The Dublin Arts & Human Rights Festival takes place from this weekend, featuring a play entitled River Of Thorns, telling the incredible true story of Margaret Kearney Taylor.
Margaret's story was the subject of the 2016 Documentary On One production Tearoom, Taylor, Soldier, Spy in 2016, made by Richard Fitzpatrick and Tim Desmond - listen to it above, while Richard introduces the documentary below.
My good friend Joe Haslam, who lives in Madrid, tipped me off about the story of Margaret Kearney Taylor – or "Margarita" as everyone used to call her. I couldn’t believe my ears when he told me. Schindler’s List came immediately to mind.
Margarita saw herself as Irish although the documentary reveals she was actually born in Southampton, but to an Irish mother who had been born in a workhouse in Kanturk, County Cork. After living for a period in Paris, she came to Spain and founded the Embassy Tearoom on Castellana, the great avenue that cuts a swathe across Madrid, in 1931.
It was a watering hole for high society, mainly Anglo-American ex-pats and Spanish aristocrats, including the likes of Frederika, the Queen Mother of Greece and Ramón Serrano Suñer, a close friend of Margarita’s, who was General Franco’s brother-in-law and the most ardent Nazi sympathiser in his fascist regime.
During the Second World War – while Spain was neutral – Margarita used her apartment above the tearoom to harbour Allied servicemen and Jewish refugees who were fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe en route to Portugal or Gibraltar and ultimate freedom in the United States or repatriation back to Britain.
She was part of an escape network that included Walter Starkie, one of Ireland’s most colourful characters from the last century, a fiddle-playing travel writer and director of the Abbey Theatre whose friends included WB Yeats, Winston Churchill and Federico García Lorca.
The radio documentary Tearoom, Taylor, Saviour, Spy tells Margarita's story. I interviewed Walter Starkie’s daughter Alma, who remembers William Butler Yeats telling her fairy tales as a child. She’s infectious company; she knew Margarita during the Second World War and recalled Allied pilots on the run staying with them in her family’s apartment.
The documentary also includes some chilling testimony from Benjamin Hirsch, a Jewish survivor who was spirited through Madrid in August 1941. Benjamin Passed away in the United States in 2018 at the age of 85. Joan Cook, who worked in the British Embassy in Madrid during the war spoke vividly about the tension between the Nazis and the Allies in the city at the time.
Margarita’s tearoom stood only a few steps away from the front door of the German Embassy. During the Second World War – with the exception of Berlin – there were more German spies in Madrid than in any other city in Europe. It was a den of intrigue.
There were approximately a thousand German agents reporting to Abwehr, the Nazi’s intelligence agency, which was based in the German Embassy. Margarita was operating her escape network right under their noses.
The great joy of doing a radio documentary is that it always takes you places you weren’t expecting. Thanks to some canny research by my co-producer Tim Desmond, who began pulling at some threads of Margarita’s private life, we’ve uncovered some fascinating detail about what made this reserved, heroic woman tick.
Listen to more from the Documentary On One archives here.
