Grey High School and Sir George Grey... A bit of history -- July 2019

Grey High School and Sir George Grey... A bit of history -- July 2019

This weekend Grey College beat Grey High -- 58 to 0.
Game played in Bloemfontein.

On Saturday, 20 July, Premier Interschools will broadcast a derby of truely epic proportions. Two schools take each other on in an Interschools that started in 1929. Grey High and Grey College both have the same benefactor in Sir George Grey, Governor of the Cape Colony from 5 December 1854 to 15 August 1861. He founded Grey College, Bloemfontein in 1855 and Grey High School in Port Elizabeth in 1856. During Grey's first tenure as Governor of New Zealand, he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (1848). Grey gave land for the establishment of Auckland Grammar School in Newmarket, Auckland in 1850. The school was officially recognised as an educational establishment in 1868 through the Auckland Grammar School Appropriation Act of the Provincial Government. Auckland Grammar school also became the school in New Zealand that produced the most All Black rugby players, much in the same mould as Grey College has become the rugby factory for Springbok rugby players in South Africa.

Grey High School from Port Elizabeth first took the initiative with an inland tour in 1929 that started off with them playing St Andrews in Grahamstown and working their way up north to Bloemfontein. There they played their brother school for the first time and lost 0 -16. They invited Grey College to come down to PE the following year and the Bloemfontein Boys dually accepted and in 1930 they undertook their first tour to Port Elizabeth. In a closely fought match the boys from Bloem again triumphed with 9-7. For some unknown reason lost in the midst of time, the two schools took another 23 years before they played each other again. Grey PE toured to Bloemfontein again and lost 13-3 in 1953. It took another 10 years for the two Greys to square up again and the 1963 game was a drawn match of eight all while the 1968 game was also a draw. The 1972 match introduced the first unbroken sequence of matches that continues until this day. In all that time there was only another two draws in 1973 and 1990. Grey PE won their first match against their Bloemfontein Brothers in 1976 at the anniversary of the tenth meeting between the two teams. On a day of high drama on the Philip Field at Grey PE, Robbie Logan slotted a last minute penalty for Grey High to emerge as 13-12 winners. Since then, Grey High has only been on the winning side a further seven times with their last win coming in 2014, just showing the dominance that their counterparts from Bloemfontein have in the Derbies.