My mother’s affair and the fear I would be sent back to an orphanage
Dr Chris Luke has always been one of the country’s most outspoken medics, which he believes stems from his unusual upbringing
CHRIS Luke was 11 years old when he discovered his birth was the result of an affair between his mother and father, who met while working together in the press office at the Guinness Brewery in Dublin.
A letter he found in a hall cabinet at his home in 1970 revealed his father, Leslie Luke, had been married to another woman, Doreen, and that they had six children. Luke already knew this woman quite well, she was ‘aunty Doreen’, who was a ‘kindly friend of my mother’s who used to take me for birthday treats to places like the Royal Marine or Fullers Café in Dún Laoghaire, and who gave me presents like wallets, handkerchiefs and books*’.
Although bewildered and confused, the young boy had only one question that he wanted answered that day: ‘Are you really, truly my mother?’ he asked Colette Redmond, the woman he had been living with for the previous five or so years. ‘Honestly, I am. Please believe me. I am your mother,’ she replied.
Learning that his parents were never married and that his father, in fact, had a wife and six children he had never met, naturally came as a shock to Chris Luke. His overriding feeling, however, was fear. He was afraid
‘I have no interest in loot, I’m more interested in love’
of being sent back to the orphanage where he had spent the first six years of his life, a time to this day he has mostly blocked from his memory.
‘I felt like a small boy with an awful lot to lose... As far as I can recall, my sudden overwhelming feeling was a fear of having to return to the orphanage.’
The opening chapters of Dr Chris Luke’s memoir, released this week, read like the plot of a riveting, if rather tragic, novel. His background is a complicated tale, but it helps explain how this eminent, well-known physician came to lead the life that he has.
‘I think I’m regarded as a little eccentric,’ he says. ‘I don’t play golf, I don’t have a boat and I don’t have a big private practise and a fancy car. And I believe it’s because of my upbringing. I often say to friends I have no big interest in loot, I’m much more interested in love, which I know sounds unbelievably twee, but if you’ve known me, you know it’s true. I used to crave affection as a young man.’
An emergency doctor for the last 35 years, Luke is renowned for his media contributions during that time. Always happy to discuss anything from the trolley crisis to the latest drug to hit the streets, he sometimes got himself in trouble for his forthrightness. But it is his childhood that is particularly fascinating, an extraordinary example of how the repercussions of extramarital affairs were handled in this country in decades gone by. Luke doesn’t believe his experience was all that uncommon.
‘Even today I got a message from someone, saying, “Chris I didn’t realise, I was the same and it really resonated.” The mother and child homes, you just have to look at the basic figures,’ he says. ‘There were a couple of hundred thousand people involved, I think probably every single family [in Ireland] is affected in one way or another.’
He’s possibly right. His story, however, was unusual in a number of ways. His dad Leslie Luke, originally from the North, was one of the first public relations consultants in Ireland. A long time press officer with the Dublin United Transport Company, he was one of the founding members of the Public Relations Institute of Ireland, which was set up in 1953.
He joined the press office of the Guinness Brewery, where Colette Redmond, a single woman in her late 30s, was working. It was an exciting, dynamic place to be, not least because of the launch in 1958 of a glossy new in-house magazine, The Harp, whose contributors included Flann O’Brien, Benedict Kiely, Mairtin O’Direan and Brendan Kennelly. Leslie Luke was its first editor.
In March 1959, Redmond — who was the editorial secretary of the magazine — travelled to London and gave birth to Chris Luke. The name on his birth certificate was recorded as Leslie Christopher Marshall Luke.
After ten days or so, they both returned to Ireland. Luke’s grasp of the intricacies of where he was sent when he was a tiny baby are vague, as his mother always refused to discuss the details with him.
From what he’s learned through his mother’s friends and neighbours, he thinks he stayed with a ‘local woman’ for a few weeks, before being handed over to an order of French nuns and then eventually arriving at St Philomena’s Orphanage in Stillorgan, south Dublin.
‘One day, I may learn the actual facts but, sadly, all the main protagonists are now dead, so my understanding of what happened in my early years is limited,’ he writes in his book. ‘It seems that, while I was in St Philomena’s, my mother, Leslie and Doreen had devised a sort of strategy for me that involved a temporary placement in the orphanage until I was old enough to attend primary school, at which point I was brought home to live with my mother and sent to St Conleth’s College, on Clyde Road in Ballsbridge.’ He stayed there for six years. ‘I’ve never had more than faint memories of the period, and I’ve spent most of my life trying not to bring them to the surface more than necessary,’ he explains.
In the meantime his father died suddenly in 1963 at the age of 48, after abdominal surgery. Luke was barely four years old and has no vivid memory of ever meeting him. He learned very little about him from his mother.
‘My mother was consistently tight-lipped about my father, so details were frustratingly hard to glean,’ he writes. ‘No matter how often I would ask her, “I don’t know what to say,” she would reply to my earnest, even desperate, inquiries about my father over the decades. Towards the end of her life she did admit that Leslie had been the love of her life and that her heart had been completely broken when he died.’
‘As far as I understand my dad was an unusually honourable guy,’ Luke tells the Irish Daily Mail. ‘And he did what he could to support my mother and the situation. Even more outstanding was that his wife Doreen was intimately, intensely and continuously involved [in my life] until she died and that is quite remarkable.’
Did he ever ask his mother why Doreen was so involved?
‘My mother was unbelievably chatty and garrulous, she just wouldn’t talk about certain things,’ Luke replies. ‘She couldn’t talk about my father for some reason, only in the last year of her life, when she was 99, did I get a little detail or two.
‘But when Doreen died suddenly in the early 1980s my mother was absolutely devastated. I don’t think I’d ever seen her cry, but she wept terrible tears that day. I’ll always remember that.’
He’s reluctant to discuss if he has any kind of relationship with his six half siblings.
‘Let’s just say that’s an unfolding story,’ he says. ‘I’m very optimistic.’
After Leslie Luke’s death, Redmond took over the editorship of The Harp magazine, at this stage a prestigious quarterly. By the time Luke was taken out of the orphanage to live with her, she was largely absent from home, working full time and he was sent to a variety of friends’ homes to be taken care of.
This lack of stability wasn’t helped when his name was changed a number of times.
‘First I was Christopher Redmond, then Christopher Marshall and eventually, by the early 1970s,
‘By the time I was 15, I was a tearaway’
I was Chris Luke,’ he explains. ‘My mother was working all the time, and I was circulating around all these different houses. By the time I was 15 , I was a teenage tearaway.’
However, it was his mother’s aloofness that caused him the most bother.
‘That was probably one of the biggest issues,’ he says. ‘She wasn’t very good at emotion. Although she guarded me like a lioness, I never got any affection from her, which I found very difficult, I think it’s why I was always craving affection elsewhere.’
Luke went on to study medicine in UCD and worked in Scotland and Liverpool before settling in Cork, where he ran the emergency departments of three hospitals for a time. He married Victoria, a nurse he met in Edinburgh, and they have four children.
It’s clear the close relationship he has with his own family now is the kind he wanted for himself when he was a boy.
Well-regarded in his field and intensely passionate about his work, it almost led to a severe mental breakdown ten years ago and an incident that he says prompted him to write his book.
During a discussion about the trolley crisis on a radio show, he heavily criticised some medical practitioners, including those GPs he believed were referring non-emergency patients to the emergency department.
It led to an ‘online pile-on’ and some of his colleagues shunning him.
‘This book was really prompted by my general collapse about ten years ago,’ he explains.
‘The burn out and pile-on were almost the end of me. I struggled to keep going.’
In August 2018 he was forced to retire from frontline medicine due to severe wear and tear on his neck.
‘I’m only semi-retired now,’ he says. ‘I went back to clinical work for the first wave[of the pandemic], but I’m still lecturing, writing, doing legal and HSE stuff. I’m just not back in the emergency departments, I have a bad spine and a weak hand.
‘I think I have another eight to ten years in me, but now after years of galloping I just want to trot along at my own pace.
I’m still passionate about medicine and still concerned about the health service but now I’m tackling it at a much slower pace.
Instead of ranting, I’m trying to be a bit more thoughtful and systematic about my crusading.’
He believes there have been some very positive changes in the health service over the last three decades.
‘Especially in my own field, in emergency,’ he explains. ‘When I came back from the UK, we had about 14 consultants in the whole country and I was running three A&E departments in Cork.
‘Now there are over 100 consultants I think, and we have dozens of brilliant trainees coming up the ranks, and so many brilliant medical students, who have created emergency medical societies in all the schools.
‘I was blessed to be reunited with my mother’
There is lots of really exciting stuff happening in emergency medicine.
‘Having said that, conditions and challenges at the moment seem to be as bad as they ever were and there’s a distinct possibility they may get worse in the coming months.
‘As we’ve seen in Northern Ireland and the UK, there’s been a massive pent-up demand for emergency department care. I read some weeks ago that the Emergency Department in The Victoria Hospital in Belfast saw something like 500 patients on one Monday, they had to declare a major incident, normally they’d see 150 to 200.
‘That’s being replicated all over these islands. It’s still hard to recruit graduates to work at the coal face. So there remain huge challenges, but the underlying trends are profoundly encouraging.’
He thinks we should be very proud of our vaccination rates, and of how the hospitals reorganised themselves during the various waves.
‘If we can do that so well, mobilising the health service staff to carry out the vaccination campaign like we have done, and reorganising all our emergency departments like we did, I think that shows we are capable of remarkable adaptation,’ he says.
He admits to being ‘nervous, very nervous’ on the release of his book. ‘Obviously it’s been a therapeutic exercise,’ he says. ‘It’s like my daughter said to me, “daddy if you’re going to be vulnerable, you’ve got to commit”. And I did commit. So I am vulnerable.
‘But I hope people take it for what it is, which is an honest recollection of my travails and career through medicine.
‘It’s been bubbling under for a long time,’ he adds. ‘And comes from a need to tell my side of the story. It’s perhaps the apology and explanation that some medics and trainees are still demanding of me for my alleged slanderous comments in 2011.’
Most of all perhaps, it’s a tribute to his mother, Colette Redmond, a successful career woman caught up in an affair that, given the era Luke was born in, could have destroyed her.
Instead she fought to hold on to her son and worked hard all her life to support him.
She died at the age of 99, after spending the last couple of decades in Cork, not far from Luke’s family.
Luke knows, as he says in his book, he was lucky not to have ended up in an orphanage for the rest of his childhood, with the risk of being adopted out of the country.
‘I know that I was utterly blessed to have been reunited with my own mother in the 1960s,’ he writes. ‘And — even belatedly — to have come to partially know, forgive and still love two parents.’