About Us
The purpose of the Association is to bring together alumni as well as former members of the academic, non-academic staff and friends of Queen’s College of Guyana, in order to provide various forms of assistance to it, including the organizing of fund raising activities for the benefit of the College and any charitable purpose connected with it.
A Brief History of Queen's College
It was established in 1844 by Bishop William Piercy Austin as an Anglican grammar school for boys and was aimed at educating the colonial elite. The school was temporarily quartered at what it the current location of the High Court then moved to another property at Main and Quamina Street until 1854. In 1876, the Compulsory Denominational Education Bill secularized education and it became Queen's College of British Guiana as a national institution funded by the government. and in 1975 became co-ed.
Several more moves took the school to the site of the present Ministry of Health building (Vlissengen Road and Brickdam) in 1918 and then to its present location in Thomas Lands (Camp and Thomas Roads), where the facilities were formally opened on December 3, 1951. The building there maintained its original form until November 1997, when an arsonist struck and the entire middle section of the school - comprising the offices, auditorium, tuck shop and bicycle shed - was destroyed. Phase I of the rebuilding - the Administrative Block and Auditorium - has been completed and was dedicated on September 19, 2003. Queen's College celebrated its 160th birthday on August 5, 2004.
The library was opened in 1880 and the school produced a variety of student papers, starting in 1881 as Our College Gazette, QC Gazette, the Queen's Chronicle and, the QC Lictor newspaper in 1950. The school also produced The Queen's College Magazine yearly from about 1912 to the 1974-76 edition.
The school has a House system of 10 houses, named in honor of famous people to the history of Guyana; William Exley Percival, Walter Raleigh, Bishop Austin, Benjamin D'Urban, Edward Oliver Pilgrim, Frederick Thomas Weston, Edwin Moulder, Charles Campbell Woolley, John Henry Dacres Cunningham, and Captain Howard Nobbs. By convention, siblings are often put into the same house, and could also apply to other relatives and the children of previous students.