building was completed and blessed .
With an impressive new building , things began to go better for the Brothers . In 1869 they had 167 free pupils , 25 fee-paying pupils , 23 boarders who paid for their keep and 32 boarders who did not pay anything . The school taught Religious Instruction , Reading , Writing , Arithmetic , Algebra , Astronomy , History of England , Rome and Greece , and Natural Philosophy . Brother Lothaire had to admit , however , that ' exceedingly few of our pupils remain long enough in the school to get properly instructed - generally speaking the parents care very little if they are fit or not , provided they have good penmanship it is all they require to place them in some mercantile house as clerks or apprentices .'
Brother Lothaire presided over SJI until 1871 . Three years earlier , Father Beurel , worn out by his labours and semi-paralysed , had returned to France after thirty years in the East . He died in Paris on 3 October 1872 , and is buried in Montmartre . His affectionate parishioners , it is said , offered to defray the expenses of his burial in Singa pore , in the ehurch that he had raised . This was not to be , and a marble tablet records the achievements of our Founder instead .
The story of education in Malaysia , where the Brothers now have 57 schools , would have been very different if it had not been for the initiative and perseverance of Father Beurel . Shortly after they opened the school in Singapore , the Brothers in France sent men to open schools in Calcutta , Sri Lanka , Burma , Hong Kong and Indo-China . Much of this was due to the influence of Father Beurel . French missionaries stayed at his house on their way to the East , and became fired with his ideas and his zeal .
BrotherSwedbert had been so highly esteemed by the parents and his pupils that they insisted thathe be laid to rest in the Church of the Good Shepherd , under the altar of Stjoseph . A tradition says that such was the competition to carry his coffin to the grave that it almost became a riot . In the melee , a certain Mr Batemanlost his hat , which fell into the grave . We are not told if he retrieved it but , in 1907 , he caused a marble tablet to be put up in memory of the muchloved Brother Swedbert .
Unhappily , the friction between the Mission and the Brothers continued until 1881 , when the Brother Visitor made the Brothers withdraw altogether from Singapore . A letter from their Superior , which would have solved their problems , arrived too late to prevent their departure . They did not return until 1885 . In the interval the school continued under the supervision of a Mr Collinge , who subsequently became Inspector of Schools in Perak .
On the return of the Brothers , the Superior placed at their head as Director the same Brother Lothaire who had come out with Father Beurel in 1852 . He had been away from Singapore forfourteen years and had been successively Director in London , Director in Saigon and Visitor of Vietnam , Master of the Novices in New York , Visitor ofBaltimore and St Louis , Director of Albany , New York , and Director in Liverpool . Now , in the evening of his life , he returned again to SJI . When he passed away in 1897we may say that the first chapter in the story of SJIhad come to an end .
The Founder and the First Brothers 7