' Dinner is at half-past four : we have chicken , a little fried pork , a dish of rice and some vegetable ; the dessert as I have already described for the morning . For drink a little wine , measured out in a glass , which in France serves to measure brandy ; of this we normally take two measures each , rarely , rarely , three .
' As for soup we only have this on Sundays . One day I asked Father Beurel why he did not have it every day and he replied that tohave a little piece of meat suitable for making a soup would cost three francs and that with the rest of the seasoning it would be extremely expensive .
' When I asked Father Beurel what we should pay for our food , he told me that we should need at leastten piastres a month for each person , which is the same as fifty-five francs , and that we could not feedourselvesforless . Isaid thatifwe should need as much in our own establishment we could not survive ... Father Beurel told me that we should have to manage as best we could , and that if we wanted more money we should have to arrange it with Monsignor , because all had been arranged with His Eminence .
' We have only 15 piastres per person or 45 altogether ; but we need 30 for food , 9 to pay the cook and 3for the laundry , for each one of us needs one piastre a month if we want to keep clean and not to smell bad , because of the sweat ; it is necessary to change one ' s linen every other day , and we must wash our gowns more often than once a fortnight . For my part I am obliged to change my shirt and handkerchiefs every day . 1 £ I do not change them everything smells bad on account of the continual sweating . Here it is men who do the washing by beating it against a flat stone in exactly the same way as a man beats out the corn with a flailin France . So I can assure you that once a shirt has passed through their hands four or five times one no longer wants to wear it without having it repaired . Ours are already unwearable , or at least some are ...'
After four months the Brothers moved into a house of their own on Mount Sophia . ByMarch 1853 their pupils had increased in number to 145 , and an attap hut had had to be erected to accommodate the overflow from the little chapel .
Meanwhile , Father Beurel continued to collect money for a new school building . By 1855 he was ready to begin .
' On a beautiful evening , at six o ' clock after Vespers , the Corner-stone of the intended school was laid . The Sisters , with all the girls from the convent , were present . In a bottle laid in the foundation stone was the following inscription : - " In the Year of Our Lord , 1855 , on the 19th of March , the Feast of St . Joseph , the Glorious Patron of this mission , and especially of all the undertakings of the Rev . J . M . Beurel , the first stone of this building to be erected for the pious and venerated Brethren of the Christian Schools has been laid ". 2 The school became known from this point as
St Joseph ' s Institution .
Just two weeks later , Brother Swedbert , who had been ailing for some time , passed away . The building came to an end for lack of money . The Bishop became alarmed by the situation and , partly to spare Father Beurel further expense , called for a delay . Difficulties multiplied . After 1854the East India Company stopped paying any grantto Mission Schools . So itwas left very largely to Father Beurel to pay the bills . To survive was difficult enough : a new building would have been impossible . Anyway public interest had declined . It was to be ten years before building began again .
To make matters worse Father Beurel and the Brothers had a big quarrel . The root of the trouble was lack of money . Father Beurel had takenabouttwenty-
2 . In 1985,130 years later , attempts were made to locate this bottle , but it could not befound and excavation was abandoned for fear of affecting the structure . six boarders into his house . Their fees provided a useful additional income and Brother Gregory felt that the Brothers should have the boarders in their own house . Father Beurel countered by saying that the Brother Superior in Paris had not given his authority for the Brothers to take in boarders . Brother Gregory went ahead and had the house on Mount Sophia fitted out to take boarders . Then he told the boarders to leave Father Beurel ' s place and come to his . But he was not such a good housekeeper as Father Beurel and twice the boarders marched out in a body to protest against the bad conditions . In the end they all returned to Father Beurel . The Bishop deplored this division and duly reported it to Paris .
When Brother Gregory became Director in 1862 , on the departure of Brother Liefroy for India , the chances of harmony became even smaller . He ran into debt and sent the bills to Father Beurel who refused to pay as he had not authorised the expenditure . Almost from the outset , Brother Gregory had been threatening to leave , which would have meant the closure of the school . Father Beurel was prepared to go to any lengths to prevent this , but he must have revised his ideas about ' the Guardian Angels of Childhood ' .
When Brother Gregory left for India in 1863 Brother Lothaire came down from Penang to be the new Director . He was a much younger man - he had been only twenty-five when the Brothers arrived in 1852 - and he was a Frenchman . Brother Lothaire resolved to finish the school building . He sold the house on Mount Sophia , started a public appeal and borrowed money from the Convent . The Government of Singapore offered bricks at cost price , but as the Istana was being built at the same time there were none left for SJr . The work began . Brother Lothaire built the central block that we know today - a broad central corridor , with lofty rooms opening off it upon either side . Upstairs the Brothers had their Quarters , and with the permission of the Bishop they were also allowed to accommodate boarding pu pils . In 1867the
6 Memories of5f1