(pupil at the school 1927)
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Thank you for your letter informing me that the College is forty years on this year, though I must say that your request for an article is not altogether welcome at the moment. Believe it or not, I have had a very full life since coming here to Australia and at the moment I am very occupied with all the preparations for the Solemn Opening of our Church and House. I have prepared a souvenir brochure which contains a short informal history of this foundation and I hope that it will be ready this week and I shall certainly see to it that a copy reaches you.
We are going to have a special Family Celebration at the end of this month with Holy Mass in the new church and afterwards with three bands at a Social and Stage entertainment. The three bands are so that we can attempt to satisfy all tastes. Then of course there are plans for moving house and finally the formal Blessing and Opening on 8th December.
We have also postponed the First Communions this year so that the children may make their first communion in their new church. It will be one round of celebrations and feeds! Now, all this may sound very little on paper but I have had all kinds of frustrations with the builders and they have kept me on tenterhooks whether they will be finished on time. They still haven't given me a final date for completion, but I can't withold the invitations any longer. They were supposed to have finished by the 30th August so I think that I have been patient enough! What with preparations, training the choir, and seeing to all the usual Parish demands, apart from requests for nun's retreats, I don't know whether I am on my head or my heels.
About school reminiscences, I started school at the Salvatorian College on 18th September 1927 with eight other boys and that brought the school up to 50. On that first morning, even before we got into school, Alan Lester sustained concussion by being knocked head over heels by a boy riding his bicycle around the playground. At the first recreation period, Joe Carter (now deceased) had a fence fall on him; Brother Trudo had left the fence resting against the side of the playground, Joe tripped on it, a three inch nail penetrated his kneecap and he was whipped off to hospital. So my introduction was not a very propitious one. They were quite pleasant days on the whole, however, as we had paper chase every dinner hour and usually arrived late for school, and had to wait an opportunity to enter the classroom by the window while some one kept the master taking the class properly distracted. It was usually Father Charles' class and normally he didn't seem to notice the late arrivals. It was quite a different story if Father Cuthbert happened to put his head in at the door just at that moment.
Father Charles taught History and I can see, quite vividly, to this day the tomb of Edward the Confessor, which we had to draw at every class as this was Father's safeguard for class discipline. We had in those days a system of lost and bad marks. Ten lost marks constituted a bad mark for which one was given a two-hour detention on Friday after school. As Father Charles never mastered the distinction between lost and bad marks, many was the time when a boy would find himself at the end of a class with as many as 30 bad marks. If we had held to the formal ruling, you would find to this day some old (and now very old) boys doing their detention on a Friday evening! The matter was usually settled, however, by asking Father to be a 'sport' and erase the marks from the register. While this was a satisfactory arrangement for the boy concerned, it made havoc of the registers much to the consternation of Father Cuthbert.
Despite this seeming liberalism in the field of education, the average results in the Junior Oxford, which at that time was the ultimate in school examinations, were quite high. By 1931 we had advanced to more ambitious levels and were then able to sit for the Senior Oxford and Matriculation. We also had a good tradition of Drama. Music and Sport and on the whole acquitted ourselves favourably in the academic field. We participated in the opening of the Church and the school took upon itself the responsibility for paying for the flooring of the new Sanctuary. This was no mean task as the materials used were on an experimental basis and rather expensive.
These are the points which strike me at the moment and I am sure that there are as many which evade me. Father Declan joins with me in wishing the school every success and send our regards to the Staff, Boys and Old Boys.
In Salvatore,
Father Paul Keyte S.D.S.