PREFACE
The material for the history of the school comes from school magazines and the personal recollections of many. I am most grateful to Mrs. Forgan, Miss E. M. Taylor (who wrote almost all of chapter 3), Miss Cottam, Miss Weatherup and Mrs. Walton (Miss Tarver) who have been kind enough to write to me about school, and to Miss Dobson, Miss Clark,
Miss Humphries and Miss Wright, the many old girls and members of staff who have talked to me about it. It is always hard to know what to select and what to leave out and I apologise to all those who feel they would have chosen differently.
I have tried to recall the most characteristic events of the school in its various phases. I have not been able to mention many of the people who influenced those events, though I hope that their shades are not far away from these reminders of scenes of the past.
The 46 years of the school’s history have been unspectacular but, on the whole, they have been happy. Time and again, former staff and pupils remember the friendliness and the good humour. Even Miss Dunn, with her more formal approach, was no stickler for protocol and Mrs. Robinson and Miss Roberts are too deeply interested in what goes on around them to approve of remote control. .
No school is perfect and we have our full share of faults and weak-nesses. But the Collegiate School is remembered with warm affection by most of the girls and staff who have passed through it. The school has valued sincerity and honesty and has been concerned for the individual, including the black sheep. We have tried to inculcate a sense of value for education in itself, neither as a status symbol nor as a passport to material gain. I hope that this, our last magazine, may at least ensure that we shall not lose our sense of belonging to a worthy and worthwhile tradition.
The year which has just ended has followed the accustomed course and is recorded in the customary way, with no great sense of being the last of an era, but the general articles for this last magazine are all relevant to the current theme. Their writers who give their recollections and reactions are some of those most closely concerned with the coming changes. They are of the generation who will carry the old into the new and not only our good wishes, but our hopes for the future, go with them.
Joan Wilkinson.
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