The Government School
A school on this mountain, 1895 to the 1960s.
Opened in 1895, closed twice, nearly abolished, redesigned by its own headmaster and left half-built by a war. Nothing of it survives.
Schooling on this mountain is older than almost anything else that survives here, and far more fragile than it looks. It opened in 1895, shut, reopened, was threatened with abolition, and was rebuilt in the middle of a war it did not survive intact. What follows is the record, interruptions and all.
The opening — 1895
The school opened on 7 January 1895 under a teacher named D. Wiarda. His school stood at Uitkyk, with a Kaapsche Hoop postal address — near the village rather than in it, which is how education usually began on a frontier.
The earliest named pupils come from just before that. In December 1894 two children were entered on declarations of indigence, as free pupils: S. J. Gouws and J. W. Nel. In February 1899 A. W. Gouws and the Myburgh children appear. Three founding-family names, and the first two admitted because their parents could not pay.
The village gives its school away
By 1897 the community could no longer carry it. The school commission — chaired by M. C. de Stoppelaar, who was also the village’s Responsible Clerk — formally offered its school to the Government for takeover under Wet No. 15 of 1896.
The correspondence grinds on for more than a year, between the Superintendent of Education, the Mining Commissioner at Barberton, the School Board and the State Secretary. That is how it became a State School: not by founding, but by surrender.
Kloppers — 1898
Philippus Johannes Kloppers arrived at the beginning of 1898. He was twenty-three, born at Arnhem in the Netherlands on 30 June 1874, and he sent Pretoria his certificates almost immediately — teacher, head teacher, physical education, first class.
His first year nearly finished the school. The roll reached about thirty, but in November 1898 the Department raised the question of abolishing it altogether unless the position improved. Kloppers wrote at length, repeatedly. A public meeting was called. In the middle of it he sent one of the shortest telegrams in the file:
I begin to hope. Your last letter seems to be having an effect.P. J. Kloppers to Pretoria, November 1898
The school stayed open. In January 1899 he reported that he had reopened it.
The schoolmaster who redesigned his own school
This is the part of the story that has never been told, and it is the best of it.
In September 1898 Kloppers telegraphed Pretoria about what the new school building should be. He wanted iron, on a stone foundation, and gave his reason plainly: the climate here is so damp that in summer one cannot lay brickwork.
A specification followed in December. Then he read the plan — and proposed changes to it. Public Works amended the design. In May 1899 he learned that the Volksraad had approved the building and recorded that he had heard it with joy, urging that work begin soon. In August he was still pushing, asking the Executive Council to amend its own decision so the school would be built to his improvements.
Two instalment certificates were paid through 1899. In December the building commission was authorised to buy three roller blinds at seventeen and six apiece.
Then the war stopped it. By 1902 the contractor was seeking a settlement for the erection of a school from a government that no longer existed.
An English section, and a war
In February 1899 Kloppers telegraphed that the English section had just opened, with eighteen pupils. A Dutch-Republican state school on a mountain, running an English division, in the last year of the Republic.
On 12 October 1899 — the day after war was declared — the chairman of the school commission telegraphed Pretoria that thirty-two pupils under sixteen remained, and that the parents and the commission wished the teaching to go on. Kloppers was granted leave to keep the school open as long as possible, and recorded his thanks.
By December the English section had closed. In 1900 he reported that he was still at Kaapsche Hoop, remaining only on the order of the Assistant Commissioner. Whether that officer was Republican or British is not established — by then the district was passing into occupation, and the difference matters.
The man who engraved the Republic’s last coin
Kloppers left the mountain and did one more thing for the Republic. He designed and engraved the Veld Pond — the gold coin struck by the mobile State Mint in the Field in 1902, the last currency of the South African Republic, and the last one struck a week after the Republic had already surrendered.
He was appointed nominal head of that mint on 5 May 1902, in its closing days; the mint itself worked at Pilgrim’s Rest, not here. The village’s schoolmaster cut the dies for a state’s final act. The full story of the Veld Pond is here.
Milner’s nineteen books — 1904
On 9 July 1904 the High Commissioner, Lord Milner, visited Kaapsche Hoop. The schoolchildren turned out to welcome him and presented him with a gold nugget.
Seventeen days later, on 26 July 1904, a letter came from the Governor’s Office:
Lord Milner desires me to send you these books, to form the nucleus of a library for the school at Kaapsche Hoop.Governor’s Office, 26 July 1904
The headmaster, A. E. Underwood, wrote back by hand to thank them for “nineteen handsome books”.
Underwood and his wife had been engaged as teachers here in 1902, at seven pounds a month each. Two years after the Republic ended, a mountain school got its first library: nineteen books, sent because some children gave a visiting Englishman a nugget off their own mountain.
The ground, and afterwards
Ground at Kaapsche Hoop was reserved for educational purposes in 1906 and again in 1907, and a school site appears in the township records from 1905. On 12 April 1909 Stand 233 — the highest-numbered stand on the 1887 village plan — was formally reserved in the name of the Colonial Secretary for educational purposes.
Later reservations concern a school hostel rather than the school: a ten-stand block in the lower village in 1924, formalised in 1928, almost certainly to board children from outlying farms who could not cross the mountain daily.
A teacher’s flat was added to the school after the war. The village record has it that in 1929, when the Amianthus asbestos mine opened, a mine school was started and the village’s schooling began to move; this has not yet been confirmed from the archives. Nothing of the school stands. A 1999 newspaper account of the village records that the building was demolished in the 1960s, and the ground — Stand 233 — carries a private house today. Exactly when the teaching stopped has not yet been established from a document: the government files on this school end in 1928.