TO say that Rouge Bouillon School has a complicated history is somewhat of an understatement.
It has been an intermediate school, a girls’ grammar school – although not always in the same building – and a primary school which was the amalgamation of a number of other Town schools.
Tracing its history was made even more difficult in 1991 when a fire destroyed many of the school’s records.
The date on the capstone, however, shows that the original Brighton Road School opened on 7 July 1908.
Among the pictures which have survived date back to its days as a girls’ school and show some very neat and tidy girls in 1911, 1912 or 1913.
One of the pictures is evidence of how times have changed over the century. The girls are pictured in what appear to be domestic uniforms and holding cookery books and feather dusters.
In 1980, the girls’ school relocated to where Grainville now is and a new Rouge Bouillon Primary School was opened, combining Vauxhall Street, Halkett Place and Val Plaisant schools.
The first head teacher was Jurat Nick Herbert, who held the post for eight years when he was succeeded by Wendy Hurford. On the morning of Monday 15 April 1991 – the day before the beginning of the new term – a fire ripped through the school. It started in the roof space where workmen had been conducting repairs before the children returned to their classrooms.
It also did considerable damage to the Teachers’ Centre, which was on the same site. No one was hurt in the fire. Rouge Bouillon was the largest of the Island’s primary schools – as it is today – and some 400 pupils were unable to return to school.
There was also damage to Police Headquarters and, at one point, it was feared that the fire would spread to the Fire Station. ‘The whole area was shrouded in dense smoke as the flames, which could be seen as far away as Cyril Le Marquand House, swept through the building,’ read the JEP report.
Thirteen members of staff, some with their children, had been in the building when the fire was discovered and they, along with staff from the Teachers Centre, were evacuated. Despite the extent of the damage (only the Nursery Unit remained largely undamaged) the school reopened to the majority of its students just one week later.
In all, however, it took five or six years for the phased repair work to be completed. Mrs Hurford said that although it was a very traumatic time for the pupils, staff and parents, it was also a period through which everyone was very supportive.
‘We had something like 12 phases of building and some teachers moved eight times in two or three years,’ she said. As the school was repaired, bit by bit, teachers and their pupils moved between classrooms and portable accommodation on the site.
‘It certainly was a challenging time, but one during which everybody supported each other. It was an effort to try to make sure that the quality of education remained while we were on a building site,’ she said.
Mrs Hurford left the headship in 2001 following a secondment to the Education Department. Isobel Wood became acting head and was then followed by the current head teacher, James Speight.
