The Founders- Canon Smith and Bishop Marsden
Across Eastern Australia’s Great Dividing Range, set in the plains, is Bathurst, one of the first towns established in New South Wales. By the 1870s, Bathurst was busy in its role as a thriving gold and pastoral centre. It was also seen as ‘a bearer of enlightenment’ with all kinds of schools, each one ‘fighting for its share of the public purse, parents’ fees and children’s attendance’.
The early success of the Roman Catholic secondary school, St. Stanislaus’, founded just before All Saints’, did not go unnoticed in Anglican circles, especially by the Reverend Thomas Smith, who had been living in the district since 1861 and in 1873 was nominated canon to All Saints’ Cathedral. Canon Smith had been concerned about the low level of education generally available to his parishioners’ children, so he set up a committee to establish a secondary boarding school, under the auspices of the Church of England, similar to St. Stanislaus’.
In 1873, his committee obtained a site from Bishop Marsden, Bishop of Bathurst. The Bishop, reputedly wealthy, had provided his own episcopal residence, and five acres of the site originally set aside for Bishop’s Court were apportioned to the proposed new school. Money for the buildings came from committee members and Canon Smith’s loan from the sale of his own property, a farm and orchard between Strathfield and Burwood.
The Foundation and the first Headmaster, Mr Henry Kemmis
By December 1873, enough progress had been made to justify the school opening in the following year; the first announcement referring to The Bathurst Church of England College was in The Bathurst Times on 6 December 1873. Boarders’ fees were sixteen guineas a term and dayboys three guineas. Work on the new school buildings had not yet been finished, and so the school opened in temporary premises, one being the Oddfellows’ Hall in Keppel St., on 27 January 1874. On the first day, there were seven boys and two assistant masters, all sons of Henry Kemmis.
Shortly after the opening, the school moved from the Hall to a small room in the tower of the Market Buildings, then to the first Headmaster’s house in Russell Street, and then to a cottage at the corner of Keppel and Peel Street. Finally, in mid-1875, the newly named school, All Saints’ College, moved to its new `Home on the Hill’, into an acceptably `Gothic Edifice’ created by Edmund Blacket, designer of Sydney University’s main buildings.
The students of the time, especially those from the bush, were highly independent and at first resented any control. Most were sons of parents from properties out west, Dubbo, Forbes, Mudgee, travelling up to 100 miles without a break on Cobb and Co. coaches, at the beginning and end of term holidays. Many of the boys were aged 16, 17 and difficult to teach (although good at football), and as a result, the classical side received less attention than those subjects more concerned with winning a living from the land. An old boy composed a poem some twenty-five years later when an early Headmaster revisited the school:
Confess, O chief, that when the first wild mob
Confronted you, it seemed a forlorn job
To break us in: we backed at all restraints,
And snorted loudly at the name of Saints,
Forgetting, if they cared to make a fuss,
That they had much more right to snort at us,
A nervous tremor must have shook your frame;
But all we know was this: that you were game!
It was heroic, curb and bit and spur,
And something else that used to raise our fur-
With more than these-High Purpose shining clear
Won you the victory that brings us here.
The next Headmaster, Edwin Bean, set out to build a school according to the principles he had learned at Clifton, a noted English school that he had attended for seven years. He believed that the prime purpose of a school was “to form character and the second to train the mind”. Boarding schools, he believed, were most effective because of their close community and “should profess some form of religion”.
The early buildings were modelled on Clifton, Bean’s school in England, and architect Edmund Blacket’s plan for the new school reflects this.
Mrs Memory Sanders
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