Olympian, Cleric, Brigadista: Robert Hilliard's Enigmatic Life

RTÉ News​

20-05-2025

We present an extract from Swift Blaze of Fire, the new biography by Lin Rose Clark.
Celebrated in song by Christy Moore and affectionately recalled in many memoirs, Robert "Bob" Hilliard, the author's grandfather, is one of Ireland's best-known International Brigadistas. His short life blazed with a rare intensity; his death in Spain left a dark shadow hanging over his family. This book unravels Hilliard's enigmas to bring us an absorbing character and a fresh understanding of the times that shaped him.
My grandfather's name was Robert Martin Hilliard and there has always been a Robert Martin Hilliard-shaped gap in our family. As time passed my sisters and I heard more about him. It seemed he had a bewildering series of occupations. At one stage he was a Church of Ireland priest, so when our atheist father joked about marrying a vicar's daughter I clothed my mind's-eye grandfather in a white dog collar, like the local vicar. My mother said he was also a journalist and a boxer. Boxing was not his job, though – when boxing was on TV she would say, proudly, that he had been an amateur who boxed in the Olympic Games. In her opinion, amateur boxing was more sporting than professional, because amateurs wore thicker gloves and won by displaying skill rather than damaging their opponents.
Our grandfather was Irish, and our mother told tales of her own childhood in Northern Ireland, where he was sent after being ordained. The ugly part of his story was that he walked out on our grandmother and his four children to go to London; the sad part was that he died in Spain. Eventually I learned the name of the battle where he was shot, Jarama, and the year, 1937.
Tim and Deirdre (our mother), Robert Hilliard's eldest children, were shattered by his death. They had always thought he would come back. Long into adulthood, Deirdre was tormented by dreams that she was running to catch up with him in the street, only to find she was following a stranger – or worse, that he looked at her with no sign of love or recognition. Their mother transmitted a sense to her children that their father had dealt the whole family a crushing betrayal. Deirdre was left with irreconcilable contradictions. How could the affectionate, playful father she remembered walk away from her and her brothers and sister? How could he leave them so unprovided for that they had to do moonlight flits to escape unpaid bills, and often went short of food? On the one hand the International Brigades were a heroic undertaking; her father's readiness to fight Francoism was therefore heroic. On the other he had left his own children, and what kind of hero did that?
The effects of such an abandonment don't end with one generation. As a teenager I was acutely aware of our mother's unresolved unhappiness. It mingled with the resentments she shared with many women trapped in the role of 1960s housewife. Our house felt full of exploding emotions, making me eager to leave home and for a while putting Robert Hilliard out of my head.
The Killarney department store came as a big surprise, standing out in the street, larger than its neighbouring shops, R HILLIARD AND SONS in impressive lettering across the front. Peering through plate glass, I could see no further than the window display of clothing, footwear and steam irons.
It was 1975 and I was a young teacher on my Easter holidays, hitchhiking and walking with a friend through Kerry and Cork. We had been trudging through Killarney, looking for the Killorglin road, when I saw the unexpected name. Was our family related to the Hilliards in this shop? I didn't go in. Tired and travel-stained after a day on the road, I felt too scruffy to present myself. We pressed on to the youth hostel, but the shop's image lingered.
During another of my 1970s visits to Kerry I wondered aloud to a stranger about the scarcity of people in the sweeping landscape – where was everyone? – and he described the events behind the long-deserted ruins and the haunted feel of empty places where once there had been inhabitants. His words brought back my mother's stories of a terrible Famine, evictions and mass emigration. Fragments of history, some from family members, some from strangers, I began connecting with my missing grandfather. That Killarney shop was central to his boyhood, I learned. His grandmother had walked hundreds of miles during the Famine to replenish its stock. He had swum in the Killarney lakes, fished in them, rowed boats across them, run wild on their margins with his sister Moll, and carried away from his childhood a lifelong yearning for the ecstatic self-forgetfulness that the lakes and the mountains brought.
After World War II, little was said or written in Ireland about Irish participation in the International Brigades. As this silence lifted, Robert Hilliard's repute grew. In 1984 singer-songwriter Christy Moore released his album Ride On, featuring the song 'Viva la Quinta Brigada', which commemorates the names of many fallen brigadistas. Here's the second verse:
Bob Hilliard was a Church of Ireland pastor
From Killarney across the Pyrenees he came,
From Derry came a brave young Christian brother
Side by side they fought and died in Spain.
And then the stirring chorus:
'Viva La Quinta Brigada!
'No Pasaran' the pledge that made them fight.
'Adelante' was the cry around the hillside.
Let us all remember them tonight.'
Suddenly every Christy Moore fan knew my grandfather's name and had heard of the anti-fascist cause for which he died.