Bulmer Hobson

John Bulmer Hobson (14 January 1883 – 8 August 1969) was a leading member of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) before the Easter Rising in 1916. Although he was a member of the IRB which had planned the Rising, he opposed and attempted to prevent it. He swore Patrick Pearse into the IRB in late 1913. He was chief of staff of Fianna Éireann, which he helped to found.

John Bulmer Hobson was born at 5 Magdala Street, Belfast, to Benjamin Hobson, a grocer originally from County Armagh, and Mary Ann Bulmer, who was from England. However, numerous sources erroneously cite his place of birth as Holywood, County Down.

In 1901, the family was living in Hopefield Avenue in Belfast, before moving to the townland of Ballycultra, outside Holywood, by 1911.

Hobson had a "fairly strict" Quaker upbringing, according to Charles Townshend, possibly intensified by being sent to a Friends' boarding school in Lisburn. Hobson later resigned on principle from the Quakers soon after the 1914 Howth gun-running, as the Quakers are opposed to all forms of violence. Bulmer's father was born in Armagh, although he later lived in Monasterevin, County Kildare, and was said to be a Gladstonian Home Ruler in politics, while his mother was an English-born radical.

In 1911 she was reported to be on a suffragist procession in London and was long involved in Belfast cultural activities. She gave a lecture, entitled "Some Ulster Souterrains" as the Belfast Naturalists' Field Club's representative in 1901 at the British Association's annual meeting in Leicester. With the poet Alice Milligan, she organised the Irishwomen's Association, whose home reading circle met in the Hobsons' house. Hobson began at 13 to subscribe to a nationalist journal, Shan Van Vocht, published by Milligan. Soon after he joined the Gaelic League and the Gaelic Athletic Association.

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