Joseph Coates, referred to as “Joey” by the boys, arrived as Headmaster at Sydney High in January 1884, having previously been Headmaster of Newington College, 1877-1883. Because Newington would not release Coates from his duties until the end of 1883, John Waterhouse, Coates’ assistant at Newington, acted as headmaster at Sydney High for the first 3 months. Waterhouse then went on to become the first headmaster of the newly-established Maitland Boys’ High School at the beginning of 1884.
Coates made his reputation as a headmaster in an era when formal qualifications were not yet essential for a career in teaching. This is exemplified by the statement of one of his early pupils at Sydney High:
Without any exaggeration, I can say that his gift for teaching was never excelled by any teacher that I have ever been under, either in Sydney or in Edinburgh. Without being perhaps a profound scholar, he possessed to a remarkable degree the gift of passing on everything he knew to his pupils. And how he understood boys!
Born at Huddersfield, in Yorkshire, England, on 13 November 1844, the son of a cordwainer (or shoemaker), Coates received his final years of education at an academy called Huddersfield College. As a senior boy, in 1863, he received a gold medal for history, a silver medal for mathematics and a silver medal for second place in classics. He matriculated to London University, but never undertook a course of study at this or at any other university.
In 1864, he arrived in Australia and was employed at the newly-established Newington College. During his first stint at Newington, Coates played in the College’s sporting teams – cricket and also Rugby when Newington became the first Australian school to field a Rugby team in 1869. In 1873, he entered the service of the NSW Council of Education and, after a quick succession of appointments to public schools, became Headmaster of the flag-ship Fort Street Public School in 1876. However, a year later, in 1877, he became Headmaster of Newington College, supervising its move to the new site at Stanmore in 1880. The move to Sydney High, prompted no doubt by a substantial pay rise from £450 to £600 per annum, was a significant blow to Newington College which had also lost Coates’ assistant, John Waterhouse, to Maitland High School. Coates’ personal following at the College was so great that seven of the senior boys transferred with him. These boys, who were much older and larger than the Sydney High School boys, provided a much needed support to the school’s early sporting program.
Coates himself was an inter-colonial cricketer of some ability, and was Captain of the NSW side on numerous occasions. He played 32 matches against England and the other Australian colonies between 1867 and 1880. He is credited with having introduced to NSW the type of bowling known as the “Yorker” (named after the County of his birth). His best innings was in 1878 when he made 73 runs and took 11 wickets for 69 runs. One pupil, writing in an 1888 edition of the school magazine, wryly observed that the school's half-holidays always fell “on a day when there happens to be a cricket match on at the Association Cricket Ground”. Coates himself was one of the original members of that ground, now known as the Sydney Cricket Ground.
He was known widely as a “firm disciplinarian”. The use of such a phrase today cannot adequately describe a violent streak on the part of “Joey” that would leave most modern readers distinctly uncomfortable. Numerous accounts survive of Coates’ discipline. One from an old boy who enrolled in 1884:
In those days the punishment was made to fit the crime. It was the daily habit of "Joey" to meander round various class rooms - which were separated by big drop baize blinds - and round up the boys like brumbies who were frequently adorning the floor instead of their class, and drive them into “his room”, there to be well trounced. The worst punishment of all that we boys dreaded was the return to the school on Saturday morning at 9.15 am and to be detained until 11 am, which not only broke our morning but fairly broke our heart.
Another, from an old boy who enrolled in 1883:
On another occasion the Head, good old Joey, caught Os Bell and I (we two were always up to some devilment or other) throwing pens into the ceiling, a favourite pass time, and we were called out together. Joey approached us with that set look of his and his teeth together and bared, and quick as a flash Os got one from that swift left hand on the right ear. I was successful in dodging mine, but, as I turned, the foot scored where the hand had failed, and I received a beauty in the rear.
One former colleague recalled:
The left arm that had been the terror of many a Victorian batsman in the Interstate games, became a greater terror to erring youth, when the ball became a stick. Coates had some constitutional weakness that worried him a lot, and an occasional excess of wrath under provocation was not unnatural. One morning among those marshalled for the stick was an old offender, who was insolent. Up came that "dirty" left, and the open palm caught the culprit fair and square, and lifted him clean off his feet. We are more lady-like now, and less effective.
The same accounts go on to state that he was "very just and fair", "a great friend of the boys, and well beloved by all of them", "a just and upright man", and "a grand, clever, painstaking, lovable man". Indeed, Coates opened his house, at 24 Moore Park Road, to some of the boys who had enrolled from the country to stay there as boarders. It was in this house that the boarders had Mrs Coates choose between two proposed schemes for the school colours – “light blue, dark blue and gold” or “chocolate and blue”.
By the time the school moved from Castlereagh Street at the beginning of 1892, Coates’ health was noticeably deteriorating. He had a distinct limp, the result of muscular paralysis, and was already having trouble in stumping about with the aid of an umbrella. Yet he lived another 5 years, dying shortly after his retirement from the School in 1896, at the age of only 51.
Joseph Coates