Scots College
Present and past students, and their families, often comment on the College's spacious and secure residential campuses to which we owe a great debt of gratitude to our founders. Today, we are noted as a vibrant and caring school that places a great emphasis upon an all round education, both as a preparation for tertiary and practical life. The College continues to play a prominent role in its local community. If you had asked anyone who was living in Warwick during the time of the Great War (1914 - 1918) about the beginnings of PGC and Scots, they would have told you that it was B.T. de Conlay and R. J. Shilliday who started the schools. It was common knowledge, they would have maintained, that de Conlay and Shilliday wanted to send their daughters to a Presbyterian school and they were darned if they were going to send them to Fairholme in Toowoomba. If Toowoomba could have a girls school for Presbyterians, so could Warwick. After all wasn't Toowoomba a 'Johnny come lately' on the Downs? Hadn't Toowoomba been just a raw bullocky's camp when Warwick was already an established town, patronised by some of Australia's wealthiest graziers?
The Principal and Staff
Although the school opened for the first day on 5th February 1948, Miss Mackness and her resident staff had been appointed late in 1917 by the Presbyterian Church's Board of Education in Brisbane, and most of these staff members had taken up residence early in the New Year. Miss Mackness had visited Warwick for the first time in November of the previous year, before she had accepted the appointment as principal, and this brief visit was the beginning of a thirty-two year association with Warwick, which was to result in the establishment and development of PGC as one of the State's prestigious boarding school for girls. While Miss Mackness alone cannot be given credit for this achievement, her long period of stewardship of the school is a significant factor in the growth of the school and the establishment of its reputation. Miss Mackness was thirty-five years old when she was appointed to PGC and remained at the school until she was sixty-seven. By the time she came to Warwick she was an experienced schoolteacher, having taught at a business college in Sydney and at PLC Croydon where she was appointed senior teacher. There followed two years as Headmistress of the Presbyterian Ladies College, Pymble, which introduced her to school administration and management and there is little doubt that as a Presbyterian herself she knew exactly what Presbyterian parents wanted for their daughters. She was attracted to Warwick because it gave her the unique opportunity to open a school; an opportunity denied most school administrators. She was idealistic and relatively young; she had a clear vision of what needed to be done and she came to an enthusiastic local organisation, which was prepared to help her wherever it could.Student Enrolments
Miss Mackness noted in her Record Book that the College opened on 5 February 1918, with fifty-three pupils enrolled during the first term, including eleven boarders, and thirteen kindergarten pupils. During the year enrolments grew to sixty, of whom fifteen were boarders. The initial trend, in which daygirls outnumbered boarders, lasted until 1920, but from that year onwards boarders became the dominant group in the school, a situation that exists to this day.The School Site and Buildings
At the meeting of the General Committee on 17 June, 1917, B. T. de Conlay was able to report that there were six suitable properties available in Warwick for the proposed school. A small group was authorised to inspect these properties, none of which was particularly large, and by August it had recommended the acquisition of Glenbrae, the property of local politician and businessman, Mr. G. P. Barnes. Barnes had purchased the property from Mr. John Archibald in 1906, but Mr and Mrs John Lock, the original owners, after whom Locke Street was named, sometime in the 1870's or early 1880's, probably built Glenbrae.The original home, on an allotment of five and three-quarter acres at the corner of Palmerin and Locke Streets, faced the east and commanded a superb view, over a series of tiered gardens, of the rolling hills that constitute the Great Dividing Range.
Next door, to the west, was the Convent and over the road, to complete the Locke Street education precinct, the Anglican Church was in the process of setting up St. Catharine's Church of England Girls School. The southern boundary of the Glenbrae property consisted of the South-Western Railway connecting Warwick to Dirranbandi.
Mr. Arnold Conrad of Auchenflower, a principal of the Brisbane firm of architects, Conrad and Atkinson, was appointed College architect and instructed to draw up plans for renovations and additions to allow accommodation for twenty-four boarders on a sleep-out balcony.
These additions were completed by the successful tenderer, Mr. Walter Thompson of Warwick, in the summer of 1917 - 1918 at a tendered cost of £1758, and consisted of `five classrooms [in a seperate building], sitting rooms for teachers and prefects, office, cloakroom, hall, and [also in a seperate building] a kindergarten and three music rooms'. By 1949, the year of Miss Mackness' retirement, hardly a year had gone by in which some form of addition or renovation had not been undertaken.
The need for extra accommodation, specialist classrooms, and assembly hall-cum-gymnasium or more bathrooms always outstripped the planning for these facilities so that, in this sense, the school grew like Topsy. By the late 1940's it was clear to Miss Mackness at least, that PGC had outgrown the Locke Street site. By this time, tennis and netball courts had replaced the tiered gardens in front of Glenbrae and the land running down to the railway had been pressed into service as a small running track, a facility which the girls had long wanted, particulary when inter-school athletics time arrived. Previously, the Show Grounds, a few hundred metres further down Locke Street had been used for practice. In 1945 Miss Mackness was able to report in the pages of Miss Thistle that the Council had purchased forty-nine acres on the Stanthorpe Road as a site for the eventual relocation of the College and a building fund was established. The intention was to retain the Locke Street site as a girls preparatory school.
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