Fundraising to save the school dominates the year 1890, and later years as well. Sometimes there are concerts at school, sometimes balls at the Wanderers. The Anglican community is very supportive.

Miss Holmes-Orr hopes President Kruger’s government will help financially, and she makes a trip to Pretoria in the hope of meeting Kruger himself. The Boers are conservative and deeply religious and dislike the uitlanders and all they seem to stand for – brash materialism and loose living. There is no help forthcoming for the children of the British from the volksraad (parliament), and Miss Holmes-Orr and interested parties face years of financial struggle. Fundraising, a matter of survival at that time, is to become embedded in the psyche of the school.