Johannesburg and The Hill High School ...

Although I attended The Hill High School in the Apartheid Era, of course which we were very ignorant about "Apartheid", did not even know the word.   I feel privileged to have had the upbringing in the South of Johannesburg and attended this school.

In South Africa in the "White" areas, we had "English speaking" schools, where English was the first language that you were taught in, and "Afrikaans" was a 2nd language that you had to learn, due to the fact that the "Boer" Government was "Afrikaans" and run by the Dutch Reformed church.  There were also Afrikaans speaking schools, that were very strict and every subject except of course English was taught in the Afrikaans language.


There was the "South" side of Johannesburg, which consisted of area's like Rosettenville, The Hill, Linmeyer, Oakdene, Glenvista, Townsview, Forest Hill, Turffontein and many others.  The South side was always looked upon as the "Poor" side of Johannesburg and the older working class, it was also close to the Western suburbs mining towns like Roodepoort etc.

And the the North would have been more upmarket bigger houses with bigger grounds, it incorporated wealthier suburbs such us Parktown, Rosebank, Hyde Park, Craighall Park, Illovo, Melrose and many other suburbs.

Living in the South you did not venture over to the North that much!

So getting back to the South and the Hill High School, The South was like a melting pot of all different nationalities, thinking back on it now it was a bit like a multi-national school, we had kids who were foreign nationals and some who were first generation South African, almost every single child was from parents who each would have come from different nationalities.

To list bit a few here, there were children whose parents would have come from Portugal and then those that would have been refugee's from the war in Mozambique.  Majority of Portuguese as well as Greek and Italian would have gone to a government or private school and then after school they would have attended a few hours at the relevent country schools e.g. Portugese School which was held in Rosettenville I cannot remember the name now but will find it out!  So most of these kids would also not really date outside of their culture and would end up marrying into the culture.

Whereas for example with myself, my father was born in Austalia, so we believe but would have come from mixed Irish / Scottish protestant parents.  My mother was born to a father and mother who were both of French descent "Marais & De Villiers" but would also have been of mixed origion somewhere along the line, I think on my Mother's side there was some Dutch mixed in as well. 

So the Nations in our school were all very mixed, French, Dutch, Irish, British, Scottish, Hungarian, Polish, Lebanese, Portugese, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Chinese, Mauritian, Afrikaans, Canadian and that is probably naming a few, at Hill High we came from all walks of life, Poor, Rich, Orphaned, many many single parents, and a lot of divorced parents who were re-married.  Some parents were very young and some like mine pretty old.   And of course from various different Suburbs, South Hills, The Hill, Rosettenville, Rewlatch, Regents Park, Linmeyer, Oakdene, La Rochelle and various other suburbs.

In Standard 6, I was in probably one of the worst behaved classes in the whole school, Ms Harvey was our school teacher and she was strict, so strict that she did not hesitate to give us detenetion.  One day she gave us detention, locked us all in the classroom and then went home, she apparently fell asleep and did not get back to the school before 6, by which time most of the kids had climbed out of the class room windows (including myself) and had gone home.

In the year I started we had 11 classes of Std 6 and almost 40 students in each class - that was a record number of over 400 standard 6 students - in total in the school there were about 1,800 of us.

A lot of kids looked like they had crossed the colour line somewhere a long the line and many would have been re-classified in an instant were the government that hell bent on colour.  But I think in majority of cases they just turned a blind eye.

The Hill was a very disciplined school, with lots of Rules - which a lot of kids were just hell bent on seeing how many rules they could break.  The guys wore striped ties and would put a mark on the back in pen whenever they received a "cut" from the principal.  A cut was performed with a long think cane.

There were quite a few incidents at school with Drugs, violence, gang fights, a lot of kids were expelled, in most cases kids that were expelled either ended up at Forest High, Damelin or those that were just not able to conform ended up in Boys Town which was like a kind of reformatory.

Teachers:

Well where do I start there were those teachers that came to the school and just stayed there until they retired ... Mr Tobias, Miss Katz, Ms Teper, Mr Krueger, Ms Sacks, with some of us they taught our parents and probably more recently our grandparents.  But they were Good teachers and they had a calling.  Not like some of the teachers today!

Wow I have rambled on about School and probably not even touched the surface of some of the wonderful moments we had at school and of course some of the really bad times, but I will save those for future posts.