History of Newcastle East Public School
Newcastle East Public School is the oldest school in continuous operation in Australia. Eddie Braggett has validated this continuity since its formation in 1816 by Henry Wrensford, finding conclusively that the school has accepted pupils every year since its inception.
Henry Wrensford was a twenty-six-year-old convict when he was convicted of fraud and sentenced to seven years’ transportation. It was only two years later in 1814 that he was granted a conditional pardon by Governor Lachlan Macquarie, with his occupation recorded as “schoolmaster”; perhaps owing more to his military connections than any such experience or aptitude. Wrensford started the school in May 1816 with eight girls and nine boys attending, aged from three to thirteen. Lessons took place in one of the government-owned slab huts that stretched along the bottom of the hill now occupied by Bolton Street and its whereabouts. At this time, the settlement consisted of no more than 400 people, mostly convicts, and the students were the children of these. Macquarie himself directed that the Commandant “give it every possible support and encouragement it being highly approved of by the governor as a most benevolent and praiseworthy institution”.
Captain James Wallis, who presided over an expansive building programme in Newcastle, including the breakwater from mainland to Nobbys Island, designed Christ Church which was completed in August 1818. Some time that year, Wrensford’s school was moved to a vestry of the church, and the Newcastle School soon acquired the name “Christ Church School”.
Four years later in 1820 Wrensford became a free man and left the school, being replaced by another convict Samuel Dell. The control of the school was changed from the government to the church during 1826. As the school continued to grow there became a need for a new site and the school moved to the corner of Church and Bolton Streets.
In 1859 an additional school was opened to satisfy the needs of parents who wanted a government controlled school. Newcastle Public School was opened in Brown Street in the basement of the Congregational Church, after which it moved to a classroom opposite the current site. In 1878 the school moved to the current site in Tyrrell Street. The success of this new public school led the state government to take control of the church school in 1883 and name it Newcastle East Public School.
Read more about this topic: Newcastle East Public School
Famous quotes containing the words history of, history, east, public and/or school:
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun’s rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The beds i’ th’ East are soft.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“It was a time of madness, the sort of mad-hysteria that always presages war. There seems to be nothing left but war—when any population in any sort of a nation gets violently angry, civilization falls down and religion forsakes its hold on the consciences of human kind in such times of public madness.”
—Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930)
“There is nothing intrinsically better about a child who happily bounces off to school the first day and a child who is wary, watchful, and takes a longer time to separate from his parents and join the group. Neither one nor the other is smarter, better adjusted, or destined for a better life.”
—Ellen Galinsky (20th century)