This story is part of a series, The Greatest Irish Olympic Stories Never Told, which will run every Saturday in The Irish Times up to the beginning of the 2024 Olympic Games, on Friday, July 26th
When you hit Google in search of information on the life and times of Robert Martin Hilliard you’d be forgiven for suspecting that you’ve stumbled upon the tales of at least a dozen different men of the same name. Because in his mere 32 years on this earth, the Kerry native packed a remarkable number of chapters into his story.
It is, you’d assume, unlikely that many Irish Olympians could lay claim to getting a mention in a Christy Moore song, coming up with the advertising slogan “Great stuff this Bass” and being early proponents of the notion that you should “vote early, vote often”.
Referring to Hilliard in An Irishman’s Diary back in 1944, then Irish Times editor Bertie Smyllie wrote: “One young gentleman of my acquaintance – I am sorry to say he was a student at Trinity College, a Protestant and a fierce republican – boasted to me on the day of the polling [in the 1922 general election] that he had voted 17 times before his breakfast that morning.”
How many times he voted after breakfast wasn’t stated.
In his 1998 book Unusual Suspects: Twelve Radical Clergymen, Denis Carroll devotes a chapter to Hilliard that captures just how extraordinary his life was. He could, most probably, have set aside all 292 of the book’s pages for him.
In the course of his 32 years, he was, after all, an Olympian, a republican, a radical student heavily involved in politics of the left kind before dabbling in the right; a journalist who also worked in advertising; an atheist before being ordained a clergyman; and, in his final months, a soldier. And that’s only the half of it.
Born in Moyeightragh, Co Kerry in 1904, the son of a successful businessman and part of the well-known Hilliard clan in the county, he went to Trinity College at the age of 17. Somehow, despite being active in a string of its societies, and pursuing his passion for republican and left-wing politics, he found time to play rugby for the college and to become one of the founders of its hurling club.
That in itself was a revolutionary move at the time, the historian Donal McAnallen noting the derision with which the founding of the club was greeted by elements of the Trinity establishment who suggested its hurlers were simply men who couldn’t prosper in any other sport.
He dug out this especially spiky barb from a 1922 edition of the college magazine: “And yet the rugger teams don’t seem to want you, and in the hockey club you’ve no more luck, if e’en the lonely ‘soccer’ team won’t have you, why, come and join the hurling club!”
It was in boxing, though, that Hilliard excelled, and after winning the Irish amateur bantamweight title he was selected for the boxing team for the 1924 Paris Olympics, the first time Ireland competed in the Games as an independent nation. Of the eight men picked – only seven competed in the end, Cork’s Dan Flaherty failing to make the weight – Hilliard was the sole non-Army man.
There was, though, a Saipan-ish feel to it all for the boxers. As Bernard O’Neill wrote in the Evening Echo, quoting a report from the boxing association at the time: “The arrangements made by the Irish Olympic Council for the housing and training of the boxing team were unsatisfactory throughout. The team was housed in the centre of the city, and the food (described as soft and sloppy) was totally unsuitable for men in training.”
[ The modern Olympic Games is far from what its founder had in mindOpens in new window ]
“The assistance given by Irish officials was nil. The boxing team reached Paris having the grand sum of £12 to cover the expenses of providing lunches, taxis, etc. The boxers who, as events have proved, were the only hope of Ireland, were financially starved. Other Irish teams had their buses and taxis. The boxers had Shank’s Mare. Let us hope that the Irish Olympic Council has learned by their experience.”
There is no record of Hilliard’s take on that experience, whether the soft and sloppy food had a detrimental effect on his form, but his Olympic journey was short-lived. After receiving a bye into the second round, he was beaten on points by Benito Pertuzzo, the Argentinian going on to lose in the quarter-finals to eventual silver medallist Salvatore Tripoli of the United States.
In all, five of the seven Irish fighters were beaten in their opening bouts, Tipperary welterweight Paddy Dwyer faring the best of all by reaching the quarter-finals. It wasn’t the most auspicious of Olympic debuts for independent Ireland, then, the only medals won in 1924 were those of the non-sporty kind – Jack B Yeats’ silver for painting and Oliver St John Gogarty’s bronze for literature.
There was no athletes’ village back then, certainly not as we know them now, but you’d guess Hilliard would have enjoyed being shacked up with Yeats, and especially Gogarty. While Gogarty was 26 years his senior, they had a heap in common – they were both Trinity boys, and they both offered refuge in their homes to IRA men in their time.
As economics lecturer and historian John Corcoran, who has delved deep in to Hilliard’s life, wrote: “On at least one occasion, whilst home on holiday from Trinity, Hilliard provided meals for local IRA men downstairs in the kitchen of the family home, leaving his nervous parents upstairs with strict instructions not to come downstairs whilst he entertained his ‘visitors’.”
Netflix wouldn’t know where to start with a biopic on this man.
His path after the Olympics became even more quirky. He married Rosemary Robins two years later and they went on to have four children. He moved to England where he began working in journalism, having a spell with Editorial Services which was run by Basil Clarke. There was an irony in that, Clarke having worked for a time for the British government in Ireland when he was accused of leading the propaganda war against Sinn Féin and the IRA.
Hilliard also tried his hand in the advertising world, later making that claim that he’d come up with the “Great stuff this Bass” slogan for the pale ale. But while in London he swerved dramatically from his atheism to evangelical Christianity, joining the movement that had been founded by Frank Buchman, an anti-Communism Lutheran pastor from Pennsylvania who was accused of having Nazi sympathies.
Hilliard returned to Dublin to complete his erstwhile abandoned degree in Trinity, while also resuming his boxing career, winning the Irish featherweight championship in 1931. He was subsequently ordained as a pastor, took up a position at a church in Belfast, before suffocating debt and disillusionment with his role prompted him to leave his family and return to London in 1934.
There, he made another complete about-turn, joining the Communist Party while taking up journalism again. Within two years he was so roused by the cause of the Spanish Republic against the forces of General Franco, he joined the International Brigade and headed to Spain.
In his book Crusade in Spain, the late Jason Gurney, who also fought with the International Brigade, recalled meeting Hilliard in Spain.
“One of the most amusing characters was an ex-Anglican parson, the Reverend RM Hilliard, who had become a communist and had developed the most startlingly irreverent manner by the time I knew him. When in wine he would put on his parsonical voice and make a benediction – ‘In the name of Marx’ – and with two fingers raised he made the curve of the sickle.”
“He was a great drinker and his friends were of all classes. They liked him for his sense of humour and his consistently cheerful attitude. It was the last time that I saw Hilliard, the boxing parson. He was killed that evening.”
It was at the Battle of Jarama, northeast of Madrid, that Hilliard died, one of thousands of members of the International Brigade to fall at the hands of Franco’s forces over a three-week period in February 1937 in what was one of the war’s most brutal episodes.
Hilliard’s last letter to his wife was written two weeks before he died. “My dear, do not worry too much about me, I expect I shall be quite safe. I think I am going to make quite a good soldier. I still hate fighting but this time it has to be done, unless fascism is beaten in Spain and in the world it means war and hell for our kids. All the time when I am thinking of you and the children I am glad I have come. Write when you can, it will help – love to you, Robert.”
He is buried near where he fell, Christy Moore saluting him, along with Éamonn McGrotty, many years later in his Viva la Quinta Brigada song: “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.”
A short life, but one like few others.
