GOLDEN GROVE PRIMARY SCHOOL, Rondebosch, Cape Town.
School houses / Afrikaanse blasoen
The arms have been in continuous use since the school opened in 1954, not changing in format. It seems likely that no application was made for registration under the Protection of Names, Uniforms and Badges Act of 1935, and they clearly have not been registered under the Heraldry Act of 1962.
They may be blazoned:
Arms: Per
bend sable and gules, overall a tree or.
Motto: Semper sursum.
Around the outer edge of the shield is a yellow line, originally stitching in the blazer badge. When the school does get around to registering the arms, it will need to decide whether to treat the yellow line as a border or demi-border (half the width), or to omit it altogether.
The banners for the school houses (Milner, Stuart and De Mist – see below) show the arms against a background of black, red or yellow. In these the yellow line has been treated as a full border, and the school may well decide to continue this usage.
As part of the process of registration, the shield would as a matter of course be redrawn in a more appropriate style – the shield shape used is a degenerate one used long after shields were actually used in battle or in the tournament. This shape was commonly used by South African schools before the passage of the Heraldry Act.
A major disadvantage of the shield as traditionally used is that is far more difficult for children to draw – the shield of a school’s arms ought to be readily drawn by pupils.
A further drawback of the arms as traditionally used is that the tree is very small, floating in the middle of the shield, instead of filling the space.
Shown here are two possible versions (rough sketches) of a redrawn device on a regular shield: without a border (left), and with one (right).
The shield is divided per bend – that is, diagonally from upper dexter (right, as seen from behind the shield) to lower sinister. The field colours of black and red fall into the category of tinctures, but since the line of partition is crossed by the single charge (a golden tree), this provides sufficient contrast.
The motto translates as “Always upward.”
About the school:
Golden Grove Primary first opened its doors in 1954, one of many new schools opened in Cape Town as the post-war baby boom boosted pupil numbers.
While most schools in the area had navy blue blazers, Golden Grove was the only one using plain black blazers.
The new school served the eastern or lower parts of Rondebosch, Claremont and Newlands. Initially an arrangement existed that pupils from Rondebosch East, across the Kromboom River, would be referred to Alpha Junior School in Rondebosch East, but the Wynberg School Board ruled against this, and pupils from Rondebosch East and from as far away as Philippi were admitted.
The school occupied part of what previously had been a dairy farm named Golden Grove, and for the first 7½ years of its life it occupied a single prefabricated building divided into classrooms, a small office, a small staffroom, boys’ and girls’ cloakrooms and a kitchen, occupied by the caretaker. A toilet block at the back completed the facilities.
Classroom accommodation was insufficient from the start, and the principal, Ray Holmes, arranged that classrooms would be used in the adjacent hall of the Rondebosch Hebrew Congregation[1] and the nearby hall of Christ the King Anglican church. School functions were held in one or other of these halls, or in other halls even further away, such as the one at St Thomas’s church in Campground Road, or the Rondebosch Town Hall.
In the mid-1950s a tarmac area was laid out behind the prefab block, used in summer for tennisette, in winter for netball and in fine weather for school assemblies. The one field, below the tarmac, was used for cricket in summer (using a rolled-out mat on a concrete strip) and in winter for both rugby (for the senior boys) and soccer (for the juniors).
Mr Holmes, an old boy of Rondebosch Boys’ High and later principal of Rondebosch Boys’ Prep School, arranged for his pupils to swim in the pool at the boys’ schools.
Fundraising by the parents, combined with a pound-for-pound undertaking by the Cape Education Department (that is, for every £1 raised by the parents, the province would provide £1)[2] gradually provided enough for construction, and in 1961 work began (on additional land to the north that had been vacant since the dairy farm moved to Ottery, before the school opened) on building a school hall and two classroom wings, one to the north of the prefab, the other further east, extending on either side of the rear of the hall.
The pupils[3] who had been in Sub A in 1955 eventually occupied the new Std 5 classroom in the second half of 1961, and took part in one prizegiving in the new hall.
Mr Geoff Todd, father of a Std 5 pupil and a partner in a plastics company, donated large plastic renditions of the school badge for the front entrance (just the shield) and the proscenium of the hall (shield and motto). These were still to be seen in 2005.
The hall has since been named the Ray Holmes Hall.
In due course the prefab block was removed and placed at another school, and in its place the classroom wing facing Stuart Road was extended.
In the early years the school’s rear looked down on the Kromboom River, but this vista has been replaced by the Kromboom Parkway, a municipal freeway running north-south. The river is still there, but less visible.
Founded for white pupils only (no other option was possible in the 1950s), the school was among the first to open its doors to pupils of all races in 1991.
The school remains the only State English-medium co-educational primary school in Rondebosch – the other State primary schools are either single-sex or (in one instance only) Afrikaans-medium and co-educational.
School houses:
The original school houses simply had the colours of the school badge: Black, Red and Gold.
In later years the names Stuart, Milner and De Mist were adopted for these houses, these names being taken from nearby streets.
Stuart Road (running north-south) is where the school is situated. A minor road turning off it on the north side of the school is called Golden Grove.
Avenue De Mist (running roughly east-west along the Rondebosch-Claremont boundary) links Stuart Road to Milner Road, two blocks west.
This street bears the name of the principal official at the Cape during the rule of the Batavian Republic (1803-06), Commissioner-General Jacob Abraham Uitenhage de Mist, after whom the town of Uitenhage was named.
Milner Road runs from Klipfontein Road, an east-west arterial in Mowbray, southward on the east side of the Rondebosch Common (see at Rondebosch), turning roughly eastwards for about a kilometre, then heading south again in Rondebosch to the boundary with Claremont.
In Claremont, there is a southward continuation called Milner Road South, but the main thoroughfare continues (at an angle) in Belvedere Road.
Milner Road bears the name of Alfred Milner, High Commissioner for South Africa.
This German-born imperialist came to the Cape in 1897 as Sir Alfred Milner, Governor of the Cape Colony and High Commissioner. He promptly went about provoking war with the Boer republics, which broke out two years later, resulting in the annexation of the Oranje Vrij Staat in 1900 as the Orange River Colony and in ’01 of the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek as the Transvaal Colony. He then resigned as Governor of the Cape, retaining his High Commissionership, to become Governor of the two former republics.
In 1901 he was elevated to the peerage as a baron, and in 1902 became a viscount.[4] He returned to England in 1905.
It is not clear who Stuart Road was named after. However, this is a common given name, popular thanks to the House of Stewart (written in French as Stuart), who reigned over Scotland, and later over England and Scotland, from 1371 (King Robert II) to the death of Queen Anne in 1714. There is considerable romance attached to the son and grandson of King James II, claimants to the throne – especially the grandson, remembered as Bonnie Prince Charlie – who led a rebellion against the House of Hanover in 1745.
Afrikaanse blasoen:
Die wapen mag in Afrikaans so geblasoeneer word:
Wapen: Skuins gedeel van swart en rooi; oor alles heen ’n boom van
goud.
Leuse: Semper sursum.
Die leuse vertaal as “Altyd boontoe.”
