New headmistress, Zinnette de Wet, is the fourth Eunice principal since 1942. She began her leadership of that privileged hot seat in February. A champion of girls’ schools education, De Wet was formerly deputy-head at Potchefstroom High School for Girls where in earlier days Eunice old girl, Moira Thatcher, was headmistress.
Eunice was founded in 1875 by the Dutch Reformed Church in response to the establishment just months earlier of the Anglican St Michael’s School and the Catholic Greenhill Convent. Not generally known is that Elizabeth Laird, Eunice’s first principal, brought out from Scotland, resigned to marry the director of Education, Dr John Brebner. So she was Mrs Brebner and when she died, he married the third Eunice principal, Miss Van Pommeren.
Perhaps the best known headmistress is Miss E.L.M. King, who made a name for herself as an artist, poet and a great educationalist. She guided the school through its major crises: the fire which gutted Eunice House, the First World War, and the Spanish flu epidemic. King wrote the school song, No other school so dear, which is still sung today, and her sister, the artist Bertha Everard, designed the school banner.
Many ‘older’ old girls will remember Adele de Jager (née Murray), a Rhodes graduate who came to Eunice from the Central High School in Bloemfontein in 1942 and stayed until 1968, despite failing health. She developed the school’s facilities and numbers and was vehemently opposed to the enforcement of mother tongue instruction in the senior schools in the late 1940’s which changed “the very nature and soul” of Eunice.
She also introduced the prefects’ induction ceremony which remains unchanged to this day. Old girls in their late forties and fifties had their schooldays dominated by the legendary Miss Vos, a brilliant history teacher, parttime John Orr’s model and friend to many a girl with one recordmark too many. Besides that deep voice and that sense of fun, Miss Vos will be remembered for pioneering and moving Eunice to its “new” position alongside Grey College.
For almost three decades, Paul Cassar, first “gentleman headmistress” and longest serving Eunice head, guided the school into its very successful modern era as the Free State’s top school and a national competitor in many varied fields.
