Sir, – Ronan McGreevy, writing of the atomic bomb and Nagasaki, states, "There was one Irish eyewitness: Dr Aidan McCarthy from Cork" ("The Irish eyewitness to the atomic bomb at Nagasaki," August 9th).
Not wishing to detract in any way from the experience of Dr McCarthy, knowledge and fairness dictate that there were indeed others, especially as we seek to establish an inclusive history of all the people of this island. These others were the Very Rev Prof Dr Thomas McCurdy Barker, his wife Dr Ann Barker and Lilian McCombe.
Tom Barker was a Presbyterian minister, a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, the first full-time secretary of the Irish Student Christian Movement, the convenor and organiser of the 1913 conference “Ireland’s Hope”, the proceedings of which he edited, and then later professor of New Testament Greek in Moukden, Manchuria, China, where he continued to teach with occasional furloughs until 1951 when Mao Zedong could no longer guarantee his safety.
He returned to Ireland and served as minister of the Presbyterian Church in Donegal town until his retirement. His church elected him moderator and Trinity College conferred on him an honorary degree. He remained in contact with Mao Zedong until shortly before his death. He is buried in Castlerock. He was a Japanese prisoner of war in Nagasaki with, among others a community of Catholic nuns to whom, in the absence of a priest of their own church, he ministered on a daily basis, a ministry which was later recognised with gratitude by Pope Pius XII when he learned of it after the war.
Ann Barker was Tom Barker’s second wife. She was a medical doctor and like her husband exercised her profession during her incarceration in Nagasaki and it was her skill in later years that helped Tom to continue living an immensely rich life well into retirement in spite of the distorting effects the bomb had had on his physique.
Lilian McCombe was a school teacher also in the Presbyterian station in Moukden where she had lived and worked since 1923.
Writing in 1974 she records, "That chapter of my life closed with the attack by Japan on the United States Fleet, 9th, December, 1941. From that date I, with some 12 other colleagues, were under Japanese jurisdiction. The greater part of the intervening years was spent in interment camps in the cities of Kobe and Nagasaki (over which the second atomic bomb was exploded, 9/8/45). After a non-stop voyage of around three weeks via the Pacific Ocean, I was welcomed in USA by my brother James, staying several days with the family there. The old Queen Elizabeth, then a troop ship, brought me to Southampton, next day to be greeted by my family; and later, by a host of friends! Following a period of returning health, I was eventually led back into teaching until retirement age was reached."
That is her own modest account of her experience. She was my father’s third cousin.
Lilian McCombe writes of “some 12 colleagues” of hers from the Irish Presbyterian Mission in Moukden. Ann and Tom Barker were two of them. There may well have been even more Irish people who shared that devastating Nagasaki experience. – Yours, etc,
SALTERS STERLING,
Tullamore,
Co Offaly.