Connolly arrived in Penang after having travelled overland from their native country in caravans. Mother Mathilde Raclot, leader of this group, was to become a key personality in the early history of the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus on Victoria Street. On 2 February 1854, the Sisters sailed to Singapore from Penang on a mission to build a school for girls. On 5 February 1854, they reached the island's shores and took up residence at the Caldwell House. The nuns began taking in pupils only ten days after moving in, establishing the first CHIJ school in Singapore. Reverend Mother Mathilde staffed her school with sisters from the parent Society, the Institute of the Charitable Schools of the Holy Infant Jesus of Saint Maur. She dedicated 20 years of her life turning the convent into a school, a house at the corner of the Stamford Road and North Bridge Road was acquired in 1855 to serve as an orphanage and refuge known as Home for Abandoned Babies for local girls and women and sometimes boys. Two classes were conducted, one for fee-paying students and another for orphans and the poor. Slowly, the nuns managed to restore the house into a simple but austere residence. Father Beurel had since acquired all the nine lots of land between Victoria Street and North Bridge Road, originally belonging to the Raffles Institution, that would constitute the entire convent complex. He presented them all to Reverend Mother Mathilde. The first chapel of the Convent, which was built in 1855, was in such a bad condition that it was necessary to build a new one. At the end of the 19th century, the Sisters started fund-raising by various means for the new chapel. The old one was becoming so dangerous that the Sisters decided to celebrate mass in Caldwell House. Father Charles Benedict Nain, a priest at Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, was engaged as an architect for the construction of the chapel at the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus and, on behalf of the Roman Catholic community, was in charge at the same time of the construction of the extension of the Saint Joseph Institution. The construction of the chapel started in 1901 with the architectural firm Swan & Maclaren oversaw its constructions and it was completed by 1903. Father Nain was highly involved in the worksite. He was the author of