It was soon on its way. In 1905, Tree found 62 Gower Street, a four-storey house which could take the students cluttering his theatre and with a bit of ingenuity give them a tiny stage in its drawing room. By the end of that year, his peers were so convinced of the ADA's value that they formed a group to share the responsibility.

That first nine-man Council was chaired by Sir Squire Bancroft, so successful an actor-manager that he had retired aged 44, 20 years earlier. It included Tree, fellow actor-managers George Alexander, Johnston Forbes-Robertson, John Hare and dramatists Arthur Pinero and J.M. Barrie, a formidable professional gathering.


Tree had three longer-term aims: that the Academy of Dramatic Art be self-supporting but not profit-making, with scholarships for those who could not afford the fees; that it should not be exclusively identified with his own theatre but soon have its own premises; and that it should then seek a Royal Charter and become a public institution.

Already, as the new Council took over in 1906, he was two-thirds there. The ADA was self-supporting, offering its best students scholarships and prizes to cover or defray their fees; and Council's top managers were keen to offer them jobs. The entry qualifications, it had to be said, were not rigorous.


Young men, in short supply, were eagerly welcomed and some girls were as young as eight. Yet among the juveniles was Athene Seyler, who, like other graduates in the first decade - Robert Atkins, Miles Malleson, Fabia Drake, Cedric Hardwicke, Gladys Young - would be a famous name half a century later.


Certainly, the growing reputation of the Academy and the good housekeeping of its new Administrator from 1909, Kenneth Barnes, gave the Council confidence to link to No 62 the house next door, then add a purpose-built theatre behind them on Malet Street - only for the outbreak of war in 1914 to put the theatre on hold and nearly kill the Academy itself, as a slump in student numbers sapped its income.


With Kenneth Barnes away in the army, it was left to his sister, Irene Vanbrugh, a major stage star and the first woman member of the Council, to keep the place afloat, by organising a movie version of a popular stage play, Masks and Faces, persuading an all-star cast to donate their services.


In return, the production company donated a life-saving £2000 to the Academy. So as the war ended, the theatre was completed, to be opened by the Prince of Wales in 1921. And in 1920 the third plank in Tree's manifesto had been largely achieved, as King George V signed the royal charter creating the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.


This, among other things, formalised the position of the Associates of RADA, established in 1908 as Council sought to bring other eminent people of the theatre and elsewhere into an advisory support group, now with up to 300 members, many of them RADA graduates, with a voice also in nominating Council members. It would, nevertheless, be many years before the Academy became formally a public institution.

Council spent most of the 1920s fighting through the courts and Parliament for the substantial tax breaks accorded the academies of music and painting, for the Gower Street houses needed major refurbishment. Those battles were won, the decade's fund-raising succeeded, and in 1931 HRH The Duchess of York - soon to be Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, and a life-long patron of the Academy - opened the rebuilt RADA, including a second, smaller theatre in the basement, on Gower Street. Meantime, the true work had not ceased.


In the 1920s and '30s, RADA's graduates included John Gielgud, Flora Robson and Rachel Kempson. The list of Gold Medallists alone includes Charles Laughton, Mervyn Johns, Patricia Hayes and Hugh Griffith.


In 1938 Kenneth Barnes, by now titled Principal, was knighted for his leadership of the Academy, which would continue to his retirement in 1955, after 46 years. But even Barnes' spirit almost broke when, in April 1941, all the problems brought by another war (the basement theatre served as an air-raid shelter) were compounded by a bomb which totally demolished the main Malet Street theatre for which he had worked.


But staff and students - including the 17-year-old Richard Attenborough - toiled to clear the rubble. Term started just one week late. So, the war over, it was back to fund-raising schemes, including a RADA Ball, all-star matinees and prominent royal support. But in the post-war period not only were there many demands on potential funders but building materials were in short supply.


It was 1954, the year of RADA's golden jubilee, before the Queen Mother opened the new Vanbrugh Theatre, naming it after Sir Kenneth's star sisters, Irene and Violet, both longtime supporters and sometime teachers.


The post-war period saw a shift in the social make-up of the student body. The idea that it had been a 'finishing school' for well-off young ladies always was something of a caricature, as the early students themselves testified. Now, grants for ex-servicemen, then for students, saw the likes of Peter Sallis, Albert Finney, Tom Courenay, Glenda Jackson, John Thaw, graduate from RADA.


But the biggest change came in 1956, with the appointment of John Fernald to succeed Barnes. An established theatre director, he convinced Council to limit numbers and go for quality in both students and their training, in effect modelling each year's intake as a theatre company, a policy aided by the munificent bequest by George Bernard Shaw, who joined Council in 1912, of royalties from his estate - which now included the vastly successful My Fair Lady. That policy has been continued under successive Principals: Hugh Cruttwell (1966), Oliver Neville (1984) and Nicholas Barter (1993).


The continuing success of its graduates testifies to the Academy's effec-tiveness, but its history continued to be turbulent. Gower Street's post-war fabric was fast wearing out.


Changes in education funding in the '80s saw grants for acting students melt away again. By the early '90s, RADA was fighting to maintain its proud aim that any student winning a place through its now rigorous audition process would be found the funds to take it up.


It was also urgently looking for a new home - and the money to provide that too. It was the launch of the National Lottery that offered an unforeseen solution to what was now a building crisis. Its planning process already well advanced, RADA made an early application to the Arts Council Lottery Board and won the grant which underpinned the rebuilt Gower Street home opened by HM The Queen in November 2000.


In 2001, the government established the Conservatoire for Dance and Drama, through which students at RADA and other affiliates are funded on a similar basis to those at universities. In the twenty-first century, that leaves neither the institution nor its students free from financial concerns, but the founding fathers' quest for talent lives on.


This 'Brief History' is written by Peter Fiddick, whose definintive history of RADA's first century is published by Oberon Books.