Alexander Robinson

Alexander "Buck Alec" Robinson ( – 1995) was a boxer, Ulster loyalist paramilitary and Ulster Special Constabulary (USC) reservist. Robinson gained notoriety in Northern Ireland for streetfighting, robbery and for owning a pet lion. His contemporaries included James "Stormy" Wetherall and Patrick "Silver" McKee.

Joe Graham of Rushlight Magazine has stated that Robinson was given the option of prison or joining up after assaulting a member of the wealthy Thompson family on the Glencairn Road, with Thompson's own hammer.

Interned

As well as being a Special Constable, Robinson was also a member of the loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Protestant Association. The group's aim, according to a police report of 1923, was "simply the extermination of Catholics by any and every means". The police thought Robinson, who led a UPA group on Andrews street, was, "a dangerous gunman and leader of a murderous gang". In the press he was known as the "Docklands gunman and bomber"

With the end of the Anglo-Irish war and partition in 1922, Robinson left the USC. After being implicated in several shootings and bombings he was interned in October 1922. His second release may have been secured through the promise that he would move to Chicago where he had relatives. In an interview with the north Belfast playwright Martin Lynch in the 1980s, Robinson claimed he worked for Al Capone and Joseph Kennedy.

Criminal convictions Robinson was back in Belfast by the late 1920s. Writer Sam McAughtry recalled a banner reading "Welcome Home Buck Alec" being raised above York Street in the city. Sources vary as to how these were acquired, one that they came from a visiting circus which Robinson allowed to use waste ground he owned at the rear of his house on Back Ship Street. Journalist Seth Linder writes that the lions were acquired from Dublin and Belfast Zoo, with Alec displaying them at a travelling circus throughout Ireland. He kept the toothless lions at his home. Belfast folklore tells of him walking them on the streets of Sailortown. He continued to be known as a streetfighter into his fifties. Local newspapers regularly covered his fights in Belfast, the last known being in 1959. In court Robinson claimed he had knocked a man unconscious as he disagreed with the language he was using.

Death and tributes Buck Alec continued to live in north Belfast until his death in 1995. Gusty Spence and Ian Paisley attended his funeral, the latter carrying the coffin and describing Robinson as "a rare character, a typical Ulsterman, an interesting facet of Ulster's history". A report in the Irish News focused on his paramilitary past. Other reports stated that "his heart was in the right place" and that Catholics attended his funeral alongside Protestants.

In his book Formations of Violence, Allen Feldman argues that Robinson was seen as a "hard man" who believed in a fair fight, rather than a common thug.