BOOK OF THE DAY: JEFFREY DUDGEONreviews Bulmer Hobson and the Nationalist Movement in Twentieth-Century Ireland: By Marnie Hay; Manchester University Press; 272pp, £18.99
THIS IS the first biography of Bulmer Hobson, the leading Irish republican who fell from grace in 1916. After a long career building the separatist movement first in the North and then Dublin, his pinnacle was as secretary of the Irish Volunteers. He was also a member of the IRB’s Supreme Council.
Within the volunteers he was allied with two other Northerners, his long-time friend Roger Casement and Eoin MacNeill, the volunteers’ chief of staff.
They had compromised with Redmond to avoid a split and held out against the insurrectionists. However, the IRB Military Council and Hobson’s erstwhile comrades, Tom Clarke and Seán MacDermott, successfully conspired to effect the Rising, along with Connolly who was to suggest chloroforming Hobson.
Hay effectively recounts the complicated events of 1914-16 where Hobson went from organiser of the Howth gunrunning to a lonely cell in Phibsborough on Easter Saturday, thus becoming 1916’s first POW.
He was arrested by his own organisation, the IRB, to stop him calling off the Rising as he was in the process of doing. MacNeill dithered and changed his mind several times but finally advertised his order against “special action” – which made the IRB put the start a day forward, brilliantly fooling the authorities. Ironically if Hobson had prospered in the movement he would have come into his own in the War of Independence as he had long advocated guerrilla war tactics and trained Volunteers accordingly. Hobson’s Northern Protestant origins – he was born in Magdala Street in Belfast – seem to have been thoroughly sloughed off. He foolishly regarded Ulster’s resistance as due to “English interference”.
This incomprehension stemmed largely from having a father who was a home ruler and a mother a suffragist. His Quakerism also disappeared once he became a militarist in 1904. Hobson’s arrest saved his life but killed his political future. His enemies spread tales of cowardice and, most dangerously, ridiculed him. A later lack of arrest – he hid with his parents in Marino, Co Down, for a year – or imprisonment, unlike the experiences of Eoin MacNeill and Seán Lester, a fellow IRB member, prevented his rehabilitation.
Once arrested by the IRB, Hobson had his reputation irrevocably stained. Countess Markievicz wanted to shoot him while Seán O’Casey loathed him, memorably mocking him as having “a moony face, bulbous nose, and long hair covered by a mutton-pie hat”. This hostility was exacerbated by Hobson’s constant resistance to socialist ideas and Labour involvements. Pearse, however, said he was “not lacking in physical courage.”
Hobson lived in quiet rage and obscurity for the next five decades. Instead of being a leader of Ireland he worked for 25 years as deputy director of stamping in the Revenue Commissioners.
He did maintain his enthusiasm for the Gaeltacht, and sent his two children to a Quaker school in Waterford, but his marriage to a Catholic, Claire Gregan, which had required a papal dispensation, failed in the 1930s.
He became a follower of Social Credit and an early advocate of quantitative easing or the government printing money. Hobson died in Connemara in 1969. People were surprised he was still alive.
Hay details a most interesting story in a readable style within a somewhat academic structure. The book disappoints in having only one photograph of Hobson which however confirms the police description of him as “theatrical.”
Jeffrey Dudgeon is author of
Roger Casement: The Black Diaries – With a Study of his Background, Sexuality, and Irish Political Life