The first opportunity children in Glebe had to receive a public education was when James Buckland began taking enrolments in the Francis Street Wesleyan chapel on 3 November 1858. At this time three denominational schools, 2 Anglican and 1 Catholic - St. Johns Glebe, St. Barnabas Broadway and St. Benedicts Broadway dotted the landscape. From the early 1850s the wealthy and well-to-do Protestants sent their sons to the Glebe Point Grammar School. Most of the Sydney Glebe lands were sold off in 1828 but the Church of England retained two tracts of its original land grant, the estates of St. Phillip and Bishopthorpe. The Bishopthorpe Estate was carved up into 238 allotments which were offered on a 99 year lease by the Anglican Bishop of Sydney from 1856. In 1861 a lease was negotiated for a national school to replace the non-vested school in Francis Street Wesleyan chapel. In the census of that year there were some 817 "scholars in tuition". The new National School buildingwas opened at Derby Place, Glebe in May 1862. The external architectural style of the building was an impressive neo-Gothic design, 80 feet long and 25 feet wide with sheltering verandahs and large windows on all sides but the interior was much less generous-long cold rooms with rows of backless students' desks.
A report noted that discipline had improved since pupils transferred to the new building "and may now be regarded as tolerable". When William Wilkins, the Inspector of Schools, conducted the school's first examination in 1862, "there are five classes in the school", the Sydney Mail reported, "from the farthest advanced down to the infants. Every class was examined in reading, writing and arithmetic and the upper classes were questioned in grammar, geography and object lessons. After the examination had concluded the pupils were gathered together to sing patriotic ballads and in the midst of their rendition, his Excellency Sir John Young and Lady Young arrived for the prize giving ceremony".
Throughout the 1860s enrolments at Glebe School were around 320 but from the mid-1870s the number of pupils rose remarkably, from 446 in 1875 to 605 in 1879 and to 937 in 1882. Under the Public Instruction Act of 1880 attendance became compulsory for children between the ages of six and fourteen years with a minimum attendance requirement of only 70 days each half year. Most of the pupils attended school in autumn and winter, when the annual examination was held, but even then barely half the children attended for 50 days. Children were regularly absent from school through illness-epidemics of measles, scarlet fever and whooping cough could empty a school.
The very poor, along with children deemed unruly, refused admittance to a public school, could attend the Glebe Ragged School, on the corner of Glebe and Bay Streets, opened in 1862. The Ragged and Industrial school movement sought to reform and improve the poorest section in society, and its schools provided a mixture of elementary education and industrial training. Over 100 children attended the Glebe Ragged School which moved to premises in Water Street, Glebe in 1896 and closed its doors in the early 1920s.
From 1881 public schools with at least 20 pupils who had completed the primary course of instruction were permitted to offer the "higher branches of education", and were designated a 'Superior School'. The elementary schooling most received was a basic education in literacy and numeracy. Children were taught by rote how to read and write, add and subtract, often in an atmosphere of stern and sometimes brutal discipline. Glebe School achieved Superior School status in April 1884 when it had more than twenty girls and boys in fifth classes; all had been educated up to and beyond the Standards of Proficiency of Fourth class, and Glebe School retained its Superior School classification up to December 1912. Throughout this period Glebe remained essentially a primary school, for only a handful of girls and boys progressed beyond primary level and received an education in the secondary part of the Superior School (in fifth class and beyond) at a time when secondary education was not highly valued. Glebe School began as one department but as the number of pupils increased, a combined girls and boys primary department was created, with a separate department for infants, and then, as enrolments and accommodation allowed, they were divided into three seperate departments. With enrolments reaching 926 in 1883 approval was given to erect a 'Girls' to accommodate 600 pupils. The first headmistress of the new Girls School, which opened in 1884, was Mary Pinnington and in the same year Anges Kilminster became mistress of the Infants School.
Most State school teachers, at this time, completed their elementary schooling at 14 or 15 years of age and served a four-year apprenticeship as a pupil-teacher, teaching by day and studying at night, often with the assistance from the headmaster and one of the mistresses. The Public School system emphasised order, obedience and respect for authority; rolls were marked daily and at the end of the day rows of backless desks had to be straightened by the students. Very few pupils wore school uniform and footwear was optional. Student's school work was written in ink using steel nibs and each desk had a earthenware inkwell filled from a bottle kept in the corner of the classroom.
Evening Public Schools, created by the 1880 Education Act, were designed to provide an elementary education for young men who had received little schooling. The Glebe Evening School opened in 1882, with relatively high fees, a shilling a week, compared to threepence a week in the day primary school, but the Department was generally willing to exempt poor families from paying fees. Often, poor labouring families sought permission for their offspring to exchange day school for evening school, so they could get a job during the day. Mothers of large families kept older children at home to mind the baby or run errands. Poor families often depended on children to supplement the family income. Children old enough to work but still at school, represented a financial sacrifice many ordinary folk felt they could not afford. Itinerant labourer John Probert of Cowper Street was constantly out of work. His wife, Sarah, took in washing, did mending and nursed to make ends meet. Their son, Selwyn, left Glebe School at 13 in 1898, and the 10 shillings a week he was paid as a stable boy eased a little of the family's budgetary strains. The Glebe Evening School was conducted three nights a week, generally by the headmaster. The curriculum was narrow and enrolments did not exceed 30 students, and thus was closed at the end of 1883. It reopened in 1903 and continued to operate until 1913.
In 1886 School Inspector John McCredie reported that "Glebe School was uncomfortably full". The number of pupils on the roll exceeded 1,000 in that year, and enrolments surged during the 1890s reaching 2,088 by the turn of the century. Increased student numbers led to temporary or makeshift classrooms, and in 1897 with 1386 pupils a second storey was added to the Boys School. But Glebe School remained a very crowded place. Fortunately for attending students, average class attendance figures indicate that 25% to 50% of pupils stayed away from school on a regular basis. In 1911 Glebe School opened a new building to accommodate the 412 infants that were enrolled.
By the mid 1880s most public schools used military training as a remedy for idleness, indiscipline and bad association. At Glebe School 27 boys were drilled regularly to teach them discipline and patriotism. Their training was not physical education in the modern sense, but marching and doing exercises based on the British Army textbook.
Glebe School ceased being a Superior School at the end of 1912, and reverted to ordinary primary school, a reflection of the restructuring of secondary education in NSW between 1910 and 1913. The Director of Education, charged with bringing education into closer touch with real life, and making it more practical, was Peter Board who began his career into public education in 1873 as a pupil-teacher at Glebe School.
Photographer and filmmaker Frank Hurley (pictured) attended Glebe School in the 1880s and later recalled that one of his teachers was "a cantankerous tubby little man who drove his point home, and hammered knowledge into us with the aplomb of a jobbing carpenter".
At thirteen years of age Frank Hurley shied two inkwells at him and ran away from school and home, finding work at a steel mill at Lithgow.
Pupils could sit for the Qualifying Certificate from 1911, a Departmental examination, at the end of the primary school course, and those who passed at a satisfactory level proceeded to high school which offered an academic course preparation for university. There were three types of education open to the remainder - commercial schools for boys expected to go into the business world; junior technical schools for boys who would enter industry and trades; and domestic science schools for girls to prepare them for the role of homemaker.
Glebe School became a Junior Technical School in 1913, with a special emphasis on technical drawing, woodwork and metalwork, and at the same time also acquired Domestic Science/Home Science status with a two year domestic science course for girls covering practical aspects of cookery, home management, dressmaking and millinery./p
Rising levels of literacy in the community made the Evening Public Schools redundant. The Glebe Evening School closed in 1913, and reopened as the Glebe Evening Continuation School offering two year commercial, domestic science and junior technical courses three evening a week from 7.00pm to 9.30pm. Evening Continuation courses were offered at Glebe School up to 1945./p
On the first Empire Day 24 May 1905, Glebe Mayor Thomas Nosworthy gave a patriotic homily at Glebe Town Hall to local public school pupils. They then travelled to Epping racecourse gathering to sing patriotic songs, after this ladies of the district presented the children with a rock cake, sandwiches and fruit. The children also received free rides on the merry-go-round, razzle dazzle and swinging boats. Empire Day became a major attraction in the schools, an occasion on which pupils heard remarkable stories of Race and Empire, and were given maps of the world and asked to colour the Empire in red. Loyalty to God, King and Country, and the virtues of self-sacrifice were emphasised. These lessons implanted in childhood would, it was hoped, encourage in later life a sense of duty accompanied by a willingness to enlist. The Education Department encouraged a martial spirit, conducting camps for boys, and the Defence Acts introduced compulsory service. Cadet corps at Glebe and Forest Lodge Schools, along with the Boy Scouts, aimed at instilling order, regularity and pratriotism duty in the youth of Glebe. In 1914, when the nation was called on to defend England, Glebe School resorted to practical patriotism with its war relief schemes, fund raising, making comforts for the Red Cross and continuation of school cadets. Between 1914 and 1918 some 306 former pupils of Glebe School volunteered to the call of King and Country and crossed the seas to foreign lands. More than fifty former Glebe School students died at Gallipoli, in France and in the Middle East.
Some families paid an extraordinary price for the defence of the British Empire, losing more than one son. By the end of the war brothers Frank, Edwin and George Maltby, Gus and Alex Faerber, Earl and Harry Neaves and Richard and Murray Sharpe had been buried on foreign battlefields. The names of all who volunteered for service are recorded on the school's own memorial, designed by William Martin and funded by weekly penny contributions by school pupils. The memorial was offically opened on 18 October 1919 by local MLA Tom Keegan./p
In the early 1940s most girls and boys went to school for a period of seven to nine years, with the school leaving age raised from 14 to 15 years of age. The rhythm of pupil's daily life continued to be regulated by the school bell, just as the shrill summons of the factory hooter determined the routine of their fathers. Though regular attendance depended, more than anything else, upon the parents' determination to see their children educated, it is clear from the 1920s that more children were getting used to regular and prolonged attendance, and increased dependence of financial support from their parents. In 1881 at Glebe School, though a prevalence of small pox kept many pupils at home, School Inspector J. S. Jones reported, "school attendance is not as satisfactory as it ought to be". Average weekly attendance was 64%. In 1921 the average weekly attendance at Glebe was 83.48%, a striking improvement on school attendance forty years earlier./p
Glebe School grappled with the problem of large class sizes and a shortage of classrooms, and there was an urgent need for more teachers in the period between 1919-1939. Aggregate enrolments at Glebe were to remain high and fairly stable in the interwar period, from 1,380 in 1921 to 1,359 in 1931 and 1,311 students in 1937. The average class size of Glebe Boy's School was 36.5 in 1921, and was significantly higher in the Girl's School with the average class size being 45. Ten years later the average size of both Boys and Girls classes was 34 students.
Among Glebe School teachers well known for their extracurricula activities were cricketer, tennis player and medical practitioner Lesley Poidevin who taught there in 1895 and 1898, and in the early 1920s Clarrie Martin taught 6th class elementary science. Martin subsequently became Labor Attorney general in NSW from 1941 to 1953. In the 1940s Test cricketer Jack Moroney was a member of staff at Glebe School.
The Glebe Road Methodist Church was abandoned by its congregation in 1923 and when, two years later, the church was acquired by the Education Department the building provided the school which much needed classroom accommodation. It was converted into a manual training centre where carpentry, mechanical drawing and descriptive geometry were taught.
The academic progress of the pupils in large overcrowded classrooms was determined by the learning pace of the struggling 'slow learners'. Teachers demanded order and respect from their pupils and a lapse from the expected standard was punished with a caning. The cane was administered not only for idle disobedience or vagueness but also for failing to spell correctly and poor arithmetic. Dux of the school John McGlynn, a pupil at Glebe School from 1915 to 1923 drew a distinction between thick and thin cane wielding teachers. The somewhat menacing figure of Mr Donahue saw to it that he used his thick cane regularly while on playground duty; his favourite ploy was to cane anyone who looked on while others received the cane. Red-headed Rowley Bradley, a teacher at Glebe School for 31 years, was a thin cane man who was quick to use the cane for punishment and was known to his pupils as "Gingerlep" from his "lep right, lep left" when marching pupils into school. McGlynn remembered Infants Headmistress, Miss Briner, as "an imposing figure somewhat resembling Queen Victoria, without her regalia". Another teacher Miss Cahill, he recalled was "a dragon of a lady".
Rudolph Bohrsmann graduated from Sydney University with a degree in medicine in 1894 and four years later opened his surgery at 36 Glebe Point Road, next to the Glebe School. Dr Bohrsmann took an active part in community affairs and become a strong supporter of Glebe School and the Empire Day celebrations. From 1900 to 1923 he donated a gold metal for the Dux of the School. Dr Bohrsmann died on 10 September 1925, aged 54 years.
Three of the duxes of Glebe School, Walter Aird (1906), Ernest Mitchell (1909) and John McGlynn had distinguished careers with the Sydney Water Board; Aird became Water Board Secretary and author, Mitchell, Inspecting Engineer and McGlynn retired in 1974 after 42 years service as the Board's Engineer-in-Chief.
From 1906 to 1923 Tom Herlihy (1859-1928) was Headmaster of Glebe, remembered with great affection, Herlihy had the image of a no nonsense Headmaster, but beneath this facade a former pupil saw him as "a down to earth softie".
In the early postwar years about 95% of children attended a Public School. The pupils of Glebe School continued to mirror the demographic and ethnic character of the local community. Rising 'real' incomes enabled tenants to buy their own homes, but few young couples, whose circumstances permitted, chose to raise their families in the inner city and an increase in car ownership facilitated their exodus to intermediate or outer suburbs.
Tennis ace, Lew Hoad enrolled at Glebe Public School in 1940. The Hoad family lived at 43 Wigram Road, a narrow lane separated their backyard from the four tennis courts of the Hereford Tennis Club. The game captured young Lew's imagination and he practised hitting a tennis ball against a brick wall in the lane. At 9 years of age he joined Glebe Police Boys Club and soon impressed as a fine cricketer and football player-but tennis was his passion. Hoad completed his Intermediate Certificate at Glebe Public School in 1949 and went on to become a majestic tennis player with a superb and flawless selection of strokes and an intimidating presence on the tennis court. The powerfully built Hoad won Wimbleton twice, was Australian, French and Italian singles champion, and a member of the Australian Davies Cup team which took the trophy four times between 1952 and 1956. Remembered in Glebe by a recreational park named after him, Lewis Hoad died in Spain on 4 July, 1994.
Some 20,510 people lived in Glebe in 1947, with many large families being raised on a single income in a rented terrace house. From the 1950s there was a massive decline in manufacturing and service industries as the industrial structure of Sydney underwent profound changes. The number of factories in Leichhardt municipality shrunk from 668 in 1945 to 210 in 1983 while office and professional jobs in Sydney grew-the residential character of Sydney's inner suburbs was undergoing social transformation. Glebe's population declined dramatically to 14,263 by 1971 and continued to fall to 11,397 in 1981. Glebe School's enrolments dropped from 1,311 in 1937 to 700 in 1958 and by 1980 Glebe Public School had only 300 students. All the other Public School in the Leichhardt municipality recorded a similar drop in enrolments.
