Prince Alfred College supersedes J.L. Young's school as place for new Dissenter elite's sons
Prince Alfred College opening at Kent Town in 1869 by the Duke of Edinburgh. PAC represented Adelaide’s emerging Protestant Dissenter establishment.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia
Prince Alfred College, founded at Kent Town in 1869 by the Methodist Church, represented Adelaide’s emerging Protestant Dissenter establishment.
Named after Prince Alfred during his visit to Adelaide in 1867, it became the social rival of St Peter’s Collegiate.
Its opening signalled the decline of John Lorenzo Young’s Adelaide Educational Institution, previously bastion of middle class Protestant dissent.
Prince Alfred was closer to English model than Young’s school that did not teach Latin and Greek as required with the opening of Adelaide University in 1874.
As early as the 1830s, Congregational minister Thomas Stow had tried to establish an academy based on the English grammar schools.
The middle and upper classes could use private tutors for their sons or employ a governess for their daughters.
But the city centre and North Adelaide had a cluster of private schools in the second half of the 19th Century. In 1864, there were six schools in Archer, Gover, Jeffcott and Tynte streets, as well as G. W. Moore's school and Mrs F. Sheridan's school in MacKinnon Parade.
Pulteney Grammar School, started in 1847, was based in Flinders Street from the 1870s before moving to South Terrace in the 1920s. Between the 1870s and 1920s, Queen's and Whinham colleges for boys opened in North Adelaide. Tormore House, Creveen, St Peter's Girls and Wilderness School for girls were within the city square mile. The first church school for girls was Methodist Ladies College (later Annesley) opened in 1902.
In the tradition of dame schools and many other small private schools* from early settlement, in the 1870s at Margaret Street, North Adelaide, a small ladies school operated in the private home of spinster Eliza Lewin.
The falling city population after World War I and the 1930s Great Depression saw most city schools close or move into the suburbs by 1950. Wilderness had moved to Medindie in the late 1880s and St Peter's Girls School went to Wattle Park.
David Prest (from the Port Pirie retail family), who graduated as Prince Alfred College captain and dux in 1949, became principal of Melbourne's Wesley College 1972-91.
