By Antonis Antoniou*
In a telegram dated 23 May 1935, Colonial Secretary Philip Cunliffe-Lister gave his consent to the founding of a new government School in Cyprus, which “…will be maintained along the lines proposed by my Advisory Committee…”. He went on: “I fully recognise the need for a school on the island at which (…) an education on English lines can be obtained (…). The existing gymnasia and lyceums cannot be satisfactorily reorganised (…). The School should provide a path into the Civil Service and the teaching profession, and the examinations governing entry into these professions should be based on the curricula followed at the government school.” To fund the School, it was proposed that money then used for grants to the other schools should be transferred to it.
The telegram is extremely significant. It gives the School a wider institutional role, since it was expected to serve as a route into the Civil Service and the teaching profession. This gave its graduates a clear advantage in climbing into the middle class and the Cypriot elite. The reference to funding shows that its creation was part of a broader reorganisation of secondary education in Cyprus.
Staffing the School
In his reply on 17 July 1935, the Governor informed the Secretary of State that, owing to limited funds, the founding of the new government school would be postponed for a year. He proposed, however, to go ahead with appointing a headmaster from 1 January 1936, on a salary of £500 a year, to give him enough time to understand conditions in Cyprus properly.
The headmaster appointed was George Sims, just 28 years old, a headmaster in Hong Kong with a degree and a postgraduate qualification. In the months that followed, a deputy headmaster, Campbell, was also appointed. He too was young and held a postgraduate degree, with a starting salary of £350 a year.
The recruitment of new teachers had to go hand in hand with changes to the curriculum and the introduction of the Matriculation examinations. This meant the School needed to employ trained teachers from Britain, on salaries high enough to attract capable staff (a figure of £250 a year was proposed). Because money was tight, the headmaster proposed also employing eight Cypriot teachers on salaries of no more than £130 a year. In other words, the highest salary of a Cypriot teacher was half the lowest salary of a British one!
Employing qualified British teachers with degrees, some with postgraduate degrees, certainly raised the School’s academic standard. With their sound knowledge of their subjects, their teacher training and their understanding of how a school should run, the British teachers would create the right framework within which all the teachers would be expected to work.
An English… atmosphere
The insistence on British teachers, of course, served other purposes too. Their presence was essential to achieving the goal of creating an “English atmosphere” at the School. They would also lead and staff the new House system the headmaster was to introduce (see below), the boarding houses and the reorganised Scout Troop. The Education Office also pressed for more British teachers, as it was certain the new School would exceed the 240 pupils originally planned.
The headmaster and the British teachers would build the ideological foundations of an institution that was to be an arm of “Palmerocracy”, or, as recorded in an official minute paper: “The English School is probably the most important educational experiment in which the Colony has engaged…”
The House system
The House system was a defining feature of British secondary education. Pupils were divided into permanent groups, the Houses, which formed smaller communities within the school. Through competition in sport, athletics, debating and music, the system provided a framework for rivalry and for the pastoral and social care of pupils, building what was called “character”.
By adopting the House system, the new English School would not simply teach an English-language curriculum. It would adopt British culture and an institutional way of organising itself. At the English School, the House system was applied to sporting activities, with the aim of cultivating qualities such as initiative, leadership and teamwork. Older pupils could become House Captains or Prefects, which reinforced the aim of cultivating leadership and elitism.
The names of the Houses
More significant, however, was the choice of names for the Houses. Headmaster Sims proposed dividing the school into four Houses, each overseen by a British teacher. One would be named Newham, in honour of the school’s founder and benefactor. The other three would be named after Governors: Palmer, Storrs and Goold-Adams.
In an official minute, Governor Palmer rejected the proposal to use Governors’ names. Instead, he suggested Beaconsfield, Kitchener and Wolseley. Beaconsfield was the British Prime Minister who acquired Cyprus. Kitchener was a general of the imperial army, known for his military campaigns in Sudan and for the victory over the Boers in South Africa. There, the imperial army committed atrocities and set up concentration camps with inhumane living conditions and hundreds of thousands of victims. Wolseley was the first High Commissioner and, according to Georgallides, like “…the British, harboured feelings of racial and cultural superiority”…
The Houses thus combined two forms of historical memory: the history of the School and the history of British rule in Cyprus. British educational and colonial figures were woven into the daily life of the School, reinforcing its “English atmosphere”. The School’s official account of how the Houses were named, meanwhile, borders on the quaint.
Jobs for graduates
The headmaster favoured a fairly large school, so that its influence would spread as widely as possible. He realised, however, that this might create a problem with employment for graduates. A year after the new School was established, the director of the Education Office informed the Colonial Secretary (1 December 1937) that the headmaster was trying to reach agreements with potential employers to secure suitable jobs for the boys leaving the School.
He told him that the headmaster was finding a positive response from employers. As for the Civil Service, he added, the headmaster would follow the announcements of vacancies and Civil Service examinations in the Government Gazette. He suggested, however, that the headmaster should be informed whenever there were vacancies for clerks that would not be filled through those channels.
The Colonial Secretary acted at once (18 December 1937). He sent a circular to all heads of department enclosing the letter from the director of the Education Office, effectively adopting headmaster Sims’s proposal. This would give the School’s pupils privileged access to the Civil Service, which was seen as attractive employment and an important springboard for social mobility into the middle class. It shows clearly how much weight senior colonial officials placed on the English School.
Manual work excepted…
The newspaper ELEFTHERIA (23 December 1937) covered the issue in a front-page article: “…the government has decided that, for vacant government posts requiring the qualifications of secondary school graduates, graduates of the English School shall be preferred. It is understood that work of a manual nature and work requiring specialist knowledge is excluded. It is understood that this decision was taken at the request of the headmaster of the English School, through the Education Office, to the government, in support of the school’s graduates.”
For the British, this brought a double benefit. First, it made the English School very attractive to the best pupils, especially those from lower social backgrounds who hoped for good jobs and social advancement. Second, given the financial benefits, prospects and status the Civil Service offered, the social rise of young people from low-income backgrounds and rural areas would help create a new Anglophile middle class.
Space allows only some features of the new government School to be covered here. What matters is to understand that British policies towards the English School were targeted and ideologically driven, within a framework that has gone down in history as “Palmerocracy”.
*Graduate, teacher and former deputy headmaster of the English School
