From American war widow to Rose of Tralee's first lady president - Historian Ryle Dwyer remembers his mother

Historian and ‘Irish Examiner’ contributor T Ryle Dwyer fondly remembers his mother Margaret, who had a long and eventful life

ALTHOUGH born and reared in the United States, Margaret Dwyer settled in Ireland with her two young sons in 1948. She felt Tralee would be an ideal place to raise the two boys on her own, especially as her American war widow’s pension amounted to three times the Irish average industrial wage at the time.

It is common now for people to migrate here from other countries, but in 1948 nearly all the migration was in the other direction. Thus she became a phenomenon and, as such, was introduced to Éamon de Valera and Seán Lemass.

As a youngster I noticed at the end of any war movie, as the men would be coming home, my mother would inevitably have tears in her eyes. It is always disconcerting for a child to see a parent crying, so my brother and I learned not talk about the war, or ask about our father. Hence it was not until much later that I learned much about him.

In January 1996 while covering the opening of the State Papers for the Irish Examiner, I wrote about the disastrous Allied raid on Dieppe in August 1942. It involved some 6,000 Allied troops — 5,000 of whom were Canadians. The German Legation in Dublin had warned Germany that troops were massing on the east coast of England for a landing on the continent, but the British were reading the German reports from Dublin.

A passport photograph from 1948 of Margaret Dwyer with her sons, 4 year old Ryle (left) and 3 year old Sean.

“The Allies sacrificed the men at Dieppe in order to protect the greatest secret of the war — the fact that they had broken most of the German codes,” I concluded.

“If the landing had been called off, the Germans might have become suspicious about the security of their messages.”

I found my mother crying over what I had written. I knew she had been an overseas telephone operator in New York, and she told me that she had put up calls to Ottawa from distraught Canadian forces in Britain about their men being slaughtered at Dieppe. She thought at the time this was part of a massive Allied invasion of Europe — in effect, what would become D-Day almost two years later. She thought it had gone horribly wrong, but she could tell nobody.

For days she was upset at the news, and my grandmother kept asking her what was wrong, but she would not say. My grandmother possibly thought it had something to do with the fact that my mother was engaged to marry my father on the other side of the country the following month.

My mother told me that she had never talked to anyone about the calls to Ottawa until that night more than 53 years later. She also told me that she had talked to US president Franklin D Roosevelt and UK prime minister Winston Churchill in setting up telephone calls that she had to monitor.

The Germans could have been listening in too, so the two leaders were very circumspect in their conversation. The operator, my mother, had to listen in to give the caller time credit for anything that had to be repeated due to atmospheric conditions.

My parents got married in Seattle, Washington, on September 21, 1942. It was a tiny wedding consisting of just five people in total, — the bride and groom, two of my father’s fellow officers as witnesses, and the Catholic chaplain, who performed the ceremony in the large Seattle cathedral.

Margaret and her husband, First Lieutenant John G Dwyer, on their wedding day.

Afterwards they spent the wedding night in the Olympic Hotel, where Bob Hope and Frances Langford were staying before setting off next day for Alaska at part of a United Services Organisation tour of military bases. As my parents were going up to their room, they shared an elevator with Hope and Langford.

Langford’s signature song was her great hit ‘I’m in the Mood for Love’. In his memoirs, Bob Hope noted that the biggest laugh he ever heard was at one of their military concerts when Langford began signing, “I’m in the mood for love...”

A soldier in the audience jumped up and shouted, “You’ve come to the right place, honey!”

One can imagine the banter with Hope and Langford on the elevator, but all my mother would say was that Bob Hope was very funny in the lift.

Most of what I learned about my parents’ relationship was as a result of writing my book, Across the Waves, which relied heavily on their wartime correspondence. The first letter that my father received from my mother while he was at the front in France in 1944 informed him that she was pregnant again. He wrote back to her on the back of her letter and followed this practice with all of her letters.

“I am writing this on your letters so that we can save them for Ryle to know what we were doing and thinking during these unusual days,” he wrote. “I think some of them will give him something to think about — don’t you?”

He had fought across France and invaded Germany in November 1944 with the 90th Division of the US Army, but it was withdrawn to Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. On January 30, 1945, he wrote his last letter from Luxembourg, mentioning that they were about to go back into Germany.

“We are almost ready now to finish up this war,” he concluded before signing off. Next day his regiment crossed the Our river into Germany, where he was killed within a matter of hours.

While writing Across the Waves I learnt that my mother shared a desk for three of her four years in high school in New York with a girl named Judy Tuvim. They sat two to a desk. My mother graduated at 17 while Judy was three years younger than her, but she was a brilliant student with a photographic memory, the very antithesis of the characters she later portrayed as an actress.

Judy became famous as an actress under the stage name of Judy Holliday. In 1951 she won the Oscar for the Best Actress for her role as Billie Dawn, the dumb blonde bimbo in the movie Born Yesterday. She also won a Tony award for a similar role on stage as Ella Peterson in the Broadway hit musical Bells are Ringing in 1957. Her brilliant career was tragically cut short when she died of cancer in 1965.

As my brother and I went into secondary school my mother became very involved in the Rose of Tralee Festival and the promotion of tourism in Tralee. She became the festival’s first lady president and interacted with Jack Lynch, Liam Cosgrave, Garret FitzGerald, Charles Haughey, and Albert Reynolds.

Margaret Dwyer stands by with Brendan O’Reilly and the 1971 Rose of Tralee, Linda McCravy from Miami. Picture: Dominick Walsh

Margaret Dwyer obviously made a big impression, because some businessmen headhunted her to work as catering manager on the set of Playboy of Western World in Inch, and later as sales manager of the Mount Brandon Hotel, Tralee. She had no experience for either job but they had confidence in her.

She never seemed overawed by anybody.

In August 1974 while leaving a cemetery in Skibbereen with two fellow directors of the Cork-Kerry Tourism company Ivernia, she stopped to speak to somebody.

Her colleagues Florence O’Connor and Arthur J O’Leary walked on a short distance. O’Connor later told me that they both asked each other if she really realised to whom she was speaking.

“Oh, thanks be to God, you walked on,” she said on rejoining them. “I couldn’t introduce you. I know him well, but I can’t remember his name.”

“Jack Lynch, taoiseach,” they told her with a laugh.

He was actually leader of the opposition at the time, but she had met him on several of occasions as taoiseach. She would always have said that was really a testament to Lynch’s famed common touch.