Gryphon Gallery: Julia McDermott—From Founder/Headmistress to Matron/Housekeeper

Julia McDermott was the founder and first headmistress of Norfolk House School, a founding school together with Glenlyon Preparatory School of GNS. With the significant assistance of her colleague, Miss Dora Atkins, Miss McDermott established the groundwork for a school that would survive for seventy-three years through both good and difficult times while some private schools in Victoria would fall by the wayside. However Miss McDermott remained headmistress for less than four years. 

At sometime during those fledgling years, Julia met Victoria accountant Frederick Forbes. We know nothing of their courtship, but Frederick’s proposal of marriage must have been extremely attractive to her. At 35, and in that era, Julia would probably have more or less given up the idea of marriage and with no increase in the enrollment at her school in those early years, matrimony may have appeared a happy solution to the uncertainty of her future. The register for the fall term of 1916 contains no evidence of Julia at all as Miss Atkins took her classes. Whether at that time she had become engaged, traveled to Australia to meet Frederick’s relatives, or to England to present Frederick to her family, is not known. But she was back in Victoria for the New Year to resume her duties in her last two terms at NHS. 

Julia was 36 and Frederick 43 when they were married on August 10, 1917. In the following day’s Victoria Daily Colonist it said: “An interesting wedding was solemnised yesterday morning at St. Mary’s Church, Oak Bay. The wedding was a quiet one, the ceremony performed in the presence of a few intimate friends and relatives of the bride and groom. The bride was attended by Miss Dora Atkins as her bridesmaid. After the ceremony, Mr. and Mrs. Forbes motored to the CPR wharf where they boarded the steamer “Sol Duc” en route to Mount Rainier where they will spend their honeymoon.”

Upon their return they made their home at 2553 Beachway Avenue which was later renamed Cavendish Avenue in 1921 and was only a tennis serve away from the Oak Bay Tennis Club—not a surprise given her earlier tennis career. They lived there for the whole of their relatively short married life. As was usual in those days, Julia gave up her teaching career and was soon anticipating motherhood. A daughter, Joan, was born to them in April, 1918 and Dora Atkins became her godmother, doting on her new charge.

By 1925 enrollment at NHS had increased to 50+ and there was an increasing demand for boarding, due in part to the troubles in China and the evacuation of children from British families domiciled there. It was also the year that Frederick Forbes died (March 8, 1925), leaving Julia and Joan in a difficult financial position. Fortunately these two problems had a common solution. The school would open a proper boarding house and Mrs. Forbes would become the resident Matron/Housekeeper, while both she and Joan would have a place to live.

The search for a rentable dwelling ended with the lease of 1390 St. James’ Street, renamed Transit Road and later 1377 St. David’s Street a year before NHS left it to go to Pemberton Woods. The lease was taken up by Glenlyon Preparatory School’s as its first schoolhouse in 1932.

With Dora Atkins moving NHS to the Pemberton Woods site, she needed a closer boarding house than the one at Transit, finding the answer at “Gonzales” at the junction of St.Charles Street and Rockland. This was big enough to house herself, boarders, Julia and Joan Forbes and another teacher, Mrs. Cheetham. Unfortunately Julia Forbes only had a couple of years in her new home.

In the summer holidays of 1933 she took a trip back to England on the S.S.Duchess of Atholl. She died on August 25, 1933, just before the ship docked at Liverpool. A certified copy of her Death Certificate gave the cause of death as “Presumably uraemia” —simply put that is a buildup of waste products in the blood that occurs as a result of untreated kidney failure. She was 52 years old.

Her daughter, Joan, had not travelled with her to England and remained at the school until June 1934. She would reconnect with the school about her time spent there and shared her knowledge of NHS by making contact with Miss Scott, Mrs. Bullen, Mrs. Beynon and Mr. Walker during the late 1970s and early 1980s, providing many useful details about her mother and Miss Atkins.