Clodagh Finn: Wartime love story of Tipperary soldier and Harlem nurse

Salaria Kea O’Reilly and with husband Tipperary ambulance driver (and poet) John Patrick O’Reilly. Pictures courtesy of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives

He was an ambulance driver and International Brigades volunteer from Co Tipperary. She was an African-American nurse, discriminated against in her own country but welcomed with open arms at the American hospital in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War.

It was love at first sight, at least for the Thurles man who wooed her with poetry. “I couldn’t take my eyes off her,” he said later. They married in 1937, in the middle of one of the worst conflicts of the last century, and they spent the rest of their lives fighting racism and discrimination.

The enduring love story of John Patrick O’Reilly and Salaria Kea is cinematic gold. It came to mind because the anniversary of O’Reilly’s death in 1986 fell recently (on December 31), but theirs is a timeless story with much resonance for today.

Maybe this will be the year it will be developed into a script. But why wait for the big-screen opening? Take a moment now to sit back and let your imagination transport you to Villa Paz (the House of Peace) where Salaria and other volunteers worked to turn the disused former summer palace of King Alfonso, with its lavish garden and tiled swimming pool, into a field hospital in 1937.

Outside its walls, people lived in dark, cramped makeshift homes, burning cow dung for heat. The smell hung in the air.

Inside, in the improvised hospital, the volunteers had managed to install a gas pump and electrical wiring but, they later said, that was not enough to keep the flies and mosquitos away. Wounded soldiers were often too weak to bat them off. There was little clean water and food was scarce.

Meanwhile, John Patrick O’Reilly had been fighting in the trenches. He was among the first to volunteer, one of some 220 Irishmen to join the Connolly Column, arriving in Spain to fight Franco in 1936. About 700 Irishmen fought with General Eoin O’Duffy’s pro-Franco Brigade, but they returned home after a short and disastrous campaign.

Hard to believe now, but in Ireland Franco had widespread support as religious leaders spoke out against “church burning and priest slaughter”. Tens of thousands of Irish people attended rallies nationwide, organised by the pro-Franco Irish Christian Front protesting against the “red menace” of communism.

In Spain, however, John Patrick O’Reilly was firmly on the side of the Republicans who supported the democratically elected government which had been overthrown in a coup in 1936.

“I thought there was going to be a war and if I was going to be killed anyway, it would be better to be fighting for the poor than for the rich,” he said many years later.

Appeal for soldiers

Born in Thurles in 1908, he moved to his widowed aunt’s farm on the Tipperary/Waterford border at the age of 14. He was due to inherit the farm, but he explained in an 1975 interview that he found rural life stultifying and lonely. He moved to England where he joined the Irish Guards “simply because it was a paying job”.

After three years he left, and spent several years travelling between England and Ireland working as a labourer before reading a small ad in a newspaper appealing for soldiers to fight for the Republican cause.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Salaria Kea had tried to help victims of a flood in the Midwest in 1936. “The Red Cross told me they were accepting no black nurses, that I would be more trouble than I was worth.”

There was no such resistance among the International Brigades. When Salaria sailed for Spain in March 1937, she commented: “It seemed so funny, me being turned down in a democratic country and then allowed to go to a fascist one.”

In the same year, John Patrick, or Pat as he was known, was transferred to hospital service and was instantly taken by a woman who would go on to become head nurse at the Villa Paz field hospital.

Salaria didn’t take much notice of him at first. She thought him shy and business-like and, when he was not on duty, seemed to spend a lot of time on his own writing.

Salaria Kea O’Reilly. Pat cared for Salaria when she got Alzheimer’s disease and died four years before her in 1986.

She recalls: “Ellen, a nurse who was on duty at that time, was curious about what he was writing. Often she would take a look only to see poems — some completed, others just a few lines. To her surprise, all the poems were about me. Ellen and I were very good friends. She would slip me a poem in the morning and scold me for not speaking to Pat.”

At first, the couple agreed to be friends. They were in the middle of a war and Salaria worried about the difficulties that would face a mixed-race couple. Love, however, would not wait. As Pat said: “Would you let the reactionaries take away the only thing a poor man deserved, and that thing is his right to marry the one he loved and believed loved him?”

Wedding makes headlines

Their wedding on October 2, 1937, at Villa Paz made the Baltimore Afro-American — “NY Nurse Weds Irish Fighter in Spain’s War,” read the headline — because it offered a hopeful example of the kind of diversity the anti-fascists were fighting for.

The couple, though, had many struggles ahead. After a brief honeymoon, they were separated by duty. Shortly afterward, Salaria was captured and detained by the Germans for six weeks and later injured in a bomb attack.

When she returned to the United States, it took her more than a year — as well as a plea to US President Franklin D Roosevelt — to secure a visa for her husband. When he finally joined her, it wasn’t long before World War ll broke out and they were apart again.

In 1943, Pat was drafted and saw action during D-Day and at the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium. When he got home in 1946, he and Salaria were finally together.

They faced many challenges in the years that followed, including the loss of a child, suspicion during the McCarthy era as they, like many International Brigade veterans, were suspected of being communists, not to mention ongoing racism.

Salaria fought against discrimination, working in many New York hospitals to desegregate nursing, while Pat got a job as Transport Police officer. They were eventually forced to leave the Bronx due to a rise in racial attacks. They moved to Akron, Ohio, and while the intimidation continued, they stayed.

Pat cared for Salaria when she got Alzheimer’s disease and died four years before her in 1986. The love that began in the chaos of war lasted nearly half a century.