On 14 February 1937, Robert Hilliard was shot in the neck outside Madrid. Eight days later he died in hospital, aged thirty-two. He was Irish but had been fighting as part of a group of British volunteers supporting the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. He had received minimal military training. Today, his name is sung, often by Celtic fans, as part of a famous song written by Christy Moore, ‘Viva the Quinta Brigada’:

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.

 

Hilliard was Lin Rose Clark’s grandfather, and this book tells the story of his brief but incident-packed life. It is, however, very much not a hagiography. Hilliard was a hero and a martyr, but he was certainly not a man without faults and Clark doesn’t attempt to hide these. 

An early chapter, beautifully constructed, discusses Hilliard’s schooldays in Cork during the heady, violent and shocking years that encompassed the Easter Rising and the outbreak of the Irish War of Independence. As Clark writes, Hilliard ‘was indelibly marked by his time in Cork’. He must have been aware of the wild events of the period, given the site of his school and his daily movements. During this time, a spirit of ‘solidarity, spontaneity and direct action’ suffused the city. ‘Despite the atrocities of the Black and Tans and the constant nervous tension of life in a place of violent conflict,’ Clark argues, Hilliard ‘found something inspiring in those years’.

Hilliard’s father was always determined that his son should go to university, and eventually he did attend Trinity College Dublin. He doesn’t seem to have dedicated much time to his studies there and was frequently penniless. He did, however, become a well-known debater and a talented boxer – one so