Madam, - I hope you may allow me space to correct an omission in your informative obituary on the academic career of "Derry" Jeffares (June 18th). His time at the High School is noted, but there is no mention of his entry to Trinity College Dublin, in October 1939, to read classics, a demanding honours course that he brilliantly completed with a "first" in October 1943.
He then registered for post-graduate work on Sophocles under my supervision. . . I had completed my own course in classics a year previously, but due to the absence of Profs Parke and Wormell on war service, I had at once been recruited as a temporary lecturer, and so, early in the academic year 1943/44, I found myself appointed to supervise Derry's Ph.D work.
I was the same age as my "student", and far from adequately equipped to act as his mentor, and it was a relief to both of us when after a year or so he decided to switch from Sophocles to Yeats.
Thus good came out of my inexperience, and I may claim to have had a significant, if somewhat negative, influence on the early development of his brilliant career in English literature.
If, as your obituarist has it, he was regarded as a "young Oxonian pom" in Australia, let us also remember that he was first and foremost a Dubliner and a "Trinity man", and that he held an honorary fellowship of the college. - Yours, etc,
Prof J.V. LUCE, Bushy Park Road, Dublin 6.