 as well, or that you maybe want to say something and you don't want them to know what it is. Well, something broadly similar happened with a doctor many, many years ago, a doctor from Belfast. This was during World War II. And his name was Dr. Frank Murray, and he became known to many as simply the Belfast Doctor. And he had spent time learning Irish in the Geltacht, here in Donegal, in fact, in Ranafast. And it was there that he also met his future wife, Eileen. And he would later write daily letters to her when he was held at prisoner of war camps. And the letters often detailed the horrors of himself and other prisoners of war were experiencing. And he didn't want his captors to know about this, or they would have at the very least confiscated his letters and maybe a lot worse. So he wrote some passages in Irish. And there's a great website now that all of this is outlined on all about Dr. Frank and about his experiences during the war. And it's called the Belfast Doctor. It's a fantastic website that is actually run by his family. And I'm delighted that one of his family, his son, Carol, joins us now. And we're streaming live as well. Hopefully, Carol can hear me. Carol, are you there? Hello. Can you hear me? Absolutely. Loud and clear. Oh, good. And see you into the bargains. It was great. Now, tell me, let's go back, first of all, to your dad's time in the Irish College in Ranafast. And it was a scholarship from Belfast. Is that right? That's right. He was taught Irish by a wonderful woman called Marie McKeown in Belfast who actually taught us Irish as well, the children. Yeah. And he got a scholarship, I think two years running. He came to Ranafast, we think in 1929. And I think the first dance that night, he saw this woman on the other side of the hall and went over and asked her to dance. Ask Eliga? Yeah. And was totally besotted with her. And she with him and would always arrange to see her every day, wrote her name on the sand on the beach. Just totally in love with her. Okay. She was at Kilkeve and the Nuns there, said she was never the same when she came back. She wasn't the same girl. She was there from Belfast as well to improve her Irish. That's right. So she'd made the journey. Dad was just totally in love with her. And he even wanted to, the mum describes, you know, the railway journey from the letter Kenny to Burtonport Railway getting off at Crawley. She said it was just such a beautiful, beautiful trip. It was such a slow train that you could get off, pick some floors and come back on again. And she remembers going to the station when she left and looking around and she'd see dad just sort of, he was too shy to even sort of talk to her really. But every night at the Keeley they danced together. And she thought maybe this was something. And that was around about the age, they were both around about the age of 16 at the time. Yeah, about 16 or 17. Yeah. Now, you know, that's, I mean, you know, it didn't just sort of progress naturally, I suppose. And they, because they then subsequently met at university. Is that right? That's right. They both were Queens. And dad was essentially, I mean, not as we'd say he was stalking her. When she left Queens, you know, if you know the route, you go down at the city center and you can either go Great Victoria Street to the Dublin Road. And he would see which way she was going. He would go the other way. And then kind of accidentally meet her in the center. So she was, she lived in Springfield Road. He lives in the Cliftonville Road. But he would always arrange to meet. I mean, he was so besotted and he was had all his sports and things that he did. But he failed all his first year exams. He was a medical student, failed every single exam, had to reset them. And all because of his spending his time after her. But he was determined and even even having met her again at university, that wasn't the end of the story because the war got on the way. So let's, I suppose, move your dad's story forward. He did eventually pass his exams and earned his medical degree. And then went off to work at a practice in the UK. That's right. There's no, no jobs to be had in the North. And he, he found through it, through a doctor, an ice doctor from Cookstone, got into a practice in Birmingham. And this was in the Ladywood District of Birmingham, which was a very working class area. And he worked really hard. So this was 1937 after he qualified. So he spent two, two years doing that. He had no transportation, he had a bicycle, used to go out on, you know, due deliveries, you know, delivering babies at night. And the doctor, if doctor had any difficulties, just get Frank to go and deal with the patients. And so this is what he did. But he loved it. He loved the kind of free and easy atmosphere. And he loved working with the poor people as well. Just loved it. It was a nationalist, but that didn't stop him from signing up to defend freedom against the Nazi threat. And that was in, it was near the start of the war, wasn't it? That's right. He had, one of his patients was a refugee from Austria, who was a theologian. And he was actually the sort of religious advisor to Dalthus, who was the Austrian Chancellor, who was subsequently assassinated by Hitler. And he really admired this man and he said, for that man, I would fight all the Nazis in the world. And so when war broke out, he actually tried to volunteer for the regular army. He wanted to do his bit. And they wouldn't have him. And they said, you're a qualified doctor, you should be commissioned into the medical corps. And so that's actually what happened. And in December, 1939, he got a commission and joined the Royal Army Medical Corps. He said later, you know, because obviously his family being very nationalist would say, why are you doing this? And he wrote in his letters, he said, he said, it can do the Catholic cause in the north, no harm for me to do this. And that was exactly what happened. So he got, he was posted to India. This was in January of 1940. And he by no means had he had he given up on your mum because he sent her a Christmas card. Yeah, he sent her a card. And sort of this is December 1940. He sent her a Christmas card from the officer's mess in Royal Pindi. And it just sort of said, you know, the Christmas love Frank, that was it. And then she responded. She's had, you know, had a few romances and things in her time. I think she was realizing there was nobody quite like, like Frank. And there was there was a man who absolutely adored her. And she'd broken things off, you know, in about 1937. They just got a bit too frightened. It was. And so she just grabbed at the chance and she started writing to him. And when I say writing, and they would write about one letter a week or every two weeks, but they would be writing like one or two pages a day. And so they'd be receiving these sort of voluminous letters. He of course, wrote back straight away. And this is how it all started. So we have this incredible record of his experiences in in India and then Malaya. And then her experiences, she was working as a teacher in the school in Oma. And there's a geography teacher and life, what life was like in wartime in Oma. So it's a fascinating to look at this. It's a fascinating insight into life during the war and in both in Oma and also where where your dad was. But also, I suppose it's an indication of how correspondence was done back then. These days, it would be email or text messages. It was also different there. But the fact that they were both good letter writers means that you've got all this correspondence to draw on. Yeah, it's been fascinating because when I started doing this, it probably got in the 80s. And then the internet came along. Every time I would see a name, I would kind of Google it and find out as much as I could about those people. And it's been absolutely fascinating discovering people who were in the camp with my father who worked with him in India or Malaya. It's been absolutely amazing. Well, tell us a little bit about life in the camp because he had a number of transfers after India and was misfortunate enough to be in Singapore when it fell to the Japanese. That was in February of 1942. And that changed everything. Yeah, he sort of had this feeling. He said, I know I'm going to survive this. You know, so there were tens of thousands of prisoners were captured by the Japanese after the surrender. So he was in Changi camp until I think it was May 1943. So over a year. And as a doctor, he'd be attached to various units. So to give you an idea, he was actually going blind because the rice and of course they had rice every day. The rice that the Japanese were feeding the prisoners was polished rice. So the nutrition that was in the husk of the rice had been removed. And so he was actually because of the vitamin deficiency, he was going blind. He had two fountain pens. One he was using to write all his letters. And the other he bartered for a jar of marmite. And then the vitamins in the marmite actually see it as eyesight. And the prisoners used to joke about it because they had shows and things and they had a program. And they had an advert. They said, go and see Dr. Murray. He'd love to see you. It was this sort of joke. Yeah, because he is his religion meant a lot to him. He actually, you know, we go to three masses a day if he could. He helped construct a little church for the Catholic prisoners there, even provided a crucifix on one occasion. And it was his faith. And then obviously his love for for Eileen who was engaged to be married to him by this stage that kept him going. Yeah, because she'd accepted his proposal or they agreed to be married sometime before that. And there would have been letters over and back. But then when he went into the prisoner of war camps that the letters stopped because it just wasn't possible to send letters. But he kept sort of the correspondence going in the form of a diary. That's right. So every single day of his captivity, he wrote even if it was only a couple of lines, he would write in the form of letters. And he said that was part of the reason for doing that was if they were if they were ever discovered because because if the if the Japanese discovered diaries that could be used and possible war crimes trials and so on, they would confiscate them and punish the prisoners. So he writing it as sort of letters. He was hopeful that if it was discovered out there, this is just sort of correspondence. But he did that every day for three and a half years. And he had 200 over 220, I think pages. And he wrote in different paper, whatever he could get his hands on. And he at one stage, he wrote, he said, the war has to end soon because I'm running out of paper. It was that bad. But every single day. And then when he was liberated, he actually sent her everything at once. But on that stage, he'd been transferred to Japan. So he sent all whatever it was 228 to to your mom at the end of the war before he ever got home. That's right. And even then he kept, he kept things secret. He didn't want to disturb her too much about the actual conditions in the camp. And he was, you know, he knew obviously what was going on. But he didn't really want to upset her too much. He was very conscious of that. But in order to let your mother know what was happening and what they knew, because they had a contra brand radio, so they knew things like D-Day and when Hitler was killed or when he died or whatever. So they knew that. But let your mom know that they knew that he had to put some of the passages in Irish. And then he figured that if his captors ever came across them, they, you know, they wouldn't know, they wouldn't understand it. That's right. He used both sort of Gaelic script and then actual translation into Irish. He used both techniques. So the letters themselves weren't in Irish, but any time he was trying to hide something, the chances of any of the Japanese knowing Irish were pretty remote. And so it was essentially a code for the particularly kind of sensitive material revolving about what was going on in the war, because the Japanese just assumed the prisoners didn't know. And we're talking about sort of from 1944 onwards. And whereabouts was he held in captivity? Well, he was transported to Japan in May 1943, and was in the northern island of Hokkaido, which is very cold and winter. And in fact, apart from the sort of mental scars, the only physical scar he had was his thumb, the frostbitten thumb. And as children, we looked at it and it was sort of a Nord looking thumb. But that was just because the intense cold in the winter time, it was just intense. And also, of course, he's observing every day the way that the prisoners are treated. And he was not only the medical officer. By that stage, by the end of the war, he was the officer commanding. We're talking about 350 POWs in these camps. And so he was responsible for them. Yeah, and he had a vital role as well, because he could determine whether they were fit enough to go off and do work off a day. And in some cases, would have saved lives by making sure they're an extra day in the sick bay. Absolutely. He incensed at a part of life or death. But he also knew that if he basically kept the prisoners back, the Japanese would punish him, would punish what medical facilities they had, which was almost non-existent, and would punish the prisoners as well. So he had to obviously let enough men go out to work and keep enough that the really sick cases behind in the camp, those were difficult decisions. I mean, I should say, everybody knows the story about the railway and the Burma-Siam railway and those prisoners that were worked to death. The work was hard for these POWs in Japan. They were working in a steel mill and foundry and so on in our minds. So the conditions in that sense were better and they didn't have to deal with cholera. But, you know, dad, as a doctor, this was heartbreaking for him to see these POWs that he was responsible for, that he, you know, were denied the basic medical treatments that they needed. At the end, there was in the region of 350 prisoners there. And tell us about what they did for them as a gesture. Was it just before they were liberated or just after? Well, after the actual liberation and the defeat of Japan, it was several weeks before there were the Americans and the Allies transported them out of the Hokkaido camp and then took them to Japan and the Philippines. And one day, he was actually in a different camp and then brought back to the camp he'd been in most of the time and all his POWs. They produced this beautiful sort of like an illuminated scroll and sort of testimonial. And they had the sort of stars and stripes and the Union Jack because there were some Americans in the camp as well on the outside, but then shamrocks all the way around the outside as well. And it was basically their heartfelt thanks to him and his indomitable spirit and how his attitude had kept them alive. And it was basically a thank you to him on their behalf, which he said was, he said it was the proudest day of his life to see that. Now, he didn't, he didn't, am I right in saying didn't talk much about his experiences during the war and in captivity afterwards. So you've learned a lot of this through the correspondence. That's right. I mean, we, we ended up from about the 1950s onwards as a family. We used to go to Danigol and he'd let slip a few things when we were on holiday. It was just like take off the month of July. And occasionally he would give us a little glimpse, but none of the kind of really shocking stuff. He would just tell us a little story here and there. But yeah, it was, it was the letters and it was in the, I think in the 1980s, late 1980s, my parents said to all of us, the five children, you know, we've got, you know, if there's anything in the house that you really want us to give you now, we'd love to do it, you know, just let us know. And my sisters were interested obviously in my mom's jewelry and and I said, I just love to have those letters. I just, I thought they would be fascinating. And dad said, that's fine. And he, I think he was happy that somebody was taking an interest. And so that's where I learned a lot, a lot more than ever before about what they'd gone through, you know, dad's experiences and mom's too. Well, it's great that you did get the letters and that they've been put to such good use and that you're keeping his memory alive. And in the way that you're doing it, because it's a fantastic website. And there's the, you know, letters up there and other details of the war and the camps and a lot of photographs as well. And just to just remind people of the address, the website address. It's called the Belfastdoctor.info. And you can find information there. My brother's written a book about his recollections, his pilgrimage to Singapore and Japan. And there's information about there's a documentary. We came out some TG car and we've seen Northern Ireland, people can still still see some of their players. So lots of information and people can contact me through the website as well. Yeah, all the contact info and links to the videos and programs up there as well as, you know, the photos and the letters and so on. Carol has been fascinating. And just a reminder that it's the Belfastdoctor.info online. Carol, thank you very much for having a chat with us. Good job. Pleasure. Thank you. Around the Northwest with