Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Redmond, William Hoey Kearney
REDMOND, WILLIAM HOEY KEARNEY (1861–1917), Irish nationalist, the second son of William Archer Redmond, M.P., of Ballytrent, and brother of John Edward Redmond [q.v.], was born at Ballytrent in 1861. He was educated at Clongowes, and entered the Wexford militia, but, developing strong nationalist opinions, resigned his commission, and in 1881 was one of the youngest among the ‘suspects’ imprisoned under the coercive measures of the Irish chief secretary, William Edward Forster [q.v.]. He was in Kilmainham jail with Charles Stewart Parnell [q.v.], to whom he formed a lifelong devotion. In 1883 he was sent to join his brother John, on a political mission to Australia, and in his absence was elected member of parliament for Wexford, which his father had represented before him. While in Australia he married Eleanor, daughter of James Dalton, of Orange, New South Wales, whose near kinswoman the same day married his brother. On his return from the mission, which was extended to America, ‘Willie’ Redmond (as he was always called) became a prominent figure among the rank and file of Parnell's party—aggressive at Westminster and very active in Ireland, where his flamboyant rhetoric and gallant bearing made him the idol of public meetings. During the land war he was for the second time imprisoned, in 1888, for a speech, and met his brother, also a prisoner, in Wexford jail.
In the split in the Irish party in 1890 William Redmond sided passionately with Parnell. He had captured an Ulster constituency, North Fermanagh, in 1885, but after Parnell's death (1891) he won East Clare in one of the stormiest contests ever known in Ireland, and held it unopposed till his death. In that year he was called to the Irish bar; but he never practised. With maturity he became one of the most popular members in the House of Commons, but he abated nothing of his fervour, and in 1902, during the recrudescence of agitation which preceded the Wyndham Land Act, he was again imprisoned. His parliamentary hobby was the promotion of tobacco-growing in Ireland; a more serious aim was accomplished when in 1909 he carried through its second reading a Bill which the government next year embodied in the Accession Declaration Act. He revisited Australia and America several times on missions, and wrote two books on Australia, A Shooting Trip in the Australian Bush (1898) and Through the New Commonwealth (1906).
But William Redmond is best remembered by his last years. When the European War broke out, he endorsed his brother's appeal to Ireland by volunteering, and was given a captaincy in the 6th (service) battalion of the Royal Irish regiment, to which the Wexford militia belonged. He threw himself into soldiering with a kind of religious enthusiasm, and when the 16th (Irish) division went to Flanders in December 1915, he was, at fifty-four, probably the oldest man commanding a company in the line. In the following winter, when the division, based on Locre, lay next to the Ulstermen, he was the centre of a notable fraternization. On leave periods he appeared now and then at Westminster, and spoke twice, each time contriving to convey, as no one else had done, the best spirit of the fighting men. But his last speech, in March 1917, was definitely political, and none of the crowded House who listened in silence will forget the appeal for a full settlement of the Irish question, spoken in the name of the Irish soldiers: ‘In the name of God, we here who are about to die, perhaps, ask you to do that which largely induced us to leave our homes—and enable us when we meet Canadians or Australians and New Zealanders side by side in the common cause and the common field to say to them, “Our country, just as yours, has self-government within the Empire”.’
Three months later the forecast felt in his accent rather than his words was fulfilled. On 7 June the two Irish divisions launched against Wytschaete Ridge a long-prepared attack. Redmond had in the previous year been given his majority and transferred to a post on the divisional staff, and during the battles of the Somme was kept reluctantly out of the actual fighting line. This time he insisted on rejoining his old battalion for the day. In the triumphant advance he fell, and was carried out dying by Ulster soldiers. His death drove home the lesson of his life. His grave in the garden of the hospice at Locre is a place of pilgrimage.
[Memorial volume, Major William Redmond, 1917; biographical notice, and reprint of his last speech, in his Trench Pictures from France (posthumously published in 1917); T. P. O'Connor, The Parnell Movement, 1886; S. Gwynn, John Redmond's Last Years, 1919.]