Madam, - I have noted the correspondence in recent days concerning the much loved Percy French, and agree that his memory should be acknowledged in much more fitting style.
I am sure that his songs were a great inspiration and reminder of home to many Irish living abroad in years past, and I can vouch for this with a very personal recollection.
In mid-1960, I was living and working in Labuan, North Borneo, now part of Malaysia, and one evening after a rather late party, another Irish friend, from Larne in Co Antrim, suggested that I stop at his house on the way home for a final nightcap. Having dropped my wife home, as she was in the late stages of pregnancy with our second child, I joined my Irish friend whose house was very close to ours. Having furnished me with a large cold beer, he told me that having just recently returned from leave in Ireland and UK, he had a record he wanted me to hear, and produced the LP of Brendan O'Dowda singing "Songs of Percy French".
We listened avidly to the songs, and I was transported back to my home in Ireland. As I had been away for almost three years at that stage, I was totally overcome with homesickness and nostalgia, and I am quite unashamed to admit that the tears flowed freely down the cheeks of both of us.
A few months later, on leave in Dublin, I bought the record myself, and for the remaining five or six years I spent in Malaysia, I played it often and found great solace in doing so.
It is difficult to describe the feelings which the songs evoked and which were so beautifully rendered by Brendan O'Dowda, whom we had the great pleasure of seeing in the flesh singing them again in the Olympia Theatre, some years later.
I am sure I am not alone with memories such as these, and feel that a more appropriate and lasting memorial to Percy French is long overdue.
- Yours, etc,
TERRY STEWART, Marina Village, Arklow, Co Wicklow.