On August ist, 1855, when the riots which had greeted the restoration of the Hierarchy in England were still a lively memory, a middle-class boarding school for boys Was opened at Netherton House, Clapham. The needs of its four Pupils were catered for by a Community of nine Religious, three of whom were already teaching in the primary school attached to the Redemptorist church. All nine of them were French, Brothers of the Christian Schools, an Institute founded by St John Baptist de La Salle in the seventeenth century and now making its first English foundation. The renting of the house on Lady Day seemed to augur well for the future of this initiative in the land that had once been Mary's Dowry. And so it proved. In May this year, 1955, some 250 Brothers and nearly 7,000 Pupils in thirty-one educational establishments in England and scotland, not to mention innumerable past pupils, relations and friends will be celebrating the centenary of that event.