Letter from Patrick J. Walshe to John A. Costello (Dublin)

I wish to thank you and your family very much for your kind expression of sympathy on Joe’s death. I know how kind you all were to him over many years. He undertook a very long drive by car from Pretoria to Durban (from a height of 6000 feet to zero), in one day and he said the result might not have been so bad if he had rested in Durban for the two days before the departure of the boat for Cairo. He had an unpleasant trip of 15 days to Cairo, and a bad week in the Hotel Continental getting rid of the effects of sleeping injections given him on the boat. The Secretary to the Nunciature then got him into a pleasant Villa (Pension) at Helan outside Cairo from where he wrote me on the 28th Jany. He would appear to have got a collapse in the next few days and was taken to the Anglo-American Hospital where he must have died in a day or two.

I find it difficult to thank you sufficiently for the beautiful tribute which you paid to Joe in your kind letter.