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Oscar Wilde’s restored honour and Samuel Beckett’s swims

<span>Photograph: Alamy</span>
Photograph: Alamy

Your article (Enniskillen mounts Oscar Wilde tribute with flight of gold-leaf swallows, 15 October) says “for years you could only find his [Oscar Wilde’s] name on the Gold Medal Honours Board in the Great Hall of Portora Royal School”. I was a pupil at Portora in the 1950s, and while it was generally known that Wilde had studied there, his name had been removed from the honours board and it wasn’t on any list of distinguished alumni. I believe that in relatively recent and more enlightened times it has been restored to the honours board. And it is viewed with pride.
MH Delap
Freshford, Somerset

• I cannot think where the idea comes from that Samuel Beckett rowed every morning from Portora Royal School to Devenish island: the round trip would have taken a couple of hours at least and no biography of him mentions that he visited Devenish. However, he did regularly swim across the narrows linking Upper Lough Erne and the Lower Lough, often in the company of his school contemporary, the future General Sir Charles Jones.
CDC Armstrong
Belfast

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