two enormous generators that stand by in case of emergencies, which very seldom happen to us, but which affect most of the rest of Harare. Looking towards the ‘Tower Block’ from the swimming pool.

It is precisely because of the deteriorating macro-environment of Harare, that at St George’s we offer our pupils an exemplary environment in which to live, play and work. Bearing in mind that some of our buildings are now over 80 years old, we have high maintenance costs (at present, for example, we are giving the Beit Hall a major ‘makeover’).

A cricket match vs the Old Georgians.

Of course the use to which some of the buildings have been put is significantly different from 1963. The new Chapel (which is already too small for our needs) allowed the ‘Chapel’ which we used in 1963 to become a very beautiful library. In our day there were about 500 pupils, of whom about half were boarders. Today we have 770 pupils of whom 120 are boarders.

Page 4 So much of the Boarding area of our day is utilised in other ways: Big Dorm and Verandah is an Upper 6 Study area; Chapel Dorm is a Lower 6 Study area; Senior Refectory is now the general Staff Room; the Senior and Junior Common Rooms are classrooms; Middle Dormitory is partly a Computer Lab, and partly our bookbinding and textbook repair room. (Not all changes have been for the worse, although it is a tendency for each generation of school leavers to think that

The old chapel now the Library

they represent the epitome of the College pupil at his best.) The old Boarders’ Study Place has become a

The Cricket Pavilion on Madden Field

very beautiful hall and gathering place on special occasions. Even those teak desks, now scattered around in the bigger classrooms, have been magnificently refurbished and are items of furniture highly prized, compared to the cheap plastic and metal junk that serves as classroom furniture nowadays.

Surprisingly, perhaps, one of the most unpopular decisions (at least in the eyes of the Old Georgians) An outdoor school Assembly that I have had to make was giving instructions for the removal and destruction of Neptune’s Pond. It had by the nineties become an irreparable cesspool. Neptune himself had long disintegrated and is in the rubble of the foundations of one of the newer buildings. But the minds of some Old Georgians had become sentimentally attached to this hugely unattractive cattle dip of a pond, layered with generations of smashed ink and mineral bottles, Fr Crehan’s cigarette butts and other choice Neptune’s Lawn without Neptune’s Pond.

Page 5 items of schoolboy detritus. I don’t think it was the ornamental qualities of the pond that appealed so much as its symbolic association with how serious social infractions, such as heresy and theft, were dealt with in the days when boys were men (!) – the closest thing to a place of public execution which St George’s ever offered. (It is now grassed, but you will be glad to know that in the dry season one can still make out the traces of where the perimeter wall of the pond had been.)

The new swimming pool on a hot day

Of course a school is not so much a conglomeration of buildings as of people. One of the most noticeable differences since 1963 has been the steady depletion of the Jesuit presence. Currently we have two, an ageing German Jesuit theologically very conservative, and a new youngish Rector, Fr Chiedza Chimhanda, full of energy and charisma. (The Rector is an important figure who acts as Chaplain and a kind of supervisory referee but is not involved in the day-to-day running of the school.) I am not a starry-eyed idealist concerning the Jesuits and I sometimes marvel that I still claim some pretensions to normality despite having been brought up by a group of eccentric English bachelors in Holy Orders, so many of whom seemed larger than life. (And how boring is “normality” after all!) I had the enjoyment of returning to St George’s as a teacher 15 years after leaving it as a pupil, when the likes of Jesuits such as Tommy Crehan, Ken Nixon and Hugh Ross were still very much in evidence – as well as other later versions such as Michael O’Halloran, Bernard Brewer and Peter Meiring (the latter, Lancashire-born but the descendant of an Afrikaner general of the Boer War, thus containing within and despite himself, many of Rugby Supporters on Weaver Field making up “Saints” by the ingredients of delightful taking off their red blazers. contradiction).

Of course when I returned, my relationship was much more (though never quite) on an equal footing with such men, and on the whole, proximity did not lead to disenchantment with the view. In an increasingly grey world such men were prepared to express and stand by their opinions with determination in an unqualified manner. It may be doubted that they were all outstanding classroom practitioners or even got on with each other in a perfectly equable manner; but by and large they were singular, and devoted themselves to the cause in a

Page 6 dedicated and whole-hearted way that is inevitably different from today’s average lay teacher. (And so if the current crop of Jesuits in Zimbabwe find me grumpy, inflexible, rooted in the past etc they have only themselves to blame!)

Currently, we have a full-time staff of 65, two of whom are Jesuits and 24 are women; and this is what is most different about the St George’s of 2011 from that of 1963, viz the staff composition. We offer a fairly basic curriculum with 16 academic departments (Accounting, Art, Biology, Business Studies, Chemistry and Science, I. C. T., Economics, English, French, Geography, History, Mathematics, Physics, Physical Education, Religious Education and Shona). We do the public examinations of Cambridge International – IGCSE (O Levels) and Advanced Level; in 2010 at IGCSE Level we entered 130 candidates who achieved a 91% pass rate; and at A Level, we entered 108 candidates who achieved a 95% pass rate. So with this statistical evidence I don’t believe there has been a marked academic decline from 1963. Possibly even the reverse: the The ‘Jesuit’ wing of the Tower Block, modern Zimbabwean student is generally much more now the Administration Offices. conscious than I was at his age, of the precious gift of a good education and the necessity for it if he is to make headway in life – although of course I do not claim that for each one of our current pupils!

For me to be here has been altogether a very special privilege: it is now 55 years since I first entered the portals of St George’s, and I have been here for 40 of them since, something that then was not remotely among my aspirations, but rather the un-deliberated determination of fate. Because so much of St George’s is familiar to me from my youth, I feel sometimes that I have never grown up. I believe that were you to revisit this place, you would not be

The ‘portals’ of St Georges.

unhappy about what it has become and that it has not isolated itself from its past.

B. TIERNAN BT and wife, Gail, at a College function.