Today is the 100th anniversary of the appointment of Archie Price as the inaugural Master of St Mark’s College.
The appointment of the inaugural Master was, of course, a crucial step on the path to the official opening of the College on 15 March 1925, the Centenary of which we will celebrate with our Centenary Gala Dinner on 15 March 2025, and other events on that Gala Weekend, and later in the year.
Sir Archibald Grenfell Price, as he became, had been one of the founders of the College, working tirelessly to bring it into being from 1920 to 1925.
He served as the founding Master from 1925 to 1956, and his achievement in guiding the development of St Mark’s through hard as well as good years was nothing short of brilliant.
No individual has contributed more to the development and life of St Mark’s College, or is ever likely to do so.
Newspaper reports of Mr Price’s appointment as Master in December 1924 can be found here, here, and here. (We apologise for the quality of the links.)
Throughout his time as Master, Archie Price was supported unstintingly by his wife, Kitty Pauline Price (nee Hayward). The College’s debt to her is reflected in the fact that the portrait of Sir Archibald Grenfell Price by Sir Ivor Hele hangs in the College dining hall next to a splendid portrait of Lady Grenfell Price by Sir William Dargie.
The Grenfell Price Lodge – home to Masters (now Heads) of St Mark’s since the 1950s – is named in recognition of both Sir Archibald and Lady Grenfell Price. Their daughter, Betty, lived in the Lodge when her husband, Bob Lewis, was Vice-Master and later Master of St Mark’s.
We are profoundly grateful for all that Sir Archibald and Lady Grenfell Price did for St Mark’s, and for our enduring links with members of the Price, Hayward, and Lewis families, and their continuing support for the College.
On 20 March 1950, shortly after the 25th anniversary of the opening of St Mark’s, J. H. (“Josh”) Reynolds – the first Rhodes Scholar from St Mark’s, who went on to be the long-term Warden of St George’s College at the University of Western Australia – wrote to Archie:
“May I take this occasion of paying tribute to what I feel I owe to the inspiration of St Mark’s. I think I learned there a spirit of service and good fellowship which has been of the highest value to me at least. In saying this, may I be presumptuous enough also to pay a tribute to the inspiring character of your own creative work which has, of course, been the source and mainspring of the life of the College. St Mark’s men are very proud of you and of their association with the College.
“May I also offer my congratulations to Mrs Price on her integral part in what has been so splendidly done.”
When “Archie” retired in 1956 after 32 years as Master, another Old Collegian, Dr Sholto Douglas – proposing the toast to him at an Old Collegians’ dinner in his honour – said simply “that without Archibald Grenfell Price there would be no St Mark’s College as we know it today”. This, of course, remains true today.
You can read Dr Sholto Douglas’s full speech proposing the toast to the Master here.
A tribute to the retiring Master by the long-time Chairman of the College Council, Sir Henry Newland, published in The Lion for 1956, may be found here.
The same issue of The Lion contained “The Reminiscences of a First Master” by Archie Price, which may be found here. (A decade later, he was to pen the first full history of the College, A History of St. Mark’s College, University of Adelaide, and the Foundation of the Residential College Movement.)
In 1961, when the building housing the College’s new dining hall and library (now Learning Commons) was built, it was named the Archibald Grenfell Price Hall in honour of the first Master.
On the 50th anniversary of the founding of St Mark’s College, the Governor of South Australia, Sir Mark Oliphant, spoke at the College’s celebrations. His speech, which is here, contained a fulsome tribute to “Dr. Grenfell Price”.
We will all be able to read more about Archie’s astounding achievement in the development of St Mark’s, as well as difficulties along the way, when the Centenary history being written by Associate Professor Paul Sendziuk and Dr Carolyn Collins is launched in November 2025.
In the meantime, copies of Archie: The biography of Sir Archibald Grenfell Price by Colin Kerr (1983) will be on sale alongside Centenary merchandise on the Centenary Gala Weekend next March.
In 2014, a Flinders University doctoral thesis by Cécile Cutler studied “The latent legacy of geographer Sir Archibald Grenfell Price”. It began:
“Sir Archibald Grenfell Price was a man of substance in Australian society. He was an author, an educator, a concerned Christian, a broadcaster, a politician, a pioneer and a mentor to many. Price received a knighthood for his achievements; his name lives on in the University of Adelaide residential college. He is a very interesting and complex man.
“During his long career Grenfell Price concerned himself with many issues. These were key issues of his time, and some remain relevant today. In particular he investigated successful and unsuccessful settlement patterns, especially that of Europeans in tropical regions. Additionally he identified the characteristics of settlement which enabled some groups to be more prosperous than others. Price’s writings had an impact on his peers and contemporaries and it is likely his contribution helped shaped patterns of Australian settlement in its tropical regions.”
The Australian Dictionary of Biography entry on him, which is here, also gives a glimpse of his extraordinary achievements beyond the College – including as a scholar of geography and history, leader in school and university as well as collegiate education, public figure and war-time Member of Parliament, and inaugural Chair of the Council of the National Library of Australia. His political and public impact during Australia’s economic and political emergency of the early 1930s is brought out strongly in Baden Teague’s The Liberal Story (2023). As well as in education and public life, Archie was active throughout his life in the Anglican Church.
A commemorative plaque in the pavement of North Terrace, Adelaide, reads:
“Sir Archibald Grenfell Price, CMG, 1892-1977, Geographer, Historian, Educationist.”
On the 100th anniversary of Archibald Grenfell Price’s appointment as Master of St Mark’s College, we salute his exceptional achievements with gratitude and pride, and honour his memory.
Photograph at top: Kenneth, Pauline (Babs), Betty, Charles, and Archie Price, c. 1924
Portraits of Sir Archibald Grenfell Price by Sir Ivor Hele (1950), and of Lady Grenfell Price by Sir William Dargie (1958)
Bottom photograph: The Master with some students at St Mark’s, c. 1930
