STORY 95
Ask a Helderberg resident of a certain age where they went to school and they will almost certainly name a high school before a primary school. This is not ingratitude toward the primary schools that taught them to read and add. It is simply that the high school years are the ones that stay, the friendships that last, the teachers who are remembered by name decades later, the first real experiences of achievement and failure and the specific social world of adolescence. The high schools of the Helderberg formed generations of adults who still define themselves, at least partly, by the school they attended.
Hottentots Holland High School, HH, was the first. Established in 1937 as the Helderberg’s only secondary school, it took its name from the mountain range that has dominated the eastern skyline of the valley since long before any school existed. For the first decades of its life it served the entire basin, pupils arriving from Somerset West, Strand, Gordon’s Bay, Sir Lowry’s Pass, Macassar, Firgrove and the surrounding farms, because there was nowhere else to go for a secondary education. It was the English-medium high school, which in the South Africa of that era meant something specific about social profile, cultural orientation and relationship to the British educational tradition. It produced farmers and lawyers and rugby players and civil servants, as high schools do. It also, by its success, created its own problem: by the late 1950s it was struggling to accommodate the growing number of learners from an increasingly populated district and the pressure was building for a second high school in the Helderberg.
That second school began in a house. On 20 January 1962, principal M.J. “Matie” Odendaal and a small group of teachers arrived at an ordinary rented house at 96 Mill Street in Strand and transformed it, in a single day, into a functioning school. Two days later, on 22 January, Hoërskool Valsbaai officially opened with 97 Standard Six pupils. By 1 July of that year it had been renamed Hoërskool Strand, the name that every generation since has known. The permanent buildings were still under construction when the 1963 school year began, forcing classes into shifts in the cramped Mill Street house with 181 learners where 97 had started. The dark green uniform was introduced during that first year, beginning a tradition that became as familiar in Strand as the harbour or the beachfront. Principal Odendaal, remembered by former staff for measuring the alignment of chairs at prize-giving, for his absolute precision in every detail of school life, retired at the end of 1968 having grown the school from 97 learners to more than 400. He had started a school in a house and left behind an institution.
Gordon High School in Somerset West has its own origin story, characteristically unassuming. The school was founded in 1952, beginning in a wooden hall in Church Street that had been owned by a local cartage contractor named Eddie Gordon. The school was named for him, not for an official or a politician or a historical figure, but for a businessman who made a hall available when a community needed one. From that wooden hall the school moved to temporary structures in Victoria Street, eventually finding its permanent home near the N2 and De Beers Avenue. It grew into one of the Helderberg’s significant secondary schools, serving communities on the eastern and expanding edges of Somerset West, feeding into and from the suburbs that kept appearing on the valley’s map as the population kept growing.
Three high schools. Three different origin stories. One shared purpose, to take the children that the primary schools had prepared and give them enough of the world to navigate it when they left.
Between You and Me:
A school named after the man who lent the hall. Not a benefactor in the grand sense, not someone who endowed a building or had his name carved into a foundation stone, just a cartage contractor called Eddie Gordon who had a wooden hall in Church Street and made it available when a community needed somewhere to put a school. Gordon High School has been operating under that name for over seventy years and most of the people who say it every day have no idea where it came from. I rather like that. It is a small, almost accidental form of immortality, earned not through ambition but through having the right building empty at the right moment and saying yes.
Historian – Harmen Bockelenberg
Next week: the schools that the other histories don’t always tell education beyond the white school gates.
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