Lillie Smith's Girton Girls (1915) and King's College for boys (1920s) joined as Adelaide's Pembroke School, 1974
Pembroke School on The Parade in the eastern Adelaide suburb of Norwood incorporated the former campuses of Girton Girls School (inset top: with its neo-Georgian facade) and King's School (inset bottom: its teaching staff in 1928).
Pembroke School – an upmarket independent coeducation and nondenominational day and boarding school in Adelaide’s Kensington Park for about 1700 students – was formed in 1974 by amalgamating Girton Girls School and King’s School for boys.
Girton was one of many private girls’ schools started in Adelaide. Lillie Smith, wife of a stock broker whose income varied according to the market, decided, when her children had grown, to have a regular income by buying a Kensington property in 1915 and setting up her school for girls. It flourished for nearly 50 years.
King’s College came out of moves in the 1920s to amalgamate the Congregational, Methodist and Presbyterian churches. Although that union didn’t happen, a new spirit of cooperation led to the Baptists joining Congregationalists to form King’s College. An academy had been the vision of South Australian Congregational pioneer minister Quinton Stow, who started the church’s educational tradition continued by figures such as James Jefferis.
King’s College emphasised the academic, physical and cultural rather than faith. Its only clergyman headmaster R.A. Cook (from 1957) eventually had a school chapel built in the 1960s.
First headmaster J.A. Haslam, was the son of a Methodist minister, and later W.N. Oats, a Quaker with strong Methodist background, revived the school, from 1942. Among challenging views, Oats’ vision for King’s to become co-educational wasn't realised for another 30 years.
Diana Medlin was instrumental in the merger of Girton and King's. Medlin had returned to Adelaide from teaching in cambridge, England, when she was offered the position of headmistress at Girton Girls School, where she was described as a “trendsetter in educational practice”. During the first four years in this position, she worked with John Moody, the senior master of nearby Kings College, to merge the two schools and form the coeducational Pembroke School and become co co principals.
Pembroke thrived under Medlin’s leadership. Among important changes she led at Pembroke included the Pembroke hearing unit for hearing impaired students and introducing the international baccalaureate into the curriculum, including for students with ambitions to study overseas.
Medlin was heavily involved in the school’s extra-curricular success, encouraging music to be an important part of life at Pembroke and eventually seeing the Pembroke Girls’ Choir perform at arts festivals in both Singapore and Japan.
In 2006, Pembroke became the first school in South Australia to be granted an anti-discrimination exempltion to accept more girls than boys to redress a gender imbalance in lower years.
Pembroke School Foundation provided major support for additions at Pembroke such as Diana Medlin Junior School, John Moody Technology Centre, senior and middle schools’ resource centres and Girton arts precinct.
