On his return trip to London from Lisbon, the plane on which he was travelling, BOAC Flight 777, was shot down over the Bay of Biscay. Among the four crew and thirteen passengers who died was the prominent Anglo-German and Jewish activist Wilfrid Israel, Francis German Cowlrick, and Gordon Thomas MacLean, who had lunched together at the British Institute in Madrid. On any one evening, Starkie could count on finding in the Institute at Calle Almagro 5, a great novelist such as Pío Baroja, a rising star like Camilo José Cela (Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1989), the essayist Azorín, composers like Joaquín Rodrigo and painters such as Ignacio Zuloaga. He left behind him a thriving Institute. During the war he also helped organise and operate an escape route across the Pyrenees for British airmen shot down over France. Walter and Augusta Starkie also allowed their large flat at number 24 Calle del Prado to be used as a safe house for escaping prisoners of war and Jewish refugees. From 1947 to 1956, Starkie was professor of comparative literature at the Complutense University of Madrid. In 1954, he was elected an honorary fellow of Trinity College, Dublin. After he retired from the British Institute, he accepted a university position in the United States. It was his third American tour, taking him to the University of Texas, Austin (1957–58), New York University (1959), the University of Kansas (1960), Colorado University (1961), and finally to the University of California, Los Angeles (1961–70) where as Professor-in-Residence he was assigned to lecture in six Departments (English, Folklore-Mythology, Italian, Music, Spanish-Portuguese, and Theatre). After his retirement from U.C.L.A., Starkie returned with his wife, Italia Augusta, to live in Madrid. After suffering from a severe cardiac asthma attack he died there on 2 November 1976. Italia followed him six months later on 10 May 1977. They are buried in the British Cemetery in Madrid. Writings He won fame for his travels and was profiled by Time Magazine as a modern-day 'gypsy'. He published accounts of his experiences as a university vacation vagabond following the trail of the Gypsies in Raggle Taggle, subtitled "Adventures with a fiddle in Hungary and Roumania" and sequels, Spanish Raggle Taggle and Don Gypsy which are picaresque accounts in the tradition of George Borrow, with frontispieces by Arthur Rackham. His observations of Gypsy life, while more anecdotal than scholarly, provide