Such tributes to Fergus Pyle as I have read in newspapers describe his character with an affection that shows how greatly, he will be missed by his colleagues in journalism. Having known him as a friend for a very long time. I offer this addendum to what has already been written in order to counter some unintentionally misleading impressions and to honour his memory.
Firstly, the Dublin Protestant class into which he was born was not a mandarin one, and didn't pretend to be. Fergus's accent, when we met 45 years ago in Trinity, was what it remained all his life: that of a middle class Dublin lad who went to secondary school in Belfast. The likening of Fergus to an amiably eccentric English public school boy is charming but sends out the wrong signals. No Irish schoolboy has ever played a game of footer" or "helped other chaps with their prep". Fergus went to Irish schools and an Irish university. The middleclass parents, both Protestant and Catholic, of some of Fergus's generation, did send their children to English public schools, for various reasons, doubtless including the acquisition of the quaintly distinctive speech and manners of those institutions. The fact that his parents were happy that all their children should be educated in Ireland tells us something about Fergus: he loved Dublin and Belfast and the whole of this country; he grew up at ease with all of it and its people, urban and rural, or whatever social condition. He was in fact, much more thoroughly integrated with the people of Ireland north and south than the bigots who resented his kind could ever be. Speaking bad Irish. wearing tweed knickers, being seen at Mass and shunning "foreign" (i.e., English) games does not give you the exclusive tenure of nationality which those who did such things imagined, and to which, by public posturing, they laid claim.
Secondly, Fergus was a linguist and a cultivated European, who liked to see the world, and was exhilaratingly curious about everything. But Ireland was always his base. When we met up in London, not long after graduating, we were both looking around for work. He got himself a job with Aer Lingus in Regent Street and, later, in New York, but always with the idea that this might lead to one in Dublin. That it did, and in journalism. was perfect for Fergus, who turned out to be a "natural" in his profession. He was also - naturally and unself consciously - an intellectual. Avid for information (as good journalists must be), he was never content just to possess it, but needed to analyse it in older to ponder the complexity behind the mere facts. And he brought to this an acute intelligence and a well stocked, excitable, philosophical and generous mind.
At Trinity, Fergus was a member of the Gaelic Society which some of us, I'm afraid, joined for reasons not always incontrovertibly linked to the cultivation of the first national language: we had fun.
If being nationally unrepresentative is odd, then Trinity was undoubtedly an odd place in the Fifties. But that was hardly Trinity's fault. Throughout those years. Archbishop McQuaid's notorious Lenten pastoral letter, as some of us still ruefully recall. proclaimed that it was a mortal sin for any Catholic to attend the Protestant University of Trinity College". Because of this, fewer than a third of Trinity's students were Catholics, many of them from England. But the proportion of Fergus's friends who were Catholic was much higher. He enjoyed their company and, characteristically, studied them as he did so, and as he studied everything, with keen interest, and a general benevolence which was often delightfully imbued with a mischievous, but always charitable, irony.
In or around 1955, a jazz group, which the less earnest members of the Gaelic Society had started, went to Newman House to play some New Orleans stuff to a packed audience of UCD students. I think it may have been the first time most of them had heard live jazz. Typically, the whole idea was Fergus's. At a time when Trinity and UCD, with, respectively, condescension and envy, hated and feared each other rather more nastily than I am told they do today, Fergus wanted to make friendly contact. He introduced each number with information about where it was first played and how other versions were developed by the improvisations of the great Louisiana musicians. I suspect that Fergus himself may have been engaging in a spot of improvisation for some of this "historical" detail: as he played the tunes on his clarinet, you could still see his huge grin and the twinkle in his eye. He then announced a "short interval", which turned out to be rather a lengthy one, as the band had slipped out to the nearest pub, long since demolished (there's a Parisian bank there now instead) and had to be hauled back after several pints by a patient and courteous student society officer who had effortlessly guessed our whereabouts.
The large room on the first floor of Newman House was in darkness, except for some spotlights on the podium where we had been playing. Still packed. No one had moved. Our post interval music was, I think, lively. A few years later, jazz was being played in dozens of pubs around the city.
With Fergus's death The Irish Times has lost a much loved colleague and a journalist of international distinction. The loss to Mary and family is, of course, incalculable. The bit of background which my long friendship with him has enabled me to supply here will have served its purpose it helps, however modestly, to show that his death is a loss to all of Ireland as well. Though Fergus was unique, the resolution of the political and social conflicts of this island will never prove possible without some measure of his tolerance, benevolence, humanity, civilised perspective, and - just as important - his lovely and irrepressible joie de vivre.