Founder's Day

Each year, on the weekday nearest to December 1st, St George's College and St George's College Junior School celebrate Canon Constant Van Crombrugghe (1789 - 1865) as “The Founder”. Strictly speaking he is not the Founder of the College, having died four years before the establishment of St George’s College, Croydon. It was, however, in response to his impetus that the Josephites founded a school in England.

The school opened its doors firstly in Croydon to five boys and then, in 1884, translated to Woburn Park due to a massive expansion in numbers.

If Constant Van Crombrugghe is not “The Founder” in the literal sense (for that we have to look to Fr Céléstin Van Stalle, the first Superior, or to Fr Rémi de Sadeleer, the Superior General of the time), why then do we celebrate him as Founder? For an answer to this we have to go back to the notion of a “founding impetus” based on what Van Crombrugghe considered “fundamental” to the Josephite Schools: this is nothing to do with bricks and mortar but rather with those things which are the foundation on which the College is built: mutual respect, gentleness and gentility, mutual growth or symbiosis of all members of the schools’ community.

This week those fundamentals, focussed on Constant Van Crombrugghe, will be celebrated by the Schools. They will be celebrated principally in the Chapels - giving concrete form to Van Crombrugghe’s dictum “no education without religion” - and, for the staff, at a Buffet Supper hosted by the Community.