Anyone lucky enough to have had an encounter with Dervla Murphy will not have forgotten it in a hurry. She was just as fearless and outspoken as she was portrayed in your obituary (26 May). One of her books that it didn’t mention was Tales from Two Cities: Travel of Another Sort, in which she immersed herself in the Asian community of Manningham in Bradford and the Caribbean community of Handsworth in Birmingham, in the mid-1980s.
While in Handsworth, she spent some time with the community anti-racist organisation Affor (All Faiths For One Race), for which I worked at the time. She witnessed the Handsworth riots (or uprisings, as they were called locally), and was pursued by the media when they discovered she was on the spot. Her idiosyncratic and insightful observations on people and situations in Handsworth were recorded in her book.
Carolyn Sugden
Birmingham
