Obituary: Professor Sir Harold Bailey

I think the origin of that Cossack-like costume of Professor Sir Harold Bailey's was slightly more romantic than described by Alan Rush [obituary, 12 January], writes Professor Jake M. Hancock.

Bailey had long had a special interest in the Ossetic languages, possibly because of their similarity to some Persian languages. During the Second World War there was a prisoner who had deserted from the Red Army to the Germans and had then been captured by the British, and it was thought that he might be able to give useful information if only somebody could understand him. That somebody was Bailey, because the prisoner came from one of the Osset republics.

When Bailey attended the celebrations of Rustaveli ("Georgian was one of my hobbies when I was a youngster"), he took the opportunity to visit Ossetia. There was no university there but he introduced himself to the principal of the local equivalent of a Hochschule. They accepted his offer to lecture on a Western view of Osset literature, delivered in the local variety of Osset.

His astonished audience, for it must have been like a Japanese lecturing on Welsh literature in Welsh, arranged for this local costume to be made for him. When the Fellows of Queens' College commissioned a portrait of him, it was Bailey's own request that he be portrayed wearing his Osset costume.