19143 Bourchier 



an able and scholarly authority on the Near East, 

 conversant with all the Slavic languages and for 

 twenty-seven years Balkan correspondent of the 

 London Times. Unfortunately, in the crises of 19 12 

 and 1914 Sir Edward Grey made no use of the 

 knowledge possessed by Bourchier, Brailsford, and Pro-pkets 

 Buxton, thoroughly familiar though they were with «°^"'*^^- 

 the situation in the Balkans. Indeed, every British 

 diplomatic move concerning that region from the 

 London Conference down to the present seems to have 

 been made blindly, with no thought that the Balkan 

 peoples had feelings or opinions to be considered. 



In 1916, when Bulgaria drifted into the war on 

 the side of Germany and Austria, Bourchier went 

 back to London broken-hearted.^ Returning to Sofia 

 after the Armistice, he died there on the last day of 

 1920. Says Will S. Monroe, Stanford '94, Peace 

 Inquiry Commissioner in the Balkans: 



In his death Europe is the poorer for the loss of one of the men 

 best informed on the complex problems that go to make up the 

 Balkan tangle. Mr. Bourchier was more than a great newspaper 

 correspondent. He was a profound student of all human 

 problems. . . in a very real sense our unofficial Balkan diplomat. 



While In Sofia we spent an afternoon at the national The Bui- 

 parliament, composed about evenly of Royalists on ^^^^^^, 

 the one hand and Socialists and Democrats on the mem 

 other. The majority for king and government, ten 

 or a dozen in all, consisted entirely of Turkish 

 delegates from Thrace. ^ These sat on the extreme 



1 So, at least, I was told. In 1921 the grateful Bulgarian people placed 

 Bourchier's portrait on a postage stamp — the first time in history that a 

 foreign journalist has been thus honored. 



^ Instead of expelling aliens from their borders, after the example of the other 

 Balkan states, the Bulgarians had allowed Turks and Greeks to remain, giving 

 them equal rights and privileges with themselves. 



C 575 3 



