Adeline Schröder runs her own 'excellent' school for girls on Osmond Terrace at Norwood, 1883 to 1907
Adeline Schröder with some students at her Osmond House School at 67 Osmond Terrace, Norwood.
Adeline Schröder, at the age of 33, founded and ran Osmond House School at 67 Osmond Terrace, Norwood from 1883 to 1907. Schröder, who bought the property in 1869 when she was 20, had been born in Adelaide a month after her parents arrived from Hanover in Germany.
Probably educated at home, Schröder had a cabinet-maker father and a mother who’d been a singer awarded a prize from the crown princess of Prussia.
Schröder’s school on Osmond Terrace was for girls, with a few young boys. Enrolment was between 50 and 60, with at least three on staff. The school’s end-of-year concerts and prize giving, at Norwood Town Hall from 1884, reflected the school’s curriculum. It included a variety of musical items, piano solos, parlour plays involving up to 20 students in costume, choral items, elocution recitals, calisthenics and dancing. Special prizes were awarded for art needlework, drawing, German, diligence and conduct, music and calisthenics. Each year students received prizes for music examined at the university.
Among children at the school were Elisabeth Buring, cousin of vigneron Leo Buring; and Elsa and Herbert Basedow, children of educationist, newspaper publisher and member of parliament Friedrich (Martin) Basedow MP.
South Australian government education minister William Copley was guest speaker at the school’s 1892 prize-giving night. The Express Telegraph newspaper reported him saying he was “pleased to note the success of such an excellent private school as that of Miss Schröder. Indeed it was a source of gratification to him to see that the private schools of the better class were not injured by the competition of the public schools … Miss Schröder’s school had long been most favourably known, and … he gave testimony of his own confidence in the school by sending his own little girl (Louisa) up every day from the Semaphore to study there.”
