Hubert Butler

Hubert Marshal Butler (2 October 1900 – 5 January 1991) was an Irish essayist who wrote on a wide range of topics, from local history and archaeology to the political and religious affairs of eastern Europe before and during World War II. He also traveled to Nazi Austria on his own initiative and at his own expense and helped save Jewish people from being sent to concentration camps.

Born at the family home Maiden Hall outside the village of Bennettsbridge in County Kilkenny, Ireland, Butler graduated in 1922 from St John's College, Oxford, where he studied classics. After being recruited by Sir Horace Plunkett to work for the Irish County Libraries from graduation until 1926, Butler later travelled extensively in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Montenegro before working with the Quakers in Vienna expediting the escape of Jews after the Anschluss.

Upon the death of George Butler in 1941, Hubert Butler inherited Maiden Hall and returned to live with his family in the house on the banks of the River Nore until his death in 1991. His wife, Susan Margaret — usually referred to as Peggy — was sister of the theatre director Tyrone Guthrie and the moving force behind foundation of the Kilkenny Art Gallery Society.

Butler sought to encourage understanding of Irish social and political history through study of the land, the people and the primary source materials. He was a co-reviver of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society and through it promoted Catholic-Protestant reconciliation. Always stylish and subtle, his writing used local events as parables for the politics and pressures that accompanied the emergence of the Irish state. His book Ten Thousand Saints was a virtuoso performance, concluding with a theory that the apparently absurd legends of Irish prehistory and theology could provide evidence of the migration of Iron-age tribes around Europe. He illustrated the point by reference to local history and scholarship. Having argued that the saints of Ireland were disguised personifications of the tribes and political factions of Iron-age Ireland, he went on to suggest that the Old Testament could be the same for Jewish prehistory.

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