From the Archives
Guy Berry, alumnus of Canterbury Grammar School.
Alfred Hall holds the record duration as The heroic Ivanhoe The CGS crest reminded Principal/Headmaster (he variously used both readers of the origins of was one of Scott’s most titles) of the Camberwell Grammar School, famous characters. their success. 1891-1926, during which his institution After leaving Camberwell Grammar at the moved premises twice, finally resting on Burke end of 1916, he had passed on to the Dookie Road from 1908. In the thirty-five years of his Agricultural College, where he apparently leadership, the school population expanded struggled with the book work, but was ‘greatly from a modest sixty-six in 1886 to over 240 in interested in the practical work out-of-doors’, Hall’s final year, when Camberwell Grammar according to the school Magazine. Wounded was transitioning to become a school affiliated in the head from shell fire on the night of 9 with the Church of England (as it was known August near Proyart, France, Geoffrey died two until 1981). Hall’s reign had not been one days later, two months short of his twentieth which witnessed consistent enhancement birthday. The horrifying picture of multiple of the student population – the ‘Nineties deaths within a family, siblings or otherwise, depression had seen the population drop to 33 was all too common in the Great War but in 1897 and the days of Camberwell Grammar, at least the Berry family was spared even like those of many other minute ‘private’ deeper misery through the younger ages of the schools at the time, seemed numbered. remaining siblings, Hugh and Richard. Both However, the “Old Boss” steered the vessel subsequently served in the Second World War, through these stormy waters and was even Hugh in the RAAF as a Wing Commander able to absorb a number of other faltering and Richard as a Private in the Army – these local institutions in the years before the First younger brothers survived this conflict. World War, thereby strengthening ‘his’ school and making it the attractive proposition that Accordingly, the Camberwell Grammar it had become by the mid-1920s. Amongst Archives are interested in the acquisition of those smaller schools absorbed by Camberwell any material from these earlier institutions Grammar were Walter Murdoch’s Camberwell absorbed into our own and a recent donation College, Hawthorn College and the Canterbury from Marten and Barbara Bedford of Grammar School located in Balwyn. After the Canterbury of four volumes presented to purchase of Canterbury Grammar’s good-will Guy Marten and Geoffrey Berry as school in December 1912, Hall acquired twenty-three prizes whilst they were attending the new boys, a significant proportion of the cohort Canterbury Grammar School are valuable of 89 boys newly enrolled at Burke Road at the additions to the collection of CGS presentation beginning of the school year of 1913. Amongst volumes now housed in our Archives. These these ‘Canterbury’ boys walking south from four books express the interests and literary their Victoria Avenue home, “Hillside”, then focus of the period 1906-11, including along Canterbury Road towards the Burke the ubiquitous novels of Dickens – Oliver Road campus and Lister House were three (of Twist (Form IV Prize to Guy, 1906), David the four) Berry brothers - Geoffrey (b.1898), Copperfield (Form V Prize to Geoffrey, 1911) Richard (b.1902) and Hugh (b.1905). Their and The Pickwick Papers (Attendance Prize older brother, Guy Marten (b.1895), had left to Guy, Xmas 1909) – as well as Harold: school in 1911 and become an orchardist. The Last of the Saxon Kings (Sunday School Both the two older brothers, Guy and Geoffrey, Association Prize to Guy, 1911) by Lord had served in the Canterbury Grammar cadet Lytton, a nineteenth-century novelist whose unit under Major Whitehead, who had earlier reputation has not endured into our own defected from Hall’s school, and would join the time, unlike that of the eternal “Boz”. This AIF during the Great War – both were killed in tale of Anglo-Saxon adventure, in retrospect action. Guy, a sapper, fell at Passchendaele, seems to have been appropriate reading for Belgium, in October 1917, aged twenty-two. youths who would soon be donning khaki to The diminutive Geoffrey (5’4”, ‘Complexion: defend the Empire, but even more so was Fresh’), also an orchardist, enlisted at the fine volume presented to Geoffrey as Dux Melbourne in August 1917 and became a of Form IV at Xmas 1910, Stories of Famous member of the Australian Field Ambulance. 30
Men and Women, the second volume of the series The Young Folks’ Bookshelf. Here, the young reader was introduced to female figures, (‘role models’ as we would call them), such as Flora Macdonald the Jacobite martyr, Jenny Lind the “Swedish Nightingale”, Florence Nightingale the “Lady with the Lamp”, and, of course, the late Queen Victoria the “Model of Queens”. The male icons included the engineers James Watt and Isambard Brunel, Walter Scott the “Wizard of the North” – Ivanhoe features on the cover – George Stephenson the “Father of Railways”, David Livingstone the “Greatest and Best of African Explorers” and appropriately, Charles Dickens the “Novelist of the People”. Aside from Lind, all the subjects of this work were British and only one member of the pantheon had Australian connections, Sir John Franklin the “Discoverer of the NorthWest Passage”. However, the chapter dealing with Franklin’s extensive career as a sailor and explorer contained only half a short paragraph on his period as Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, 1837-43. This perfectly indicates the Eurocentric, imperial focus that was directed to the prize-winning students of the period before the Great War (and later). A similar series of donations was received in August from Mrs Beth Crutch, whose father John attended Camberwell Grammar from 1934-39. The talented John received prizes in Forms III, IV and V for Mathematics, Commercial Principles, Spelling, History and Geography. The books presented to him at the Speech Nights of these years indicate that the imperial focus referred to above had survived into a later generation – the titles included Recent Heroes of Modern Adventure (still free of Australian content), Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley, Kidnapped by R.L. Stevenson and two of the great novels of Jane Austen and George Eliot, Sense and Sensibility and Adam Bede. Each volume is beautifully bound and embossed with a golden CGS crest., indicating that they were intended to endure and to be prized possessions, treasured mementos of the recipient’s school years. These Bedford and Crutch donations are very valuable and valued, as our growing collection of presentation volumes provide a precise insight into the atmosphere in which Camberwell Grammar operated in the years before the world was changed by the two global conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century. These volumes remind us of the worthy merit of many of our older “Old Boys” and, in the case of the Berry brothers, of the terrible cost of a war which brutally terminated their future prospects. Dr David Bird Archivist archive@cgs.vic.edu.au
