Walter Bromley
Walter Henry Bromley was British officer and reformer who created the Royal Acadian School over the thirteen years he lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia (1813-1825). [1] His school offered schooling for middle-income children as well as low-income girls, black children, immigrant children. The school included Protestants and Catholics. The school was controversial, however, some of its biggest supporters came from the Nova Scotia elite.
Bromley also devoted himself to the service of the Mi’kmaq people.[2] The Mi'kmaq were among poor of Halifax and in the rural communities. According to historian Judith Finguard, his contribution to give public exposure to the plight of the Mi’kmaq “particularly contributes to his historical significance.” Finguard writes:
- Bromley’s attitudes towards the Indians were singularly enlightened for his day…. Bromley totally dismissed the idea that native people were naturally inferior and set out to encourage their material improvement through settlement and agriculture, their talents through education, and their pride through his own study of their languages.[3]
Bromley’s school made a “seminal contribution” to the development of the education movement in Nova Scotia.[4] Well after Bromley’s departure from Nova Scotia (1825), the school continued to play a central role in the campaign for free education. It become a girls’ school by the 1870s.
References
Endnotes
Further reading
- Walter Bromley. An account of the aborigines of Nova Scotia called the Micmac Indians
- Mr. Bromley's second address, on the deplorable state of the Indians: delivered in the "Royal Acadian School," at Halifax, in Nova Scotia, March 8, 1814
- Judith Fingard, “English humanitarianism and the colonial mind: Walter Bromley in Nova Scotia, 1813–25,” CHR, 54 (1973): 123–51
- Judith Fingard. Attitudes towards the Education of the Poor, 15-42
- Judith Fingard. Anglican Design, 134-148
- Upton, Micmacs and colonists;
- Herald (Halifax), 23 Sept. 1892;
- Morning Chronicle (Halifax), 10 July 1868, 11 July 1874;
- Morning Herald (Halifax), 7, 12 Sept. 1885;
- Walter Bromley. Appeals to the People of Great Britain on behalf of the Indians of Nova Scotia
- Report of the Royal Acadian School: instituted in 1813, incorporated 1840 (1851)