Bethel Solomons - Biography

Bethel Albert Herbert Solomons (27 February 1885 – 11 September 1965) was born in Dublin, Ireland, to a prominent Jewish family. He was the son of Maurice Solomons (1832–1922), an optician whose family came to Dublin from England in 1824. He became a medical doctor and was Master of the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin from 1926 to 1933, an international rugby player for Ireland and supporter of the 1916 Rising.

He attended St. Andrews School in Dublin where he was very interested in sport, and he went on to study medicine in Trinity College, Dublin. He earned 10 international rugby caps for Ireland (1908–1910).

In a biography of Solomons he was described as World famous obstetrician & gynaecologist, Rugby international, horseman, leader of Liberal Jewry & of Irish literary & artistic renaissance

He served as president of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI) in the late 1940s and he practiced from No. 30 Lr. Baggot Street.

Solomons was a founding member and the first president of the Liberal Synagogue in Dublin. He married Gertrude Levy in the liberal synagogue in London in 1916. He was a friend of the founder of Sinn Fein and TD Arthur Griffith. Solomons contributed to the purchase of a house for Griffith.

Family

The Solomons, who came over from England in 1824, are one of the oldest continuous Jewish family lines in Ireland. Bethel Solomons was the son of Maurice Solomons (1832–1922), an optician whose practice in 19 Nassau Street in Dublin is mentioned in James Joyce's Ulysses:

Striding past Finn's hotel Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell stared through a fierce eyeglass across the carriages at the head of Mr M. E. Solomons in the window of the Austro-Hungarian viceconsulate.

His grandmother Rosa Jacobs Solomons (1833–1926) was born in Hull in England. His elder brother Edwin (1879–1964) was a stockbroker and prominent member of the Dublin Jewish community. His sister Estella Solomons (1882–1968) was a leading artist, and a member of Cumann na mBan during the 1916 rising; she married poet and publisher Seamus O'Sullivan. His younger sister Sophie was a trained opera singer.

His second son Dr Michael Solomons (1919–2007) was a distinguished gynaecologist, a pioneer of family planning in Ireland and a veteran of the bitter and divisive 1983 constitutional amendment campaign,

See also

• List of select Jewish rugby union players

• Encyclopedia Judaica, Second Edition, volume 19, p146
• Goodwin, Terry The Complete Who's Who of International Rugby (Blandford Press, England, 1987, ISBN 07137 1838 7)