Walter Henry Bromley was British officer and reformer who created the Royal Acadian School over the thirteen years he lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia (1813-1825). His school offered schooling for middle-income children as well as low-income girls, black children, immigrant children. The school included Protestants and Catholics. The school was controversial, however, some of its biggest supporters came from the Nova Scotia elite.
Bromley also devoted himself to the service of the Mi’kmaq people. The Mi'kmaq were among poor of Halifax and in the rural communities. According to historian Judith Finguard, his contribution to give public exposure to the plight of the Mi’kmaq “particularly contributes to his historical significance.” Finguard writes:
Bromley’s attitudes towards the Indians were singularly enlightened for his day…. Bromley totally dismissed the idea that native people were naturally inferior and set out to encourage their material improvement through settlement and agriculture, their talents through education, and their pride through his own study of their languages.Bromley’s school made a “seminal contribution” to the development of the education movement in Nova Scotia. Well after Bromley’s departure from Nova Scotia (1825), the school continued to play a central role in the campaign for free education. It become a girls’ school by the 1870s.