Quentin de la Bédoyère, 1934-2023

Quentin de la Bédoyère died on 1 August, at the age of 88. A former Catholic Herald columnist, he used to relate how, when he was a teenaged second lieutenant on national service in Austria in the early 1950s, illiterate servicemen in his transport regiment would ask him to read out their letters from home. Meanwhile, his own post arrived from his mother, Catherine, and from his father, Michael – who was then editor – written from the Herald’s offices on Whitefriars Street, with Blitz-flattened buildings all around as Britian continued to recover from the Second World War.