Hay 1 Marnie Hay, ‘The mysterious “disappearance” of Bulmer Hobson’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 98, No. 390 (Summer 2009), pp 185-95. The mysterious ‘disappearance’ of Bulmer Hobson Marnie Hay Bulmer Hobson was a ubiquitous leader and propagandist within the advanced nationalist movement in Ireland in the early twentieth century. He has the dubious distinction of having been held against his will by his comrades in the Irish Republic Brotherhood (IRB) from the afternoon of Good Friday, 21 April 1916 until the evening of Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, the day the Easter Rising broke out. The Military Council of the IRB decided to kidnap him because its members recognised that Hobson, as quartermaster general and secretary of the Irish Volunteers and chairman of the Dublin Centres Board of the IRB, was the one man who possessed the influence and knowledge to scuttle their plans for a rebellion. Eoin MacNeill, the leader of the Irish Volunteers, could be hoodwinked – at least for a little while – but Hobson was so important that he had to be taken out of commission until the rising was underway. Hobson’s disappearance lasted longer than an historic weekend. After the Easter Rising he vanished from the nationalist scene altogether. To the general public it was as if he had been executed along with his erstwhile colleagues, the rebel leaders, but without the posthumous benefit of their spin-doctors. 1 Yet Hobson lived until 1969. This paper probes the mystery of his disappearance. Hobson was – at first glance – an unlikely republican nationalist. He was born in Belfast in 1883 to a middle-class Quaker family. His father Benjamin Hobson Jr was a commercial traveller and a Gladstonian home ruler from County Armagh, while