Madam, - How delightfully old-fashioned of Foreign Editor Patrick Smyth, to write that Baggotstown's James Bourchier ("Irish champion of Bulgaria", Sofia Letter, May 23rd) "died. . . unmarried" in the manner of obituaries of a gentler, or less intrusive, age.
For Bourchier, according to other reports, made little secret of his homosexuality.
He was also, like Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett, an old boy of Fermanagh's Portora Royal School. As such he has come to the attention of the Ulster History Circle, the independent nine-county body which erects blue plaques to famous men and women who, having had a strong association with the province, have been dead for more than twenty years and have left their mark on history.
Details of those so "plaqued", who include hymn-writer Cecil Frances Alexander, President of Israel Chaim Herzog, atom-splitter and Methodist College old boy Ernest Walton and the Rev John Yeats, rector of Tullylish and father of W.B. and Jack, can be found on our website www.ulsterhistory.co.uk.
The Nobel-prize winning Beckett received his UHC "Blue" on his old school earlier this year, matching the one erected to Oscar on the other end of the façade a few years ago.
With a little more information and urging from your readers, Bourchier, once the London Times's man in the Balkans, might again make his mark on his alma mater in the near future. - Yours, etc,
IAN HILL, Member, Ulster History Circle, Strangford Lower, Co Down.