Scots College – Learning. For Life.

Vivian Francis taught for eighteen months at Khandallah School before joining Scots in mid-1926 as a junior housemaster under J.H. Murdoch.

Known to all as “Tote”, he remained at Gibb House for five years during which time he was pursuing an M.A. course in Education which he completed (with First Class Honours) in 1933.  In 1932, he was appointed to the position of first assistant after the resignation of T.M. MacDonald.

Vivian Francis served Scots for nineteen years, through the remainder of J.H. Murdoch’s terms as headmaster and for all the time in which J.R. Sutcliffe held that post.  At the time of his departure he was the longest-serving of any member of the secondary staff.  His teaching areas were English, history and geography and for the whole of his time on the staff he was involved with the cadet academy, as commanding officer from 1926 to 1944.  One of his hopes as early as 1940 was to have the cadets affiliated to The New Zealand Scottish Regiment, a circumstance delayed by the war and not achieved until 1959.  His two sons both attended Scots.

His task as acting headmaster while K.W.R. Glasgow was away on active service was a difficult one.  Glasgow had been at Scots long enough to make it clear what sort of school he wanted it to be and the degree of initiative that Francis could exercise in the headmastership was clearly limited, but his heandling of the college’s affairs was both capable and considerate.  Problems of wartime shortages, of air-raid shelters being constructed (for Scots was mid-way between the potential targets of Fort Dorset and the Miramar oil storage tanks), of the military occupation of the pavilion, of staff away in the armed forces, all fell to his lot.

The boys seemed to have rather enjoyed the Emergency Precautions Scheme practices that were a feature of 1941: “When three bells go during school time, it means fun.  The E.P.S. scheme goes into action and the school bounds out into the open for a few minutes peace and quiet.”

Rationing was also a persistent difficulty, although the parents of boys with a farm background helped to ease the situation somewhat.

With the end of the war approaching and Keith Glasgow’s return expected, Vivian Francis looked about for a post elsewhere and at the beginning of 1945 had moved to Australia to become headmaster of Carey Baptist Grammar School in Melbourne.  In 1949 he obtained a position at Knox Grammar School in Sydney where he taught for the next twenty years, becoming deputy headmaster before his retirement in 1968.

In 1976 the college celebrated its sixtieth anniversary and Vivian Francis, along with two other long-retired staff members J.R. Sutcliffe (1930-38) and Miss Elsie MacKenzie (1917-1945) were able to attend.

With his wife, Vivian Francis spent the first five years in retirement at  Matcham, a country town fifty miles north of Sydney.  The Old Boys’ Association News of January 1989 recorded his death at Brisbane, in July of 1988.  His interest in Scots never ceased, for in his will he arranged for the establishment of a fund from which books can be purchased for the English section of the Scots library.