“Bob Hilliard was a Church of Ireland pastor, from Killarney across the Pyrenees he came…"
Most people who have heard of Robert Hilliard know him from Christy Moore’s song lauding the Irish who fought for republican Spain. Thirty-two years of age when he was fatally wounded at Jarama in February 1937, Hilliard had been a journalist, an Anglican cleric, an Olympic boxer and was the father of four young children.
Lin Rose Clark is Hilliard’s granddaughter. In this wonderful, engaging narrative she rebuilds a fascinating and complex life which spanned several diverse worlds. Christy Moore called the Irish Brigadistas a “comradeship of heroes”, but if Hilliard’s deeds in Spain were heroic, he was also a flawed human being.
The “crushing betrayal” of leaving his wife Rosemary and four children haunted the family. While remembered by his comrades in Spain for his “sense of humour and consistently cheerful attitude”, Hilliard was not always an attractive personality. He was a heavy drinker for a period, a gambler and capable of cruelty towards his wife.
Clark tries to disentangle family lore from fact and to rebuild the lost worlds of his life. From a comfortable middle-class Protestant background in Kerry, Hilliard was a student at a still-unionist Trinity in the 1920s. But there he played hurling, boxed (he represented Ireland at the 1924 Olympics) and experimented with new ideas.
He dropped out and an unsuccessful period as a journalist in London, which coincided with his marriage, left him on the brink of alcoholism. Redemption came through immersion in religion, his becoming an adherent of the Christian Oxford Group (involving a “complete personal surrender” to God) and then studying to become an Anglican priest.
Hilliard’s path to communism and Spain was not straightforward, then. Clark shows how living in Belfast and London, the impact of the Depression and the rise of Nazism all profoundly affected him. She conveys this story without romanticism, mindful of the human cost to Hilliard’s family of his political choices.
In her epilogue, the author tells of her mother, Deirdre, finding a postcard to Rosemary that implored her to “teach the kids to stand for democracy. Unless fascism is beaten… it means hell and war for our kids".
Amen to that.
