Erskine Childers

Wikipedia:

Robert Erskine Childers DSC (25 June 1870 – 24 November 1922), usually known as Erskine Childers, was an English-born Irish nationalist who established himself as a writer with accounts of the Second Boer War, the novel The Riddle of the Sands about German preparations for a sea-borne invasion of England, and proposals for achieving Irish independence.

. . . At that stage, Childers still believed that a self-governing Ireland would take its place as a dominion within the Empire and so he was easily able to reconcile himself to the belief that fighting for Britain in defence of nations under threat from Germany was the right thing to do. In mid-August 1914 he responded to the Admiralty telegram and volunteered for service. He received a temporary commission as lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, although hostile to spending money on armaments at the time The Riddle of the Sands was published, later gave the book the credit for persuading public opinion to fund vital measures against the German naval threat, and he was instrumental in securing Childers’s recall.

Childers’s first task was, in reversal of the plot of The Riddle of the Sands, to draw up a plan for the invasion of Germany by way of the Frisian Islands.He was then allocated to HMS Engadine, a seaplane tender of the Harwich Force, as an instructor in coastal navigation to newly trained pilots. His duties included flying as a navigator and observer. A sortie navigating over a familiar coastline in the Cuxhaven Raid (an inconclusive bombing attack on the Cuxhaven airship base on Christmas Day 1914) earned him a mention in despatches. In 1915, he was transferred in a similar role to HMS Ben-my-Chree, in which he served in the Gallipoli Campaign and the eastern Mediterranean, earning himself a Distinguished Service Cross.

Widely popular, the book has never gone out of print. The Observer included the book on its list of “The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time”. The Telegraph listed it as the third best spy novel of all time. It has been called the first spy novel (a claim challenged by advocates of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, published two years earlier), and enjoyed immense popularity in the years before World War I. It was an extremely influential book: Winston Churchill later credited it as a major reason that the Admiralty decided to establish naval bases at Invergordon, Rosyth on the Firth of Forth and Scapa Flow in Orkney. It was also a notable influence on authors such as John Buchan and Eric Ambler.

. . .Childers was executed on 24 November 1922 by firing squad at the Beggars Bush Barracks in Dublin. Before his execution he shook hands with the firing squad. He obtained a promise from his then 16-year-old son, the future President of Ireland, Erskine Hamilton Childers, to seek out and shake the hand of every man who had signed his death sentence. His final words, spoken to the firing squad, were: “Take a step or two forward, lads, it will be easier that way.”

. . .It was the express wish of Molly Childers, upon her death in 1964, that the extensive and meticulous collection of papers and documents from her husband’s in-depth involvement with the Irish struggles of the 1920s should be locked away until 50 years after his death. In 1972, Erskine Hamilton Childers started the process of finding an official biographer for his father. In 1974, Andrew Boyle (previous biographer of Brendan Bracken and Lord Reith amongst others) was given the task of exploring the vast Childers archive, and his biography of Robert Erskine Childers was finally published in 1977.

An excerpt from, “The Irish rebel who wrote ‘the first modern thriller” By Christopher Sandford, Americamagazine.org, March 16, 2023:

Perhaps the model for the emerging genre was 1903’s The Riddle of the Sands, by the Anglo-Irish writer, soldier, politician and latterly radical nationalist Erskine Childers. It had the lot. If some destructive process were to mysteriously eliminate the world’s entire spy-thriller library with only The Riddle remaining, we could surely reconstruct from it every outline of the basic formula, every essential plot device, and every character and flavor contributing to the genre. It was that good.

In essence, the novel mixes some gentle satire about the snobberies of the Edwardian-era class system with a lively seafaring adventure involving a couple of British chaps going after some German spies in the Baltic. Childers’s taut, complex plot, strong storytelling gifts and distinctive characterization made the book a memorable literary achievement. It is not only a riveting tale in itself, but so cogent in its account of the decrepit state of Britain’s maritime defenses at the time that it prompted the Royal Navy to hurriedly install a series of new coastal gun batteries. Childers’s book was an instant bestseller, and still commands a respectable sale today. Ken Follett has called it “the first modern thriller.”

An excerpt from, “‘Murderous renegade’ or agent of the Crown? The riddle of Erskine Childers” By Conor Nelson, History Ireland, June 2014:

Erskine Childers was a singular personality, likely deeply affected throughout his life by the early death of his parents. Like his father, who compiled the first Pali–English dictionary, he did nothing by halves. The arc of his journey from imperialist to republican is clearly visible, from his letters to the London Times in 1901 on cruelty in the Boer War to his trips around Ireland in 1908, when he was deeply impressed by Sir Horace Plunkett’s cooperative movement, through to his championing of Home Rule in The framework for Home Rule (1911). He resigned from the civil service to find a Liberal seat in parliament but was exasperated when his impassioned espousal of Home Rule fell on disinterested ears in the pastoral hamlets of middle England. He resigned his membership of the Liberal Party on the morning in March 1914 when he read of the first exclusion concession to unionism.

. . .His wife noted that Childers was congratulated by government ministers in the aftermath of the gunrunning, though they knew nothing about it beforehand. It is not easy to assess motivations among the key figures in that government, particularly Churchill and Lloyd George, whose public utterances on Home Rule tended to wax and wane, but it may not be unlikely that a portion of the cabinet was well disposed towards a moderate arming of the Volunteers. Might they not have regarded it as a symbolic counter-balance to an armed UVF in the context of possible civil war and uncertain army support?

An excerpt from, “Erskine Childers: A Casualty of the Civil War” By Sean J. Murphy, County Wicklow Heritage, October 2023:

The allegation against Childers of being a British spy while posing as an Irish republican is not supported by evidence. Indeed it would hardly have made sense for the British to have one of their operatives undermining the Treaty settlement they had worked so hard to secure. Nevertheless, there was great bitterness against Childers on the Free State side, best exemplified by Arthur Griffith’s insinuation that he was a British agent and a slur that he was a ‘damned Englishman’ during a Dáil debate in January 1922.

An excerpt from, “Erskine Childers: a strange mix of a British imperialist and an Irish republican” By Ronan McGreevy, The Irish Times, May 10, 2022:

Childers was English-born but reared on the family estate in Wicklow of his mother’s family, the Bartons. He took a job in the British diplomatic service. He was also a first-class sailor.

He was the author in 1903 of The Riddle of the Sands, a bestselling novel which was also credited with waking Britain up to the military threat posed by Germany at a time when France was still regarded as the chief enemy. Childers said he wrote the novel out of a “a patriot’s natural sense of duty”.

His conversion to Irish nationalism is often credited to his wife Molly Osgood, a Boston-born anti-imperialist. Yet Childers joined the royal navy as an intelligence in the first World War.

His final years were dominated by the Irish struggle for independence. His skills as a propagandist saw him replace Desmond FitzGerald, who had been arrested in February 1921, as the director of publicity for the IRA during the War of Independence. He became a Sinn Féin TD in May 1921. In the Dáil he argued that the defence clauses in the Treaty would drag the Irish Free State into Britain’s wars without its consent.

Childers had taken the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War, although he had been part of the delegation that had signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921.

The Free State government believed him to be one of the prime military instigators of the Civil War, along with being head of propaganda for the antiTreaty IRA.

In August 1922, just two weeks before he died, National Army commander-in-chief Michael Collins was told that Childers was in Liverpool trying to organise rebels gathering in the city to attack Dublin by sea while the National Army was engaged down the country.

Video Title: Erskine Childers. Source: Irish History. Date Published: February 13, 2018: