“In my beginning is my end,” runs the refrain from a poem of TS Eliot’s, lines with a special poignance to Ho Kok Chee, brother director of St Xavier’s Institution and a Masters in English - a postgraduate qualification he has had to equip himself with, as otherwise his fitness for the headmastership of the school would have been deemed by the authorities as inadequate.

In the event, it enabled him to last 16 years as brother director, the longest tenure of the 28 principals who preceded him since the foundation in 1852 of this flagship school.