Dear Parents
Today we celebrated Founders Day with a special service and a varied and fun programme. Here is what I spoke to the boys about.
What’s so good about being an old school?
172 years old. That’s what we are. Not so old compared to a number of boys’ schools in the UK where some are six, seven or eight hundred years old. But in South Africa we are one of the oldest schools in the country with SACS officially held as the oldest, having operated continuously since 1829.
So what’s so good about being an old school? Well, we have many traditions; a uniform with a long history, many old and beautiful buildings like Stanmore House, The Brooke Chapel and Founders House. We have our own Rhodes Scholarship awarded to Bishops 120 years ago. A form of rugby was started at Bishops when Canon Ogilvie arrived as Principal in the 1860s and many consider South African rugby to have started at Bishops.
The school was started by the first Anglican Bishop of Cape Town and we were one of the first schools in Cape Town to introduce a comprehensive laptop programme for College boys. These are just a few facts and observations that form part of what people call a rich and colourful history. And if you like history, you really appreciate it.
But think of those first boys who started school in Bishopscourt in 1849 in two school rooms with a Head and one teacher, and yourselves now. In the 1850s the Church bought Woodlands, something of a forest with one or two small buildings and it covered today’s College and Pre-Prep campus. Later they bought the graveyard from St Thomas’ Church as well as Stanmore and Rossall. And how many more buildings, fields, swimming pools and so on are there now. Your parents pay high fees for you to attend Bishops but fees could never cover the cost of building and providing what we have today. And to build everything we have in two years, say, we would have to borrow many hundreds of millions of Rands and then try to pay the bank back. And over our many years, many excellent teachers, families and boys have helped the school grow, not only with fields and buildings, but with new subjects, different sports and clubs, music, modernising the school and the way it does things.
So this is why Founders Day is so important: we acknowledge and thank those who did something, great and small, to give us what we have today.
“….. trampling on the rough ways, they went ahead of us.”
Augstine of Hippo
And we thank them by appreciating what we have and using all the opportunities Bishops gives us: and it’s a good day too to thank your parents for sending you to Bishops. I am very grateful to work at Bishops.
But Bishops is not an island. We have not been in a bubble for 172 years. The school grew up in a segregated society and under apartheid for many, many years. All the teachers were white and the boys were all white. That has changed, we know.
Like many old schools around the world, senior boys probably thought it was their right to beat up a younger boy. And boys who were bullied were often too frightened to report it. Now we have bullying policies, seniors are leaders and mentor younger boys. We can never go backwards. We want everyone to do what they should do to bring out the best in everyone else.
We need to support each other, make every boy and staff member at Bishops feel welcome, stand up for what is right and enjoy each other’s differences. We must all be part of making Bishops’ best future.
Pro Fide et Patria.
Kind regards
GREG BROWN
HEADMASTER |
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