From the Archives

Guy Berry, alumnus of Canterbury Grammar School.

The CGS crest reminded readers of the origins of their success.

The heroic Ivanhoe was one of Scott’s most famous characters.

From the Archives

Alfred Hall holds the record duration as Principal/Headmaster (he variously used both titles) of the Camberwell Grammar School, 1891-1926, during which his institution moved premises twice, finally resting on Burke Road from 1908. In the thirty-five years of his leadership, the school population expanded from a modest sixty-six in 1886 to over 240 in Hall’s final year, when Camberwell Grammar was transitioning to become a school affiliated with the Church of England (as it was known until 1981). Hall’s reign had not been one which witnessed consistent enhancement of the student population – the ‘Nineties depression had seen the population drop to 33 in 1897 and the days of Camberwell Grammar, like those of many other minute ‘private’ schools at the time, seemed numbered. However, the “Old Boss” steered the vessel through these stormy waters and was even able to absorb a number of other faltering local institutions in the years before the First World War, thereby strengthening ‘his’ school and making it the attractive proposition that it had become by the mid-1920s. Amongst those smaller schools absorbed by Camberwell Grammar were Walter Murdoch’s Camberwell College, Hawthorn College and the Canterbury Grammar School located in Balwyn. After the purchase of Canterbury Grammar’s good-will in December 1912, Hall acquired twenty-three new boys, a significant proportion of the cohort of 89 boys newly enrolled at Burke Road at the beginning of the school year of 1913. Amongst these ‘Canterbury’ boys walking south from their Victoria Avenue home, “Hillside”, then along Canterbury Road towards the Burke Road campus and Lister House were three (of the four) Berry brothers - Geoffrey (b.1898), Richard (b.1902) and Hugh (b.1905). Their older brother, Guy Marten (b.1895), had left school in 1911 and become an orchardist. Both the two older brothers, Guy and Geoffrey, had served in the Canterbury Grammar cadet unit under Major Whitehead, who had earlier defected from Hall’s school, and would join the AIF during the Great War – both were killed in action. Guy, a sapper, fell at Passchendaele, Belgium, in October 1917, aged twenty-two. The diminutive Geoffrey (5’4”, ‘Complexion: Fresh’), also an orchardist, enlisted at Melbourne in August 1917 and became a member of the Australian Field Ambulance.

After leaving Camberwell Grammar at the end of 1916, he had passed on to the Dookie Agricultural College, where he apparently struggled with the book work, but was ‘greatly interested in the practical work out-of-doors’, according to the school Magazine. Wounded in the head from shell fire on the night of 9 August near Proyart, France , Geoffrey died two days later, two months short of his twentieth birthday. The horrifying picture of multiple deaths within a family, siblings or otherwise, was all too common in the Great War but at least the Berry family was spared even deeper misery through the younger ages of the remaining siblings, Hugh and Richard. Both subsequently served in the Second World War, Hugh in the RAAF as a Wing Commander and Richard as a Private in the Army – these younger brothers survived this conflict.

Accordingly, the Camberwell Grammar Archives are interested in the acquisition of any material from these earlier institutions absorbed into our own and a recent donation from Marten and Barbara Bedford of Canterbury of four volumes presented to Guy Marten and Geoffrey Berry as school prizes whilst they were attending the Canterbury Grammar School are valuable additions to the collection of CGS presentation volumes now housed in our Archives. These four books express the interests and literary focus of the period 1906-11, including the ubiquitous novels of Dickens – Oliver Twist (Form IV Prize to Guy, 1906), David Copperfield (Form V Prize to Geoffrey, 1911) and The Pickwick Papers (Attendance Prize to Guy, Xmas 1909) – as well as Harold: The Last of the Saxon Kings (Sunday School Association Prize to Guy, 1911) by Lord Lytton, a nineteenth-century novelist whose reputation has not endured into our own time, unlike that of the eternal “Boz”. This tale of Anglo-Saxon adventure, in retrospect seems to have been appropriate reading for youths who would soon be donning khaki to defend the Empire, but even more so was the fine volume presented to Geoffrey as Dux of Form IV at Xmas 1910, Stories of Famous

Men and Women, the second volume of the series The Young Folks’ Bookshelf. Here, the young reader was introduced to female fi gures, (‘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 North- West 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 fi rst 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