Fighting Proud by Stephen Bourne

Author:Stephen Bourne
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786722157
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

If Hector and John did have a relationship it did not survive John’s postings abroad to Gibraltar in 1942 as a wing commander and to North Africa in 1943 as a group captain. In 1945 John married, but in 1949 at the age of 36 he committed suicide, shooting himself in the head in London’s St James’s Park. Newspapers reported that at the inquest his wife told the coroner her husband was worried that headaches he was suffering following a car accident would cause him to have to give up flying, which he loved. A verdict of ‘Suicide while his balance of mind was disturbed’ was recorded.17 In that same year, 1949, Hector began a long and happy relationship with Captain Derek Peel, a former public schoolboy and Army officer, who had been educated at Wellington College and wounded while serving in the war. They collaborated on a book, Without the City Wall (1952) and lived together in Brighton for the rest of Hector’s life. When Hector died in 1974, the charity organiser Duncan Guthrie wrote to The Times and expanded on the paper’s obituary, in which, he said:

nothing emerges of his personality as a friend, both to young writers and to others less literary. His puckish sense of fun and the warmth of the kindness which he gave to a wide and very catholic collection of friends endeared him as much to those who were his intellectual equals as to those who, for one reason or another, were less fortunate than he had been. In his latter years, and before his final illness robbed him of many of his faculties, he helped to establish a committee for developing and providing writing and reading aids for the physically disabled. Although the protocol of committee work was far from natural to Hector Bolitho he presided over it with an almost impish humour and an immense enthusiasm […] Those who were close to him knew how much work he undertook to help others. Those he helped often did not know, and that was the way he liked it to be.18

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