The First Classrooms: The Schools That Started Everything

STORY 92

Featured image: School uniform costs from 1981

Before there were school buildings, there were church halls. Before there were principals, there were single teachers standing before a dozen children in a borrowed room. The oldest schools of the Helderberg did not begin in purpose-built institutions with assembly halls and swimming pools and motto boards above the gate. They began in the spaces that communities could find, with the resources that communities could scrape together, because enough parents understood that their children needed somewhere to go and learn.

Somerset West Primary School, Summies to every generation that has passed through it, traces its roots back to 1820, when the Dutch Reformed Church established the Somerset-Wes Distrikskool, likely the very first school anywhere in the Helderberg Basin. But the school most people know today properly began on 23 January 1865, when it reopened as the Somerset West Public School with twenty-three pupils, all boys and one teacher. His name was Mr George Tubb. Classes were held in the consistory of the old Dutch Reformed Church, which tells you almost everything you need to know about how education and faith were entangled in the early life of the valley.

The Somerset West of 1865 was a small agricultural settlement where ox-wagons were still the primary transport, the mountain dominated every view and the idea of a dedicated school building was an aspiration rather than a reality. School fees were charged according to age. The first principal received an annual salary of seventy-five pounds from the colonial government. By 1882 a dedicated three-classroom building had been erected behind what would later become the Somerset West Town Hall, the town’s first purpose-built educational facility, modest by any standard, but permanent.

Summies went on to become one of the oldest continuously operating schools in the Western Cape. Its motto, Nil Sine Labore, nothing without hard work, was not chosen for its modesty. The school that began with twenty-three boys in a church vestry would eventually serve thousands of children across more than a hundred and sixty years, watching Somerset West transform from a farming village into a modern urban centre while continuing to do the same thing it had always done: teach the children of whoever lived here.

Somerset House came much later than its old buildings might suggest, founded only in 1948 by Dr George and Cora Haydock, who left Scotland after the Second World War with the idea of starting a school of their own. What distinguished Somerset House from the beginning and distinguishes it still, isn’t the age of the institution but the age of the ground it stands on. In 1950 the school moved into the old Cloetenburg homestead, a farmstead carved out of Governor van der Stel’s Vergelegen estate in 1709, its distinctive gable already dated 1785, considerably older than anything Victorian. While schools like Summies grew alongside the town’s own expansion, Somerset House arrived on land that had already lived several lives before it, a farm, then a guest house, then finally a school, its historic buildings forming a physical connection to a past stretching back further than Somerset West itself. In a town that has lost a great deal of its old fabric to development, a school built inside a two-and-a-half-century-old farmstead is itself a form of preservation.

The oldest roots of formal education in Strand reach back to 1880, when a small school began serving what was then little more than a fishing village and holiday settlement connected to Somerset West by sandy roads. The first government school in the area operated from St Andrew’s Hall in the 1890s. By 1901 funds had been secured and land obtained and in 1902 the Somerset West/Strand School was officially opened. Those early years were not comfortable ones, school records describe winters when floodwaters covered the surrounding streets and summers when drinking water had to be brought by horse cart from as far away as Halfway. The school that would eventually become Hendrik Louw Primary was built on exactly the kind of resilience that the Helderberg’s coastal community had always required.

These three schools, Somerset West Primary, Somerset House, Hendrik Louw, were the foundations on which everything else was built. Every other school in the Helderberg owes them something. The teachers who taught in those early classrooms, largely anonymous to history, shaped the community that built all the schools that came after.

Between You and Me:
Twenty-three boys, one teacher, in the consistory of a church, in 1865. That is the entire beginning of a school that is still operating a hundred and sixty years later. I find this useful to remember whenever something new feels too small to matter, a market stall, a wooden shed with a rescue boat in it, a hall on a corner that someone made available. Summies began as the smallest possible version of a school, in a borrowed room, with a motto about hard work that nobody had earned yet. A hundred and sixty years is a long time for “nothing without hard work” to remain accurate. It has.

Historian – Harmen Bockelenberg

Next week: The trail of the missing Lochner deed stays open for now, an invitation to any reader who might know more, while the story moves on to somewhere else in the Strand.