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Erskine Childers

London, 1870 - 1922, Dublin

Biographyhttp://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n50037988
Childers, (Robert) Erskine (1870–1922), author and politician, was born in London on 25 June 1870, the second son of Robert Caesar Childers (1838–1876), a distinguished orientalist, and his wife, Anna Mary Henrietta (d. 1883), daughter of Thomas Johnston Barton of Glendalough House, co. Wicklow. Childers was a reserved and sensitive child, and his youth was marked by two profoundly formative incidents. With the death of his father from tuberculosis in 1876, his mother was exiled to a home for incurables, and Childers and his siblings were sent to live with an aunt and uncle in Ireland. This loss appears to have lent him an enduring quality of independence of thought and action, while his upbringing at Glendalough inculcated a surpassing love of his mother's country of Ireland. Six years later, on the occasion of his mother's death, he began to suffer religious doubts. Given the fierce protestantism of his adoptive household, this was a cause of intense suffering, leading to his lifelong quest for more secular forms of faith.

The first of these was the imperialism in which Childers was schooled at Haileybury College. In due course he declared that ‘one can set no limits to the possibilities of an alliance of the English-speaking races’ (letter to Basil Williams, 14 Oct 1903, Childers MSS, Cambridge), and at Trinity College, Cambridge, he would argue vehemently against the provision of home rule for Ireland. He graduated BA in 1893, and his ideological leanings led him to a clerkship in the House of Commons. Here the meticulous and methodical in the man masked a nature increasingly adventurous and romantic, the latter finding expression in ever more ambitious voyages in the smallest of sailing-boats, one as far as the north German coast. It was to events in South Africa, however, rather than Germany, that Childers was next drawn, volunteering to serve as a driver in the South African War. Although he retained the patriotic fervour that had fuelled this decision, the war on the veldt nevertheless opened Childers's eyes to the sincerity and conviction with which some were prepared to fight for self-determination. Hints of this appear in his letters home, collected and published as In the Ranks of the CIV (1900), and this wider view is also evident in his volume of The Times History of the War in South Africa (vol. 5, 1907).

Childers's reputation as a writer, however, was largely forged by his novel, The Riddle of the Sands, published in 1903, and it is for this work that he is now remembered. A fictional account of German preparations to invade England, it drew upon his experiences of sailing in the German Frisian Islands, and brought to the central theme an unyielding verisimilitude. A fine thriller which has withstood the test of time, it is also marked by a richness of characterization, a matchless sense of pace, and a superb evocation of land- and seascape. Published soon after Britain's final attempt to make an alliance with Germany, and before the Anglo-French entente cordiale of 1904, the book was a seminal contribution to the considerable body of ‘invasion’ literature in Edwardian Britain.

When Childers visited the United States in the autumn of 1903, his writings provided an effortless introduction to the girl whom he would marry in 1904. Mary Alden (Molly) Osgood (1878–1964) was the younger of the two daughters of one of Boston's leading physicians, and as a couple they proved entirely devoted. A fervent republican, Childers's wife was to prove a crucial influence on her husband's subsequent political development.

There followed seven quiet years. The couple's son Erskine Hamilton Childers was born in 1905, and Robert Alden followed in 1911. Childers gradually rose in seniority at the Commons, and his career as a writer developed through the 1907 volume on the South African War and two works on military strategy (War and the Arme Blanche, 1910, and German Influence on British Cavalry, 1911). He was gradually moving towards Liberalism, to which a tour of rural Ireland in 1908 had proved a catalyst. The country was languishing under British rule, and Childers's observations convinced him of the justice of the calls for a limited form of Irish autonomy. There followed The Framework of Home Rule (1911), one of the best contemporary surveys of the Irish question, written with Childers's characteristic precision and verve. Simultaneously, though, he was beginning to question the legitimacy of merely literary efforts. Like Arthur H. Davies, hero of The Riddle of the Sands, Childers longed for the primacy of action, writing to his old friend William Le Fanu: ‘the older I grow the keener I get about things and the more acutely I feel the discomfort of caring, without the necessity that is simultaneously a sedative and a stimulant—action’ (letter to William Le Fanu, December 1909, Childers MSS, Cambridge). In 1910 he resigned his clerkship to pursue the political career that he and his wife agreed should now be their goal.

Eventually standing as Liberal candidate for Devonport, Childers was shocked by the pragmatism of the political world, as he was still very much an idealist. Soon he was at odds with the party leadership, a situation exacerbated by events in Ulster reaching a crisis over the Unionists' threat of active resistance against the imposition of home rule. When the government in March 1914 offered Ulster temporary respite from the proposal, Childers felt that what was fast becoming his ideal of a united and semi-autonomous Ireland had been fatally compromised. He at once withdrew his candidacy. Scarcely had he done so than government ambivalence over the Larne gun-running to the Ulster Volunteers confirmed the wisdom of his decision, simultaneously fomenting the notion of arming the Irish Volunteers in the south. Childers and his wife became part of a committee to raise funds for such a purpose. In June 1914 he succeeded in running some 900 rifles and 25,000 rounds of ammunition into the Dublin port of Howth. An act of symbolic as much as practical value, Childers's voyage in his own yacht Asgard is now seen as a turning point in the creation of an Irish republic.

The First World War proved to be something of a hiatus. Childers volunteered in the belief that a war declared by Britain on behalf of the small nations of the world was one which perforce would benefit Ireland. As a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, he served in the North Sea, Gallipoli, and the Middle East, spending eighteen months as a seaplane observer and navigational instructor. For this work he won the DSC. Back in England, he was involved in the development of the early motor torpedo boats, returning to his aerial role at the end of the war to plan with Major-General Hugh Trenchard the first bombing raid on Berlin.

Childers, though, was by then thoroughly disillusioned, not simply by the conduct of the war, but by the country itself. His return to England in 1916 had coincided with the Easter rising in Dublin, an incident to Childers profoundly disturbing in itself, and made doubly so by the severity of the government's repression of the putative establishment of an Irish republic. Attempts to impose conscription in Ireland appeared to Childers more and more to gainsay the government's—the country's—position as a protector of freedom. In 1917 he was temporarily seconded to work as assistant secretary to the Irish Convention, established to re-examine the Irish question. To his mother-in-law he wrote:

I feel profoundly that England in the long run must stand or fall by her treatment of Ireland—her supreme test—and in her whole attitude towards the causes of the war and her intentions in it, [standing as we do] for the liberties and rights of small nations. (letter to Mrs Hamilton Osgood, October 1916, Childers MSS, TCD)

When the convention broke up in the spring of 1918 it dawned on Childers that in his eyes England would indeed ‘fall’, a view confirmed by the terms of the treaty of Versailles the following year.

By then Childers had settled in Dublin to dedicate himself to the Irish cause. Because of his involvement in the gun-running to Howth, Childers was familiar with Sinn Féin's leaders, Eamon de Valera, Arthur Griffith, and Michael Collins. They saw in Childers a writer of talent and a former imperialist who had seen the error of his ways. Childers attended the Paris peace conference on the party's behalf to publicize Ireland's case, then produced a series of remarkable newspaper articles brilliantly exposing the increasingly violent repression of Sinn Féin—a violence fully reciprocated against British forces. Before long, he was editing the republican Irish Bulletin, subsequently becoming minister of propaganda in the doppelgänger administration created by Sinn Féin. With the manipulation of public opinion as important as military activities in the outcome of the struggle, when a truce between the two sides was finally called in June 1921, it was as much to the credit of Childers as it was to the military commander Collins.

For the subsequent peace conference in London, Childers acted as secretary to the Irish delegation. The war had been fought for a republic, but the delegates rapidly split over whether this was an achievable objective. Collins became the focus for compromise, Childers for hard-line sentiment, the republic for him now an article of faith as much as had been the empire years previously. The final treaty, granting modified dominion status to Ireland's southern counties, for Childers represented defeat, although without his presence such indulgence towards the new ‘free state’ that the treaty provided would have been less marked. It nevertheless in many respects ended the 700-year-old association between the two countries, foreshadowing the ultimate establishment of the republic.

The division between the Irish delegates was replicated in Ireland itself. When the treaty was put to the vote in the Dáil, the pro-treaty faction won a narrow majority. The country as a whole split into those who wished to continue to fight for a full republic, and those ‘free staters’ who would adhere to the treaty. By June 1922 civil war had erupted, de Valera and Childers among the leaders of the republicans, Collins and Griffith supporting the free state. Portrayed by Griffith as a ‘damned Englishman’, and a saboteur waging warfare on his adopted country, Childers in reality restricted his activities to propaganda. As the republican rump was driven towards the citadel of Cork, he edited the republican newspaper and himself wrote generous obituaries of the fallen Collins and Griffith. The end, though, was near. Never of robust appearance or constitution, during the treaty negotiations he had seemed a shadow. Now he was suffering from a persistent cough, reminiscent of his parents' tuberculosis. Recalled to Dublin by de Valera, Childers sought refuge in his childhood home of Glendalough. Here he was captured by free state troops. To his wife he wrote: ‘Beloved, they have taken me’ (letter to Mary Alden Childers, 11 Nov 1922, Childers MSS, TCD).

Childers was armed with a small revolver, given to him in happier days by Collins. The carrying of weapons bearing the penalty of death, Childers was duly tried and sentenced. Despite international appeals for mercy, he was executed at Dublin's Beggars Bush barracks on 24 November 1922, after first shaking hands with the firing squad. He was buried in the barracks, but in 1923 was reinterred in the republican plot in Glasnevin cemetery, Dublin.

Vilified as a traitor by many in both England and Ireland, Childers met a curious and tragic end for the author of a work so fervently patriotic as The Riddle of the Sands. Time, however, has largely rehabilitated his reputation. In England his novel has long been recognized as a masterpiece, and in Éire he is revered as one of the founding fathers of the republic. Among the more thoughtful in both countries he can be seen as a pioneer in the movement for self-determination who laid down his life for such a cause. Winston Churchill described him as a ‘great patriot and statesman’ in his role as one of the creators of modern Ireland. As a fitting continuation of his legacy, in 1973 Childers's son became the fourth president of Ireland. As the seventh earl of Longford wrote of Erskine Childers: ‘With all his wanderings, his was a continuing journey, governed by no passing influences, guided to no ephemeral end. He lived and laboured, and he fought and died, under the shadow of the eternal’ (Pakenham).

Jim Ring
Sources

TCD, Childers MSS · Trinity Cam., Childers MSS · A. Boyle, The riddle of Erskine Childers (1977) · M. McInerney, The riddle of Erskine Childers (1971) · B. Wilkinson, The zeal of the convert (1978) · T. Cox, Damned Englishman (1975) · J. Ring, Erskine Childers (1996) · F. Pakenham [Lord Longford], Peace by ordeal (1935) · WWW
Archives

IWM, diaries · NL Ire., corresp. and papers · NMM, yachting journals · TCD, corresp. and papers · Trinity Cam., papers :: NL Ire., corresp. with J. J. Horgan · Parl. Arch., corresp. with David Lloyd George · Plunkett Foundation, Long Hanborough, Oxfordshire, corresp. with Sir Horace Plunkett · TCD, corresp. with Frank Gallagher · U. Newcastle, Robinson L., corresp. with Walter Runciman

Likenesses

J. Keating, drawing, NG Ire. · photographs, TCD
Wealth at death

£4253 0s. 3d. in England: Irish probate sealed in England, 16 May 1923, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
© Oxford University Press 2004–16
All rights reserved: see legal notice Oxford University Press

Jim Ring, ‘Childers, (Robert) Erskine (1870–1922)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2011 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/32401, accessed 11 Oct 2017]

(Robert) Erskine Childers (1870–1922): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/32401

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Last Updated8/7/24

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