The Principals of the Grammar School

A European clergyman of the Church Missionary Society, the Rev. Thomas Peyton moved from the Fourah Bay Institution to open the CMS Grammar School on 25 March 1845, beginning with fourteen pupils transferred from Fourah Bay.

He gave the school a demanding grammar-school course — English grammar and composition, Greek, Mathematics, Geography, Bible history, Astronomy, English history, writing and music — and compared his pupils favourably with English students at a time of deep European prejudice against Africans. In 1851, on CMS instructions, he bought a six-acre farm at King Tom where pupils grew cotton. He died at the school on 14 June 1853 and was buried in Freetown.

An English clergyman of the Church Missionary Society, the Rev. John Milward was the school’s second Principal. Sources differ on his dates: the alumni association lists 1852–1859, while the Old Boys’ history records that after Peyton’s death in 1853 the Rev. E. Jones of Fourah Bay College supervised the school until Milward arrived in November 1855. He served until 1859.

From Kent Village, of Moko and Aku descent, James Quaker was one of the fourteen foundation pupils of 1845. He trained at the Fourah Bay Institution and at the Church Missionary College, Islington, then served his old school as catechist and assistant teacher (1848) and tutor (1850). He was ordained deacon in 1856 and priest in 1863.

Around 1860–61 he became the first African — and the first Regentonian — to lead the school, and he did so for more than twenty years. The school band was founded under him in 1863, and in 1871 he started a school printing press that produced the school’s own periodical. He was also garrison chaplain. He died in office on 24 May 1882.

Born at York village in 1849, of Mende and Popo descent, Obadiah Moore entered the Grammar School in May 1863 under the name Obadiah Punch. After Fourah Bay College he returned as junior tutor in 1870 and senior tutor in 1871, then spent eighteen months at Monkton Combe, near Bath, from 1875. Ordained deacon in 1877 and priest in 1879, he served at Christ Church, Pademba Road, and as pastor of St Matthew’s, Sherbro.

He became Principal in May 1882 on the death of James Quaker and led his old school until 1905. Among his legacies, he turned the fife-and-drum band into a brass and reed band.

When the Rev. George G. Garrett took charge (one source dates his arrival to 1905), the school had seven African tutors, all Durham University graduates through Fourah Bay College. In 1908 — only a year after Baden-Powell began the Boy Scout movement in England — he started Scouting at the Grammar School, the first Scout troop in Sierra Leone.

He also wrote the words of “Regentonia”, the school song still sung by Regentonians today.

Born at Lokoja, Nigeria, around 1871–72, of Hausa descent and the son of a CMS pastor, Thomas Charles John came to the Grammar School as a pupil — playing in the school band — and rose to master and vice-principal before becoming Principal in 1920. He was educated at Fourah Bay College and took degrees in arts and theology at Durham.

As Principal he kept the brass band going and supported the Old Boys’ fund-raising for the school. In 1933 he was consecrated Assistant Bishop on the Niger. He died in January 1936.

Born in 1873 into a Krio farming and trading family, Thomas Sylvester Johnson won a scholarship to Fourah Bay College, where he later took degrees in arts and theology. He taught as headmaster of a CMS school, was ordained in 1909, joined the Fourah Bay College staff in 1911 and served as diocesan inspector of schools.

In 1933 he became Principal of the Grammar School — the school that had once turned him away as a pupil. He tried to revive carpentry, introduced basket-making and called for “drastic changes” in education. In 1937 he became the first Assistant Bishop of Sierra Leone. He wrote The Fear Fetish (1949) and The Story of a Mission (1953), and died in 1955.

A history of the school records that Principal P. H. Wilson expanded the school press to include regular instruction in printing, and by the end of the 1930s bookbinding, cardboard modelling and elementary arts were also being taught.

The school moved from Regent Square to its present campus of some fifty acres at Murray Town in 1962, during Mr Wood’s years as Principal. We would welcome recollections and photographs of his time.

The son of James and Viola Hastings-Spaine of Freetown, Victor Hastings-Spaine was sent as a boy, with his brother Columbus, to live with his grandmother in Freetown. A priest of the Anglican Diocese of Freetown, later made a Canon, he led the Grammar School from 1971 to 1985.

After retiring from active service in the Diocese, he served for several years as Priest-in-charge of St Mary’s Cathedral, Banjul, following the 1997 military interregnum in Sierra Leone. His daughter remembered him as “very strict but upright”, a man who believed education was “the key to the pursuit of success and fulfillment”. The SLGS Old Boys Association (UK) held a memorial service in his honour.

A fourth-generation Regentonian whose grandfather taught at the school, Akiwande Josiah Lasite was himself a pupil before joining the staff in 1970 as a History teacher. He became Head of History a year later, Vice Principal in 1974 and Principal in 1985 — a post he held for 33 years. His tenure as Principal ended on 31 August 2018, after 48 years of service to the school.

The historian Professor C. Magbaily Fyle wrote that he “demonstrated singular energy and commitment to the task of running the school”, making the Grammar School by the close of the twentieth century “the leading secondary school in Sierra Leone in terms of overall performance in public exams”. Under his leadership the school recovered encroached land, regained its independent status in September 2007 under the Anglican Diocese of Freetown, and opened a new school block in March 2013. A Lay Canon of the Anglican Church, he is honoured as Principal Emeritus.

The Rev. Canon Leonard Ken Davies (M.A. Th. & Min., M.A. Ed., Dip. Th., CELTA) is the Principal of the Sierra Leone Grammar School. A Regentonian, he was educated at the school and returned to teach there from 1987 to 1993.

He succeeded Canon A. J. Lasite, whose tenure ended on 31 August 2018, through a two-year transition programme, taking full charge from the 2018/2019 school year. He led the school through its reopening during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and works closely with the Old Boys at home and abroad, whose gifts of textbooks, furniture and STEM equipment support his aim of a state-of-the-art Science and Innovation Laboratory and much-improved science laboratories.