Lawson Brown High School

Campbell and three staff taught 1098 Std 7’s (now Grade 9) in a cluster of pre-fabs and by 1955, when the new building was completed the enrollment had grown to 320.

The hall, which for many years served as the venue for the Inter-Schools’ Play Festival, was erected shortly before the retirement of second principal Mr C.F.

Yates, later Chief Superintendent of Education, at the helm, enrollment reached nearly 750, which made this the largest “white” school in those years.

It was principal Mr B.F. Simpson who, when part of our traditional feeder area changed from residential to industrial, and with a country in socio-political flux, took the bold step of abandoning tokenism and “properly” opened the school to pupils of all races and persuasions, thus pioneering among state-controlled schools in this city an integrated system of education in the very spirit of the words of Mr Adcock 50 years earlier and just as in the spirit of the New South Africa.

[citation needed] The opening on 22 June 1929 of the new Paterson Secondary School, off Mount Road, by the Superintendent-General of Education, Dr. W.J.Viljoen.

In January 1937 a new high school with 57 children in Std 7 was started in the dining hall of the show yard.