Early Life
Hobson was born "John Bulmer Hobson" in Belfast, County Antrim, Ireland in 1883, though many sources give his place of birth as Holywood, County Down. He 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 gunrunning, as they forbade the use of violence.
Bulmer’s father was born in Armagh although lived later in Monasterevin in Co. Kildare and was said to be a Gladstonian Home Ruler in politics, while his mother was English-born and a radical. In 1911 she was reported 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 thirteen to subscribe to a nationalist journal, Shan Van Vocht. The journal belonged to Alice Milligan. Soon after he joined the Gaelic League and the Gaelic Athletic Association.
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