He continued to work throughout the diocese, preaching, teaching and leading days of prayer. He was the first person to be buried in the grounds of the new cathedral.Thomas John Hughes, priest: born Johnstown, Co Kilkenny 19 July 1915; ordained priest 1939; Vicar General, Diocese of Clifton 1962-81; Protonotary Apostolic 1973; died Bristol 1 April 1999.. WHEN FRANK Tuohy was born, it was soon discovered that he had a then inoperable heart condition, a hole in the heart, and his father, a doctor of Irish origin, came to the tragic conclusion that it was extremely unlikely that he would survive into his twenties. It was only after the introduction of open-heart surgery, when Tuohy was already in his forties, that a successful operation was performed. Now, instead of living with the fear that each day might be his last, Tuohy suddenly realised that he could look forward to a normal life span.

That for so many years he lived so closely with the idea of imminent death must have accounted, in some part at least, for the stoical fatalism that he brought in equal measure to his writings and his life. Both were not without their fun - he had a ready wit, an acute sense of the ridiculous, and an ability to enjoy himself and give enjoyment to others if they were the right sort of people and he in the right mood - but in both books and life he gave the impression of always being morbidly aware of human mortality. It was the fragility of his health that resulted in his failure, despite success in Moral Sciences and English at King's College, Cambridge, to be accepted into the permanent service of the British Council. Instead, the Council appointed him to a number of academic posts abroad. The second of these, after a brief period in Finland, was a six-year tenure of the Chair of English Literature at Sao Paulo University, Brazil, which provided him with the inspiration for two novels set in a South America of corruption, erratic passions, and political disorder.The first of these novels, The Animal Game (1957) centres on a numbers game in which the numbers have the names of animals. All the characters, Tuohy suggests, have entered a lottery merely by living.

The same theme of life being dominated by capricious chance was to reappear, explicitly or implicitly, in much else that he wrote.After this brilliant debut he produced a successor, The Warm Nights of January (1960), no less remarkable in its ability, in a mere 200 pages, to distil the essence, potent and sometimes even lethal, of life in an environment so different from the cultivated, prosperous, upper middle-class one in which he had been brought up.A posting to Krakow University resulted in The Ice Saints (1964). The year is 1960, and a young English girl arrives in a university town of People's Poland, on a visit to her elder sister, who is married to a Polish professor, also a party member. Inevitably, it is only a matter of time before national conventions and beliefs come into collision with each other, and before the unsophisticated English girl falls in love with a highly sophisticated and, it finally emerges, duplicitous Pole. The only failure of this novel is Tuohy's shirking of any attempt to describe the sexual seduction of the girl by the man. It is about to take place, and then it has taken place; there is nothing in between.As a writer, Tuohy resembled Somerset Maugham in being ill at ease with sex, usually viewing it as something at best ludicrous and at worst nasty. In all other respects this is a masterly novel, at once ferociously funny and compassionately sad in its depiction of the subterfuges and small betrayals by which people struggle to survive in a Communist state.After these three books, which, in the words of C.P. Snow, established Tuohy "in the first flight of English novelists," he produced no more novels.