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The convent in ‘Black Town’
Reader Mrs. C. Simon writes that the first school founded by the Presentation Order (Miscellany, April 7) was in George Town and not in Vepery. It is today called St. Columban’s.
As I understand the record, when Mother Xavier Curran of Rahan Presentation Convent, Ireland, and three sisters from Maynooth, Ireland, arrived in Madras in 1842 it was as volunteers to serve the orphan children of Irish soldiers. On arrival, Archbishop Dr. Fennelly handed over to them the Catholic wards of an orphanage that had been in Fort St George and a school founded for Catholic children by the widow of an English officer, a Mrs. Smith. To these were added an ‘Indian school’ and a ‘pay school’. And IF these two date from the 1840s, it was indeed from these beginnings in ‘Black Town’ that Presentation grew, getting its main building in 1899 and even a Junior College till 1908. In 1912, the Convent became St. Columban’s.
S. MUTHIAH
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