By Greg Morgan,
Great-great-great grandson of George Vardy
George Vardy was born 8 May 1818 at Burton Green, Hampshire, England, and received an Anglican baptism 14 June 1818 at nearby Christchurch. The register indicates that his father was an agricultural labourer. According to a journal later written by his daughter, Eliza Jane (Vardy) Froude, in 1840 George Vardy left “the day and Sunday school in England” to emigrate to Newfoundland.
George Vardy, an Anglican, and Mary Martin, a Newfoundland-born Methodist, married at Grates Cove, Trinity Bay, in a Methodist ceremony on 22 November 1841. The couple had eight children, whereof four lived to adulthood.
In 1855, George Vardy and his family relocated to Clay Pits, Southwest Arm, about three miles east of Gooseberry Cove and Heart’s Ease Beach. In the fall of 1859, Vardy opened the first government-board school in Random Sound, in a new school-church at Heart’s Ease Beach.
At the end of Vardy’s first year of teaching Inspector Haddon reported “a new station being occupied at Heart’s Ease, where a schoolhouse has been built, and a master engaged.”
The inspector added, “The settlement being yet small and the people in the habit of going into the woods in the winter season, the school can be only a humble one. But, I presume, the master is engaged partly for the purpose of leading religious services on Sunday in a locality that can seldom have the visits of a clergyman.”
In 1861 and 1867 Haddon failed to inspect the Heart’s Ease school at all, at first because it was kept “only during the winter season” and later because it was “too difficult to reach.” In 1868, when Haddon opined that the school at Heart’s Ease was “a very poor affair,” he may have been disappointed at the small number of pupils – fourteen, to be precise. In another report he admitted, as though in concession, that Vardy was “a worthy man, and chiefly valuable as a church agent.”
In November 1871, George Vardy was appointed justice of peace, which most likely significantly increased both his income and his standing in the community. In 1876, the same year that the “subdivision” of the Protestant school system became effective, George Vardy retired as a schoolmaster, while continuing to serve as Anglican lay reader. He had taught for seventeen years, and had also provided his congregation with medical service.
George Vardy died of heart failure at Clay Pits on 18 January 1882 and was buried in a small cemetery near his house. His daughter, Miss Eliza Jane Vardy, became an Anglican schoolmistress in the Southwest Arm later in 1882 and continued to teach until she married in November 1884.
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Note: Greg Morgan wrote a book on his great-great-great grandfather. “First Schoolmaster in Random Sound, George Vardy of the Southwest Arm” published 2025 by George Vardy Books, St. John’s, NL