Peter Espeut | Sixty years of Campion College

On January 5, 1960 – sixty years ago last Sunday – Campion College first opened its doors with 105 first-form boys and five teachers, four of them Jesuits. The first headmaster of Campion College was the Rev Fr Samuel Emmanuel Carter SJ, who would later become the first Jamaican Roman Catholic Bishop (1966) and Archbishop (1970).

When I got to Campion in 1964, Fr Carter was still the headmaster, and I received my first (and only) caning of my school career at his hands. Thirty years later he would join my wife and I in holy matrimony.

In Campion’s second year (1961), there were 172 students, with 13 Jesuits on staff and three lay teachers; one of them was Hugo Chambers, retired headmaster of Jamaica College, who would later teach me geometry. As new forms were added, more classrooms were built, as well as science laboratories. It grew to a three-stream school, with only 550 boys; a private school, the fees were £12 per term.

When I graduated in 1968, Campion did not yet have a sixth form (so I went to my father’s alma mater – St George’s College). In 1970, a sixth form was introduced, opening the possibility of a Campionite winning the Jamaica Scholarship, the Rhodes Scholarship, and other prestigious awards. In 1976, the school became grant-aided and co-educational, merging with the adjoining Sts Peter & Paul High School for Girls; its enrolment rose to 850.

Between 1971 and 2017, Campion College produced 15 Rhodes Scholars, 33 Jamaica Scholars, 40 Jamaica Independence Scholars, 10 Jamaica Centenary Scholars, 10 GraceKennedy Scholars, and very many others. It has been ranked as the number one high school in Jamaica.

SUCCESSFUL GRADUATES

Campion College has graduated parsons and physicians, poets and playwrights, university professors and lecturers, judges and lawyers, politicians and Cabinet ministers from both sides, sportsmen and women, businessmen/women and bankers, broadcasters and journalists (including several columnists currently writing for this newspaper), anti-corruption activists and environmentalists. Graduates include reggae artistes Damian ‘Junior Gong’ Marley and Kabaka Pyramid.

At the ecumenical church service last Sunday to mark the 60th anniversary, the homilist, Campion alumnus the Rev Canon Michael Allen (Anglican) asked the question: what would Jamaica be like today if there was no Campion College? An interesting question. What do you think?

Last Wednesday, Campion held its annual Founder’s Day lecture, dedicated to Archbishop Samuel Carter. This year the topic was ‘Integrity and Character Formation in Education’, and the speakers were Campion alumnus Greg Christie, director of the Turks & Caicos Islands Integrity Commission (and former contractor-general of Jamaica); and the Most Rev Dr Howard Gregory, Archbishop of the West Indies. And the discussion may have gone some way in answering Canon Allen’s question: Campion is not only valuable to Jamaica because of its excellence in academics, but also because of the values and character formation it imparts to its students.

The motto of the school is ‘Fortes in fide et opere’ (Strength in Faith and in Work). The school is named after English Jesuit and Oxford scholar St Edmund Campion SJ (1540-1581), who, while conducting an underground ministry in officially Anglican and anti-Catholic England, was arrested by priest hunters and convicted of high treason because of his Catholic faith.

His sentence read: “You must go to the place from whence you came, there to remain until ye shall be drawn through the open city of London upon hurdles to the place of execution, and there be hanged and let down alive, and your privy parts cut off, and your entrails taken out and burnt in your sight; then your heads to be cut off and your bodies divided into four parts, to be disposed of at Her Majesty’s pleasure. And God have mercy on your souls”.

Such is the man after whom Campion College is named, and his life – and death – inspires all Campionites to be strong in our faith and our work.

The Rev Peter Espeut is a sociologist and development scientist, and a graduate of Campion College. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com