Amitié Française was founded in September 1976 by the inspiration of Mlle. Catherine Granell, a young French woman working as a language teacher at Burton-on-Trent Technical College.

At the first meeting she set out her ideas and introduced what today would be called the Club's mission statement ‑ "Maintaining an interest in France, its language and its way of life" - (in passing we knew that she was unlikely to make many errors in her English when she opened the meeting saying "Preliminarily, I would like to say………..”).

Meetings were arranged monthly by the Committee, led by Chairman Catherine, and were always vibrantly French in nature and included many different French themes, with emphasis on food and wine, French language evenings, (Tout en Française!), French films, competitions and in the summer months (to the astonishment of onlookers in Stapenhill Gardens) a Boules competition. In the subsequent year this was known as the Barbeque, Beer and Boules evening and then firmly changed to its current title of Bar-b-cue and Boules - "beer" not being suitable for such a high class French institution!

After two years, Catherine returned to Paris to study at the Sorbonne in order to enter into commercial translations of European languages - which she still does with her own company based in Versailles.