ANDREAN FOUNDATION - Grahamstown

You have only to page through the volumes of the Andrean to see how well these objectives have been carried out. You will read of annual dinners in all centres; meetings of two or three gathered together while on active service; sporting fixtures; and many other types of gatherings. The Club was not a year old before a move was made to raise funds to acquire the land which is now Lower Field, so that by 1895 this essential addition could be made to the School. Meanwhile OAs had collected £1, 400 to extend the old Upper House. In 1902 a Boer War Memorial was mooted which in good time took shape as our present chapel. At the end of both World Wars the OA Club took the lead in gathering funds for suitable memorials. The clock tower can be seen by all, but the education of the sons of OAs  

Show more

who fell in the war was, though invisible, the better part of the memorial. At the end of 1943 the Club was already considering yet another war memorial. It was planned once again to educate the sons of OAs killed and to build stone cloisters. Building control, however, so delayed the project that costs became prohibitive; moreover the Governor-General’s Fund took care of the sons of the fallen, so the Memorial Fund was devoted to the purchase and alteration of Bishopsbourne as College Sanatorium. As early as 1929 the OA Committee began to look forward to the Centenary and a fund was opened which made slow progress until the year of the Centenary, 1955, when it grew magnificently. The Currey Block, the Centenary Hall and the Centenary Endowment Fund are the results of this great effort. More recently the 1976 Appeal (which resulted in the Norton Block, containing classrooms, audio-visual rooms and a library), and the 1990 United Schools Fundraising Scheme (which enabled the building of the Design and Technology Centre and extra bursaries) both basically relied on OLD ANDREAN CLUB support.