By FRANK McDONALD [The Irish Times] – Bourchier was no ordinary journalist, but a champion of Bulgaria’s cause even after it sided with Germany in the first World War. He was a confidant of King Boris III and the country’s unofficial representative at the peace conference in Paris; it was Boris who consented to the old Portora boy’s wish to be buried at the ancient Rila monastery.
Interestingly, he had been a contemporary of Oscar Wilde at Portora Royal School, near Enniskillen, between 1865 and 1870. Afterwards, Bourchier went to Trinity College Dublin, where he won a gold medal in classics, and this led him to King’s College, Cambridge, where he again excelled in Latin and Greek, winning seventh place in his class.
For 10 years, he taught at Eton where he felt fettered and trammelled by the conventions, according to his biographer. He was also hard of hearing, which made the job more difficult. Writing for periodicals offered relief from school life and gave Bourchier a taste for journalism. But it was a chance meeting in Vienna that sealed his future career.
As my former colleague Michael Foley has written, Bourchier ran into another old Etonian, the Times correspondent in Vienna, who later asked if he was free to cover a peasant uprising in Romania, and then go to Bulgaria which was in a state of turmoil following a war, a coup by military officers, and the forced abdication of Prince Alexander.
Continued at The Irish Times | More Chronicle & Notices.
