Violence and Social Memory in Twentieth-Century Belfast: Stories of Buck Alec Robinson

This article explores the life and commemoration of Buck Alec Robinson. A feared loyalist killer in 1920s Belfast, in more recent times he has featured as a lion-keeping “character” on wall murals and in tourist guide books. Robinson is employed as a case study to investigate two separate but, in th...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of British studies 2014-07, Vol.53 (3), p.734-756
Main Author: O'Connell, Sean
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
20th century
Belfast
Biographies
Case studies
Collective memory
Commemoration
Communities
Habitus
Historians
Historiography
Irish politics
Loyalism
Masculinity
Memory
Men
Northern Ireland
Nostalgia
Police
Political elites
Political violence
Politics
Protestantism
Redevelopment
Religious terrorism
Robinson, Buck Alec
Sectarian violence
Social life
Social memory
Sociology
United Kingdom
Violence
Working class
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This article explores the life and commemoration of Buck Alec Robinson. A feared loyalist killer in 1920s Belfast, in more recent times he has featured as a lion-keeping “character” on wall murals and in tourist guide books. Robinson is employed as a case study to investigate two separate but, in this case, interlinked historiographical debates. The first involves Norbert Elias's analysis of the decline of violence. The second relates to discussion of the analysis of social memory in working-class communities, with violence being placed therein. The article supports historical assessments suggesting that the “civilizing offensive” had an uneven impact. That point is usually made in the context of working-class men. This article extends it to political elites in Belfast and probes their flirtations with violent hard men. The case is made that it is a mistake to assume the “civilizing” dynamic is to be understood as a teleological or top-down process.
ISSN:0021-9371
1545-6986
DOI:10.1017/jbr.2014.76