Br Adulbaud Freytag
20 February: Br Adalbaud Freytag, 1886-1958. Ignace Freytag was born in Saxony, then part of West Prussia, in 1886, the son of the local mayor Jules Freytag and Agnes Sedelmayer. His parents moved to Wartenburg, where some of his brothers were born. In 1898, at the age of 12, he entered the Marist Juniorate and four years later took the habit in Arlon, one of five brothers to do so Adalbertus, Pius, Leo and Louis Venerand being the others.
In the traumatic year 1903 when the Brothers were having so much trouble in France,
Brother Adalbaud, having been posted to Amiens, had to leave France. He was posted to Duncan Terrace in London, and in the next 6 years he also taught at Castlerea in Ireland before returning to London.
For the next quarter of a century he taught in Australasia, first in Sydney,
at St Benedict’s and St Joseph’s, then in the Pacific Islands in SAMOA and at Tuakau, N.Z., where his occupation is described as “malade”. Because of this he was sent to Auckland, where he remained until 1933, when he left for South Africa, where he joined up with the two remaining Frey tags as reported in the Southern Cross of 31.1.1934. Immediately after his arrival he was appointed first principal of St Bernard’s school in Bochabela Location, Bloemfontein. He built up
the numbers from 30 to 150, starting a Std 7 there in 1937, but the venture never really took off and the Holy Family Sisters took it over in 1939.
Brother spent the rest of his life in Durban with a short break in Koch St as “Provincial Secretary” in 1951. He was a very successful teacher and secured many Natal Bursaries for his pupils. Towards the end of the war he was made Principal of St Henry’s, a post he held for two years.A lasting memorial of this is the Adalbaud Hall, named after him the year after his death He had the joy of celebrating his Golden Jubilee in Durban in 1952, but gradually the strain of those years in the Islands, with their different “maladies” caught up with him and he died peacefully in the Durban Sanatorium on the morning of 20th February 1958.