David Bleakley 1925-2017

Few of my generation and younger will have heard of the one time senior Labour politician in Northern Ireland, David Bleakley, and I would not have heard of him, had I not briefly met him in Belfast, in August 1998.
We were both guests at five day event hosted to celebrate the centenary of the birth of C.S. Lewis, and while I was there to give a talk, based on a short online essay I wrote about Lewis fandom, Bleakley was there as he knew C.S. Lewis back in the 1950s, meeting him in a Cambridge shop, where Lewis introduced himself after hearing Bleakley's Ulster accent. Whereas Lewis, from what I have read of him and from the very few people I met who knew him, could be gregarious, David Bleakley himself struck me as polite, friendly, but somewhat shy. But it was Bleakley's decency that helped try and work for peace in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, and in being well regarded and thought of by his constituents. I am glad I met him, not just because he knew Lewis, and not just because of the good he aimed to do in Northern Ireland, but because he struck me as a decent man.