The history of St Michael’s finds its roots in France: Mont St Michel and Château-Gontier. Two new pages have been added to cover this aspect of St Michael’s history:
The 1965 magazine, in the Headmaster’s report, states the following about the early years:
We are 60 years old this month. How different were the origins of St. Michael’s College from those of other great grammar schools founded about the same time as a result of the 1902 Education Act. In that year religious orders were expelled from France and all their property confiscated by an anticlerical government. All but penniless, the Edmundian Fathers accepted the invitation of Cardinal Vaughan to start a mission at Hitchin where there was only a handful of Catholics. In 1902 they opened a little tin hut as a church. It eventually became a sacristy and has now disappeared. In 1904 they opened a school under the title of St. Michael’s College in continuity with the educational work they had once carried out at Mont St. Michel off the coast of Brittany and at Pontigny in the North of France. These continental predecessors of the College are commemorated in the heraldry of the rather elaborate school badge and motto, which boys will, I am sure, gladly explain to their parents if asked to do so. However, in these early days, Catholics were not made welcome in North Hertfordshire, and the College did not prosper. It became bankrupt in 1925, and the magnificent theological library which the Edmundian Fathers had salvaged from the wreckage of their schools in France was sold to pay the grocers’ bills. Rome intervened, and the Assumptionist Fathers who, in similar plight, had established themselves in the East End of London were asked to take over the College and its debts. Slowly but surely the College prospered, first as a boarding school and now as a day school, which not only maintains the great and proud traditions of Catholic education but is also a centre of much other quiet apostolic activity in the neighbourhood. The future seems very bright, and I am sure that in the year 2004 our successors at St. Michael’s College will echo the gratitude that we today feel; gratitude, in the first place, to several generations of Edmundian and Assumptionist priests, French as well as English, gratitude also to God, whose Providence has, as always, drawn good from evil and made persecution the seed bed of yet greater achievements in the spread of His kingdom on earth.
St Michael's College, Hitchin 