School history: The crest on a drum

I am a new staff member at University High School having only been here for nearly one term, so I am still learning the ropes.  Most of my days now are in the school library where I work in a team of teacher-librarians.  However, I am finding the school to be a fascinating place to work, and it is a school that I have quickly learnt honours its tradition and history.  One only has to walk the hallways of the North Wing to see this with all the old photos inside an art deco building.  It was only on my second day here that I connected some historical dots.

Outside of my profession as an educator, my other passions are history and music, and I write extensively on the history of the Australian brass band movement. Victoria is known as the home of brass bands in Australia. Victoria is also known as the place that invested heavily in instrumental music education during the 1930s thanks to the Gillies bequest – a bequest that was made to the Education Department of Victoria to the sum of £10,000.  This bequest was used to fund band and orchestral instruments in schools across Victoria.

Due to my research activities into the Australian band movement, I occasionally receive research requests from people wondering if I can find out about bands, people, or photographs.  In 2021 I received a scanned photo of a school orchestra from a person hoping I could identify the school.  Her son-in-law had apparently found the photograph in an opportunity shop. 

When receiving photograph such as these, my first visual clue is to look at the bass drum as these usually carry the crests or emblems of the bands.   In this case, there were other visual clues; the school orchestra and band members pictured in the photograph were clearly from a co-educational school, and there was a large variety of instruments being played by the students.  The photograph was a bit difficult to date, but my reckoning is that it was taken some time in the 1930s.

In this case, as can be seen by the photograph above, the bass drum does have a crest on it with the letter’s ‘U’, ‘H’, & ‘S’ intertwined with each other.  And from what I’ve now seen of the oldest building at Uni High, the photograph was most likely taken in one of the rooms in that building.  Given the large number of instruments, including instruments that you would find in a brass band, I would say that the school was one of the beneficiaries of the Gillies Bequest which provided the said instruments.

Back in this day, the school did have an orchestra and a brass band which were highly regarded.

The story does not end here.  On my second day at school, I took myself down to the music department to show them the digital copy of the photograph.  Then, to my surprise, they said they still had the bass drum in one of the rooms and took me down to the percussion room to view it.  Sure enough, there was the UHS Bass Drum, with the old crest painted on is shell, hanging proudly on the wall – a photograph was duly taken of the drum.  It is nearly 100 years old now, and a valuable part of the UHS historical collection.

Jeremy de Korte – Teacher - Librarian