Superintendent of Education
In 1859 the first Superintendent of Education, Dr Robert J Mann, provided the initiative for the establishment of a high school in the town of Pietermaritzburg. One of Mann's first tasks was to tour the colony and take stock of education in it. He found it to be deplorable, with poor teachers and a shocking lack of equipment being the norm.
Mann immediately set up the Government Book Depot to sell textbooks at the lowest possible cost to pupils and supply books free of charge to teachers. His interest in things literary did not end there: when Maritzburg High School opened its first library 30 years later, Mann's widow donated to it her husband's book collection.
The opening of Dean Green's Grammar School in the mid-1850s marked the establishment of the first true institute of higher education in Pietermaritzburg. This does not seem to have satisfied the need for a complete education and the Collegiate Institution was established in August 1861.
Clark House
Another matter tackled early on was the building for the Maritzburg College. To this end, the Trustees launched an architectural competition in order to ensure that they would be able to choose the best design available. A Durban firm was chosen for its winning design and asked to provide detailed estimates, but these were not forthcoming.
The Trustees then contacted one of the runners-up in the competition, a Cape Town firm, and proceeded to engage in months of correspondence (with sometimes as long as three months between letters) in an attempt to obtain detailed estimates from that firm.
Made despondent by these delays, the Trustees decided to make do with more modest beginnings and acquired a couple of erven on Burger Street at a modest price, to provide a temporary site for a high school. On this site was built a modest block of classrooms which later served as the home of Pietermaritzburg High School for more than 20 years, and can still be seen there today, serving as home to the Maritzburg Model School.
By 1863 Pietermaritzburg, the capital city of one of the poorest colonies in the British Empire, was a large, straggling village between the Umsindisi River and Dorp Spruit. It was into this environment that Maritzburg College was born, as Pietermaritzburg High School, the first 30 pupils being herded into a bare room in a little carpenter's shop facing Longmarket Street. (The apparently abortive architectural competition was not without its successes, however: many years later, one of the plans submitted in the competition was pulled out and dusted off, and used as the basis of the building now known as Clark House, originally the main school building.)