Churchill Boys High School

Churchill School is a boys' high school located in the Eastlea suburb of Harare, Zimbabwe. The school had the first school pipe band in Zimbabwe and produces cricket players of national and international calibre.

At one time, the school's pipe band was in the Guinness Book of Records for the longest piping hours. Pipers Neville Workman, Patrick Forth, Paul Harris and Clive Higgins blew their pipes for a combined 100 hours in July 1976, breaking the previous record of eighty hours.^[1]

History

Founded in 1950 as Salisbury East Boys' High School, headmaster E.J. 'Jeeves' Hougaard helped inspire most of Churchill's traditions. Hougaard is credited with establishing the name of the school and its affiliation to Winston Churchill and his family, and the school mascot, the bulldog. The school was established using the name Eastlea Boys High School and operated at Roosevelt Girls High for the first two terms while a block was being built at Eastlea Boys High. It happened then that the headmaster, Mr. Hougaard, wrote to the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Sir Winston Spencer Churchill, to rename the Eastlea Boys High School after him and the permission was granted. Since then the school has been known as Churchill School.^[2] Two boarding Houses which had about 180 pupils, were named Winston and Spencer houses. The games houses (Akroyd, Beaumont, Cardell, Hamilton, Maxwell and Wakeham) recall pilots who died in the Battle of Britain. These houses compete in sports and cultural activities for the prestigious Governor's Cup.

Sport

The school offers a number of sporting disciplines such as rugby, hockey, cricket, basketball, tennis, soccer, water polo, volleyball, golf, swimming, athletics, cross country, squash and, at one time, shooting. It has a very passionate sporting culture which has been carried on for generations. It is regarded as one of Zimbabwe's best sporting schools and competes for top honours with Harare's other big sporting schools, mainly St George's College, St John's College and Prince Edward School. The bulldogs hold a top ten spot in every sporting discipline that they offer.

Their cricket team is the most successful high school cricket team in Zimbabwe as it has held the number one spot in Zimbabwe's Schools Cricket One Day League and has produced players like Prosper Utseya, Hamilton Masakadza, Tatenda Taibu, Elton Chigumbura,^[2] Douglas Hondo and Larmeck Mufambisi.

Their soccer team is also one of the most popular teams in the country and has gone on to produce soccer stars such as Samson Choruwa, Norman Maroto and Eddie Mashiri.

The rugby team, which is popularly known as the bulldogs, enjoys a relative amount of success and like the cricket team, is highly rated. It is the most important team in the school and has also produced excellent rugby players, namely Tendai Mtawarira, Tangai Nemadire, Jedza, Shingie, Madondo, Dan Hondo and Bryan Taylor, of the then Rhodesia Boys' U21 1st XV and captain of the school's 1st XV (1960).

Other influential personalities

The school also has produced visionaries in the business field such as Interfin's Farai Rwodzi and Kingdom Holdings founder Nigel Chanakira. In politics, figures such as Bright Matonga and Leo Mugabe are products of Churchill School. It produced Chengetai Madondo, a pioneering black swimmer in a sport usually dominated by non-black athletes. The athletics team is credited for bringing up the likes of Ngoni Makusha and Gabriel Mvumvure, both Olympic athletes.^[2]

References