Clodagh Finn: An unflinching study of a warts-and-all ‘hero'

Irish Examiner

24-05-2025

'I've been singing Bob Hilliard's name for 40 years, and now we finally have his story,' Christy Moore writes on the back of a new biography of a man who packed several lifetimes into one.
Robert Hilliard was — and this is not an exhaustive list — a member of the prosperous Hilliard family in Killarney, a Protestant, a fierce republican, a skilled debater, an Olympian boxer, a journalist, a Church of Ireland priest, and a courageous member of the International Brigades who died fighting Franco when he was just 32.
It was his death after the battle of Jarama during the Spanish Civil war in 1937 that inspired the honorary mention in Christy Moore's song, 'Viva la Quinta Brigada', although Robert Hilliard made an impression wherever he went.
At Trinity College, one student journal noted that 'he sometimes appeared as a cross between a hornpipe and a fugue, often of a wild nature.'
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Editor of The Irish Times Bertie Smyllie recalled his wild, unconforming nature when he wrote how Robert once boasted to him that he had voted 17 times before breakfast on the day of polling in the 1922 general election.
Robert Hilliard did not coin the phrase 'Vote early and vote often' but, while working as a copywriter in London a few years later, he said he came up with the advertising slogan, 'Great Stuff This Bass'.
My generation will be more familiar with the 1970s slogan, 'Ah, That's Bass', made famous by The Dubliners. It entered the vernacular as a playful phrase that meant something hit the spot, but none of the descriptions outlined so far go anywhere near unravelling the myth that grew up around Robert Hilliard.
His granddaughter, Lin Rose Clark, for instance, was acquainted with a very different version of the exuberant man who made his fellow International Brigade members laugh. For her, he was the man who walked out on his wife and their four children, first to go to London and then to fight in Spain.
'There has always been a Robert Martin Hilliard-shaped gap in our family,' she writes.
She discovered it, aged eight, after her teacher showed slides of Spain, lighting up the white screen in the classroom with palm trees, blue sea and vivid sunshine. When Lin asked her mother, Deirdre Davey, if the family could visit Spain, her mother flinched and said they would not be going to Spain, because her father had died there when she was aged eight.
Lin Rose Clark didn't quite understand it at the time but, in that moment, she sensed the inconsolable grief that accompanied her mother throughout her life.
What tormented her mother was that her father had been loving and hands-on, yet he left his family.
Many years later, Lin set out to find out why. The result of her excavation — that's the word for it because her deep research has that quality to it — is Swift Blaze of Fire, a beautifully written biography that offers us a complete and compassionate portrait of the man himself.
As she puts it: 'My grandfather was no icon, either of heroism or shiftless betrayal, but a flesh and blood human being, an everyman shaped by his times … trying to chart a course through an extraordinary period.'
It is refreshing to read an account that reaches beyond the myths and shows that history with its big 'H' also inveigles its way into the lives and loves of the people who live through it. While she teases out the political and historical, what really stands out for me is their combined effect on the personal.
Lin Rose Clark does something else too — she writes the women back into the story.
Ellen Hilliard who walked from Killarney to Cork, during the Famine years, to buy stock for her shop in Killarney. Picture: courtesy of Lin Rose Clark
She starts with the family account of the redoubtable Ellen (née Martin), who married into the Hilliard family in 1846, and regularly walked across the Derrynasaggart mountains from Killarney to Cork and back, during the Famine years, to buy stock for the small shop she ran with her husband Richard.
That shop, R Hilliard and Sons on Main Street, Killarney, went on to become a booming commercial success. It traded as a department store — 'the Brown Thomas of Killarney ladies', some called it — for a century and half. The building is now owned by a different family and it is a bar and restaurant, but the name is still above the door, and its history is remembered — and celebrated.
But back to the beginning, if Ellen Hilliard's business acumen and grit are outlined in admirable detail so too is the fact that she disapproved of her son William's Catholic wife Frances, forcing both of them to sail for New Zealand. William never saw his parents again.
Lin Rose Clark does not shy away from telling the whole family story, warts and all. Too often, in the accounts of men's wartime heroics in particular, the impact on those left behind is omitted, or overlooked.
Not here. As a pastor, Robert Hilliard earned just £25 a year but it was his family who bore the brunt when he left for London in 1935. His daughter Deirdre remembers the milkman calling to be paid but being turned away. She overheard him saying that he thought the money would be safe as he was dealing with 'a man of the cloth'.
'I was only six and a half, but I felt most ashamed and guilty and what my mother felt I can only imagine,' she said.
There's a heart-wrenching letter from Robert's young son Tim, too, appealing to him to come home: 'You ot [ought] to kum back to us… why dont you kum and hav fun with us. Love From Timothy Hilliard.'
And there is a photograph showing both children, looking miserable, keeping a daily vigil in the doorway of their rented cabin hoping to hear their father approach on the motorbike that he bought on credit.
Rosemary Hilliard, Robert's wife, with her two samoyeds.
Their mother, Rosemary, meanwhile, moved from one ill-equipped rented place to another. She had come to motherhood very young and, as her granddaughter writes, 'for the most part unwillingly. Now she was trapped inside the oppressive expectations which society imposes on wives and mothers, expectations that ground her down although she never challenged them.'
Yet, willing or not, nobody could thrive in some of the places she found herself, such as in the damp cottage near Lisburn which had no running water, no bathroom and no kitchen. Cooking was done on a paraffin stove or using a hook hung over the fire.
But there are no pointing fingers or sense of blame in this unsentimental yet compassionate account. It simply tells the story in the round, and in doing so offers a template on how to write women into history.
To end on an uplifting note, Robert Hilliard's last postcard to his wife includes this line: 'If fascism is not defeated in Spain and in the world, it will be war, and hell for our kids.'
As his granddaughter says: 'Perhaps the best tribute we can pay to him and those, like him, who went to fight fascism in Spain is to stand up against these things in our own day and say 'No pasarán!"