MONTY’S OLD SCHOOL ROOM

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31007, 12 March 1966, Page 5

MONTY’S OLD SCHOOL ROOM

[Specially written for “The Press’' by GRAEME BARROW] rpODAY 14 Hobart scout cubs are being taught selfreliance and the virtue of honourable conduct in an old brick building where Britain’s often controversial war hero, Lord Montgomery of Alamein, studied under tutors as a young child.

The tiny schoolroom, at what is now the headquarters of the Church of England in Tasmania, was blessed recently as the “den” of the Seventh Hobart (St. David’s Cathedral) Scout Group. It was built by Monty’s father who was Bishop of Tasmania from 1889 to 1901. Rather curiously in a state becoming more and more preoccupied with its history, there is no plaque or other prominent record at the Old Bishops court commemorating the fact that Montgomery, whom Sir Winston Churchill once called “one of the greatest living masters of the art of war,” lived there for 12 years. The only momento (if it could be called that) of the family’s stay is a small, faded and unframed picture of Bishop Montgomery in his robes as a prelate of the Order of St. Michael and St. George. The bishop’s bedroom has been divided into offices but from the windows visitors can still see the placid waters of the lovely River Derwent. NOW NEGLECTED The gardens bear a neglected appearance today and the tennis court has not felt the thump of players’ feet for years.

Trees are scattered about the grounds and most of them must have felt the weight of the young Monty and his brothers and sisters as they scrambled over them at play. One of the trees is said to have been used as a wicket for the children’s cricket matches.

Judged on today’s standards, Monty’s schoolroom has an austere appearance. The floors are of bare boards and the windows small and poky. The young pupils—as well as the Montgomery’s other children were taught

there by tutors and governesses imported from England —were warmed during the intense cold of the Tasmanian winter by blazing logs in a large old-fashioned fireplace, another indication of the period in which the schoolroom was built. Other famous names are associated with the street in which the Montgomerys once lived. The actor, Errol Flynn, is said to have kicked a football along it when he was a child in Hobart, and opposite the old schoolroom today lives Mrs Adrian Gibson, who as Miss Diana Knox was called “Australia’s richest girl” when she became engaged to Mr Gibson, a Hobart M.P. in 1965. SOME CONFUSION Some confusion surrounds Monty’s schooling in his very early years but in spite of a denial he gave in Hobart in 1947, there seems little doubt that he was taught for a time by members of an Anglican order of nuns, the Sisters of the Church.

Unfortunately, over-zealous

cleaning out at the school in later years resulted in the old register being burned, but sisters there have no doubt at all that Monty did attend the school —first in what would now be called a kindergarten and then as a ppil in the boys’ section before he left to be taught at home. A photograph of Bernard Montgomery taken when he was nine years old, shows him flexing his left-arm muscle, his cloth cap at a jaunty angle, and a cheeky grin on his face. Soon after they had stepped ashore in Hobart, the Montgomerys’ eldest daughter, Queenie, was stricken with a serious illness, dying three weeks after their arrival. HERO’S WELCOME A desk made of Tasmanian blackwood was presented to Monty in 1947 by the state branch of the Royal Society of St. George, and a Tasmanian timber company gave him 126,000 sq. ft. of oak for the floors of Islington Mill on the River Wey in Hampshire

which Monty converted into his home after the war. The war hero’s welcome back to Hobert had its amusing moments. On one occasion he was presented to a group of oldish ladies, each of whom claimed to have been his nanny and to remember how difficult he was in his bath. "I did not know I had so many nurses; or so many baths,” he later wrote dryly.

But in more serious vein he told a gathering of 1500 Diggers in the City Hall on the Sunday of his visit that it was in Hobart that he had been influenced to become a soldier.

“I used to see contingents marching from here (to boats in the harbour) on the way to South Africa and I remember that I thought that some day 1 would march away as a soldier.

“When great victories were celebrated in those days we used to go to a hall in Hobart and sing a grand old song ‘Soldiers of the Queen.’ We don’t hear that song much now."