Background
O'Connor was born in Loughrea, County Galway, Ireland.
O'Connor was born in Loughrea, County Galway, Ireland.
Michael Patrick O'Connor, (1896–1967) was an Irish doctor, writer and broadcaster. He joined the British Army in 1914 and served in the Royal Irish Regiment in France and Belgium during World War I. A German gas attack in March 1918 ended his active career, and after the war he returned as part of an exhumation unit to re-inter battlefield dead in military cemeteries. In 1918 he enrolled at University College, Dublin, from where he gained a degree in medicine in 1925.
After a short period as a ship’s surgeon, O’Connor decided to join the Colonial Medical Service in British Malaya. A third daughter was born in 1930. In early 1940 O'Connor and Kit moved to Sarawak, on the island of Borneo, where O’Connor had been appointed to the combined post of Principal Medical Officer and Chief Health Officer, based at Kuching General Hospital.
After their release the O’Connors returned to Ireland where Michael published novels and short stories and became well known through his regular broadcasts to children on Radio Éireann in the 1950s and early 1960s. O'Connor published an autobiographical account of his time in Batu Lintang in The More Fool I. He went on to write two historical novels concerning the fall of Singapore and the war in the Far East in conjunction with Granville Pratt Willis, a fellow-internee at Batu Lintang.