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had to be made as the Convent increased its school-going numbers, especially with respect to

boarders.

To understand the growth of the Convent as a school we have to understand the social and church

life of this time. There was a great divide created by British colonial exclusions between the local

Filipino or ‘coloured” people and the white immigrants. Father Duignam had operated a Mission
School behind the original Catholic Church since 1874, (Fig. 3.2), the year he was appointed as a

Catholic priest for the Kalk Bay - Muizenberg area (although the extent of his religious

responsibilities extended form Simon’s Town in the south to Kommetjie in the west to Diep
River in the north.) The Cape Government had requested Father Leonard in 1874 to appoint a

Catholic priest to handle the religious needs of the Filipino - Manila community who had settled

in Kalk Bay, either as shipwrecked seaman or as deserters from Spanish ships which passed the
Cape in the early 1800s. A shipwreck in 1840 at Cape Point had greatly increased their numbers,

and a small church had been built as St. James (still known as Kalk Bay) in 1858 to avoid the

hazardous sea journey to Simon’s Town every Sunday to attend Mass.

Father Duignam, from Mullingar Co. Westmeath, Ireland, was the ideal choice as he was fluent

in Spanish - the Filipino’s native tongue, and it was not long before he established a small

Mission School where he taught the children up to Standard II both in religious doctrine and the
3 r’s : reading, writing and arithmetic. Classes were held in the Church as well as in a small

building behind the Church and once past Std. II the children left school, the boys to help their

fathers in the fishing industry, the girls to attend to the home while their mothers worked as
domestic servants and later in the wash-house of Kalk Bay. The Mission School grew steadily to

a total of nearly 80 and, once the church had moved over the road in 1900 to make way for the

railway line, the construction of a separate new Mission School behind the new church was
undertaken. As the Mission School grew, and Father Duignam was employed in building the

Convent, he engaged the services of a past pupil Frances Hilario - initially a pupil monitor but

finally an excellent teacher who was destined to remain with the Mission School for over 25

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