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A BBC Gaeilge film recounts the tale of NI doctor who made a promise to his fiancée that he would return home from the Second World War

Frank as portrayed in Litir Ghrá ón Dara Cogadh Domhanda

Dramatisation of Eileen and Frank's story

The real Dr Frank Murray

It’s the stuff of film-making. A love story between a doctor and geography teacher that withstood thousands of miles, war, and a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.

L itir Ghrá ón Dara Cogadh Domhanda will screen tomorrow evening on BBC Two Northern Ireland. It charts the relationship between Dr Frank Murray and his fiancée Eileen O’Keen who first met in the Donegal Gaeltacht in 1929.

Though Frank was under no doubt that Eileen was the woman for him, the couple went their separate ways after university.

When war broke out, Frank, who had been working as a doctor in Birmingham, joined the British Army as a medic. He ended up in Singapore as Eileen worked in Loreto Grammar School in Omagh.

Never forgetting her, Frank sent the love of his life a Christmas card in 1940.

It led to a rekindling of their relationship via letters and for the next five years, the couple’s romance was to go the distance.

Make no mistake: this is a story that, as their son Carl says, needs to be told. As Eileen worked in Northern Ireland, Frank would become Commanding Officer in a prisoner-of-war camp in northern Japan after the capture of Singapore.

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At the end of the war, it would be to Dr Murray that the local Japanese soldiers would surrender. He returned home to a fiancée, someone who he’d loved for a lifetime and whom he hadn’t seen since 1937.

Their story is told through dramatisations based on these letters, with contributions from Eileen and Frank’s children, historians, psychologists and military experts.

“We’re really happy with it and it does real justice to Mum and Dad’s story,” says Carl, explaining the family used to holiday in Donegal during his childhood.

“When we went to Rannafast which is where they met, there’d be some mention of it then,” says Carl of his parents’ romance across the miles.

“But I only really knew about it in detail when I recorded an interview with my parents back in the late 80s, early 90s.

“Dad remembers how he asked Mum to dance, Mum remembers what she was wearing. To them that was obviously something very, very special.”

Their faith in each other during wartime is evident throughout the documentary.

“I think Mum had other boyfriends or men who were interested in between breaking things off with Dad,” explains Carl.

“But she’d come to realise that Dad was certainly the man for her. The onset of war and the circumstances made her realise even more, and they re-established contact.

“It was Dad who made the first move just by sending a Christmas card and just signed it Frank. It was the fact that Mum responded so positively, Dad was just over the moon.

“Dad was so besotted with her. There’s a story of him going down with his best friend in Castlewellan to attend a party that Mum was going to be at. Of course, they didn’t have a place to stay so they slept in a haystack.”

In older life, the couple would move to a bungalow beside a golf course, one of Eileen’s favourite pastimes.

“To live in a bungalow right next to the golf club… they even allowed Mum to have steps going directly to the golf course,” says Carl.

“The fact that Dad could do something for Mum and help look after her.

“He could see her coming up the 18th [hole], he’d put the tea on, get everything ready for it.”

Some of Frank’s letters reveal the reality of life in a prisoner-of-war camp but as modest was Frank about his generous and caring nature, so too was he restrained in taking about what he had witnessed.

“Occasionally, and my siblings remember this too, in Donegal, he could relax a bit because he worked so hard and hardly had any time off,” says Carl.

“You’d get a few hints of stories but nothing like the horror of what it was really like. The only obvious evidence you could see on him was he had a frostbitten thumb. He’d tell you he got that in the prison camp because the winters were so hard in northern Japan.”

Carl recounts his father being in hospital and the effect his past continued to have.

“The actual experience of being in a room where all the beds were in a line made him think of the prisoner-of-war camp.

“He actually cut his hand and broke a pane of glass on the hospital door as he, as he saw it, was trying to escape.

“He’d rarely talk about it. He was really modest about his own achievements. Given the person he was, he’d be totally embarrassed by the documentary.”

Equality and fairness are evident in Frank’s personality, someone who honoured the underdog and downtrodden. This is clear not just in his time during the war but afterwards when he delivered medical equality for all patients.

“That’s the sort of person he was,” says Carl.

“No favourites amongst his children. You would have thought given the fact that the three daughters all went into some branch of medicine, you would have thought that was his influence, but no. He was totally, totally fair to everybody.

“If you read the letters especially when he was in Malaya second-in-command of the ambulance unit, and dealing with all the Indian soldiers and all the different religions and things.

“It was always the underdog, that was who he always promoted. If he saw anybody being bullied, he’d step in and stop it. He couldn’t stand that at all.

“As a doctor, he treated everybody the same and gave everything he had to his patients.”

Even when he wrote in his diary as a prisoner of war, he wasn’t going to tell Eileen everything that occurred.

He was also aware of how certain events, though terrible, had an impact on his family’s life.

“I asked Dad, growing up and thinking nuclear weapons are a bad thing, I asked him what’s your view?” says Carl.

“He didn’t lose his temper but he said, you would not be here if it wasn’t for that bomb [Hiroshima atomic bomb, August 1945]. That’s absolutely true, you can’t argue with that.

“It’s Mum’s story as well as Dad’s story. She taught in Omagh and had a very busy job and by all accounts people loved her.

“The pupils all knew about Frank, that he was her fiancé and was captured. Mum would be teaching geography and it’d be Australian geography, and there’s the river complex called the Murray-Darling. Every time she’d mention the Murray-Darling, the girls in the class would start sniggering.”

Litir Ghrá ón Dara Cogadh Domhanda is made for BBC Gaeilge and TG4 by Strident Media with support from Northern Ireland Screen’s Irish Language Broadcast Fund is on BBC Two Northern Ireland on Sunday, October 9 at 10pm

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