Biography: Among the varied and extraordinary cast that participated in the drama that was the Irish independence movement of the early 20th Century, Robert Erskine Childers is arguably the most enigmatic, writes Conor Brady.
His life story of tragedy, love, achievement, pain, passion and idealism - and his ultimate execution - is the stuff of which novels are made. Yet he defies conventional definition, remaining a figure of contradictions whose role in modern Irish history can still generate argument.
He was the most celebrated mystery writer of his time, a decorated naval hero of the first World War, a meticulous civil servant at Westminster and secretary to the Irish delegation at the Treaty negotiations. Yet, even while he held a senior and sensitive position in the House of Commons, he ran guns into Howth for the Irish Volunteers on his yacht, the Asgard, with his American wife, Molly (née) Osgood. A convert to Sinn Féin in 1919, he obdurately refused to compromise his ambition for Ireland's complete independence. He scorned what the Treaty offered. In debate he was (wrongly) withering of its proponents' claims that it would give Ireland the same freedoms as Canada. His admirers called him an unyielding hero. His detractors saw him as a demented extremist, a prisoner to psychological agony and distraction.
He died, in the words of the pre-eminent historian of the Civil War, Michael Hopkinson, "with grace and heroism", in front of a National Army firing squad at Portobello Barracks, Dublin, in November 1922. He had been found guilty by a military tribunal of having a prohibited firearm at his adoptive childhood home at Glendalough, in Co Wicklow.
Civil War lore has it that the gun whose possession was his death warrant had been given to him as a keepsake by Michael Collins. But the provenance and details of the weapon are vague. By some accounts it was a small-calibre, pearl-handled revolver - arguably of more decorative than military use. The official communiqué issued by the Provisional Government stated it to be an automatic pistol - a much more formidable weapon. As with so many other aspects of the life and death of Erskine Childers, conflicting accounts offer different perspectives.
By the time of his death, Childers had become one of the most controversial figures among the leadership of the Irish independence movement. To Arthur Griffith he was a "damned Englishman". Some on the pro-Treaty side claimed they suspected him as a British spy or agent provocateur, put in place by shadowy forces in Whitehall to sow dissension in Irish ranks, to extend the Civil War and to hobble the new state.
He was nothing of the sort, of course. He was no less a bogeyman to the British. A "mischief-making, murderous renegade", said Churchill. More soberly, they viewed him as a dangerous asset to the Irish delegation which arrived to negotiate a settlement in London in October 1921. His knowledge of statecraft and political procedure, gained from his experience as a senior parliamentary civil servant, was of value to the Irish. Collins and he agreed on little from the outset of negotiations. Nonetheless, relations between the two men appear to have been mutually respectful. But he worshipped de Valera. That bond of loyalty was reciprocated between Dev and his son, Erskine Hamilton Childers, later President of Ireland.
The multi-faceted life of Erskine Childers was matched by the complexity of his character. Romantic, courteous, good humoured and generous, he could equally be obsessive, inflexible and dogmatic. Contemporary reports of his execution describe tears flowing from the eyes of the firing party, with each of whom he shook hands, before calmly walking to the spot at which he turned to face the rifles. "They were so overcome," Frank Pakenham was to write in Peace by Ordeal, "that they could hardly get through their duty".
The paradox of the Irish-Englishman, caught between two nationalities and loyalties, is a recurring phenomenon in Irish history. Many United Irishmen and some Young Irelanders were of mixed Irish-English parentage. The Pearse brothers had an English father. Brugha was born Charles Burgess. Casement proudly proclaimed his knighthood. Robert Barton, signatory to the Treaty and Childers's cousin, was Irish-born, yet, as Leonard Piper puts it, the Bartons, like most of their class, "kept one foot firmly planted in England".
Erskine Childers was born in Mayfair in 1870, to an English father, Robert Childers, and an Irish mother, Anna Barton, of Glendalough, Co Wicklow. Robert had achieved high distinction in the civil service of Ceylon but had returned to England due to ill health. The remainder of his short working life was to be at University College London where he held the first chair of Pali and Buddhist Studies.
The family pedigree was fairly typical of the affluent class that kept the wheels of Empire turning. The Childers had originated in Yorkshire, where their wealth was founded in banking. Robert's father (Erskine's grandfather), a Canon of the Church of England, had inherited a fortune and was for many years chaplain to the English community in Nice. Anna's father, Robert Barton of Glendalough House, a captain in the Coldstream Guards, had died in circumstances of conspicuous gallantry at Hlobane Mountain in the Zulu War of 1879.
Robert and Anna Childers (née) Barton had five children of whom Erskine was the second boy. But tragedy struck early. Robert's health never recovered from his years in Ceylon and he died of consumption in 1876 at the age of 38. Tragically, Anna, who had nursed him through his illness, also succumbed to the disease and was obliged to leave her young family for a sanitorium where she lingered, suffering, for seven lonely years, separated from her children.
Erskine was six when he and his siblings had their last sight of their mother - from an upstairs window of their once-happy home. Anna was being hustled into a cab by distraught relatives en route to her place of terminal isolation. There could be no farewell hugs or kisses for her young children for fear of spreading the contagion.
The five children, effectively orphaned, went to live at Glendalough with their mother's brother, Charles Barton, and his new wife, Agnes. It was a well-provided home, in which the young, adopted Childers boys and girls lived easily with their cousins. But underneath the apparent security and despite the sylvan beauty of the Barton estate, set in the rugged grandeur of the Wicklow countryside, the young Erskine carried the emotional scars of a childhood overshadowed by pain and separation.
Leonard Piper's biography is perhaps more psychology than history. But the psychology is telling. Here is his analysis of the psyche of the young Erskine:
"Glendalough was his mother's home. This was where she had been born and where he had grown up. She had known the room he slept in, the tree he walked beneath, the stream he sat beside. In Erskine's young mind, Ireland and his mother became inseparably linked, a link that was to remain for the rest of his life. There is also the likelihood that Erskine reacted to the disappearance of his mother in another, much more damaging way. With a feeling of guilt. Such a reaction is common enough from a small child faced with devastating and inexplicable events. The feeling that it is, in some way, his fault. His fault that his father has died; that his mother has deserted him. From this springs the belief that he deserves to be punished. Then he spends the rest of his life subconsciously punishing himself for his supposed wickedness."
From Glendalough, Erskine followed a course that might have been generally predictable at the height of Empire for a young man of landed family and good connections. Public school at Haileybury was followed by Trinity College, Cambridge to read classics and law. After university, employment as a Committee Clerk at the House of Commons might appear mundane for a personality that was later to seek out serial dangers and challenges. But it was an important formative influence on Erskine Childers and gave him a training which he was later to utilise in the cause of independent Ireland.
The ordered life of the Committee Clerk did not endure for long. The year 1898 saw Childers - with tens of thousands of other young men - joining the colours to fight against the Boers. Service in Africa (he joined the horse artillery as an enlisted man) gave him his first taste of action. He appeared to relish the privations and the hardships of campaigning in the open veldt. But war against the Boers also had the effect of opening his mind to ideals other than those of Empire. The formation of Childers the rebel, the non-conformist, seems to have been confirmed among the torched Boer farmhouses and the poisoned wells along the Orange River. And it was the African war that first stirred him as a writer.
His artistic talent was hardly such that he might have become an author of enduring literary stature. Yet had he never taken the revolutionary path, he would have been a household name through the early decades of the 20th Century for his writing. A number of volumes based on his Boer War diaries and letters were published to popular acclaim and with some financial success. But it was The Riddle of the Sands (1903), considered by many to be the prototype of the modern espionage novel, which made him a celebrity.
Drawing upon his own experiences as a yachtsman, Childers set the plot among the sandy inlets and promontories of the Frisian Islands. The story is that of an English hero-spy and of a German plan to invade the north-east of England. It caught perfectly the public mood of apprehension over Germany's gathering menace. And, as Piper observes, it simultaneously drew on the contemporary British fascination with the sea and all things maritime. It was a massive best-seller, going into successive printings to meet market demand.
On a visit to the United States in 1903 Erskine met and fell in love with the beautiful and vivacious Mary ("Molly") Osgood, the daughter of a Boston physician. They were married in 1904 and returned to England where they set up home in Chelsea. Erskine now embarked upon a period of his life in which he found new happiness. In 1905, Erskine Hamilton was born. He was followed in 1907 by Henry who, however, survived only a few months. A third son, Robert Alden, was born healthy and strong in 1910. There was a varied if somewhat low-key social life. There was sailing in a succession of yachts which the couple designed and commissioned. And yet the new fulfilment he was experiencing could not quell the demons that dwelt within him, sustained by childhood loss and pain.
When the world plunged into war in 1914, Childers moved from the make-believe world of spies and plots into the real world of reconnaissance and low-intensity operations against the German enemy. He worked for Naval Intelligence and the Admiralty. He flew missions with the Royal Flying Corps and participated in the famous air raid on Cuxhaven in November 1914. Later, he flew reconnaissance sorties in the Dardanelles and Palestine. He was decorated (DSO) and promoted to the naval rank of Lieutenant Commander (transferring to that of Major when the Royal Naval Air Service was merged into the newly-formed RAF).
But while Childers was serving King and country, another set of impulses, political and psychological, were gathering within the English war-hero-cum-thriller-writer.
Almost from the time of their return from America, Erskine and Molly had become drawn into the cultural and political movement which sought independence for Ireland. When the Ulster Volunteers armed themselves with German rifles, nationalists sought to do likewise and Erskine and Molly joined a London-based committee which met at the home of Alice Stopford Green.
Its aim was to assist in the purchase of arms and ammunition for the Irish Volunteers. And when a number of options for procuring weaponry from the continent came to nothing, Erskine and Darrell Figgis travelled to Hamburg in 1914 to conclude a deal with a firm of arms-brokers there. The following July, Erskine and Molly, with Mary Spring-Rice and hired crew, landed 900 rifles and 25,000 rounds of ammunition at Howth. With the arming of the Irish Volunteers, the course of Irish history was set to change.
There were no irreconcilable loyalties in the minds of Anglo-Irish Protestants who saw themselves as members of the British family of nations but who also supported nationalist Ireland's cause. According to the author, most of them saw the rifles as "purely symbolic . . . that they might be used to kill people did not occur to them". It hardly seems sustainable to extend such a dispensation to Childers. He was an experienced soldier who had seen action at first hand in Africa. He understood only too well the devastating effects even of small arms fire, not to mention the modern artillery with which he worked in the Boer War.
It is also clear that Childers knew he would be in serious trouble if their mission were intercepted. He would face charges and possibly imprisonment. Asgard would be confiscated. In considering the pressure of conflicting loyalties however, it is worth observing that the Howth gun-running preceded the actual outbreak of the Great War, albeit by a matter of days. And within weeks of landing the rifles at Howth, Erskine Childers was working in the Admiralty in the British war interest.
As the movement for Irish independence gathered momentum after the ending of the Great War, Erskine decided to join Sinn Féin. Tired and spent after his wartime exertions, he had retreated to Glendalough to restore his spirits and his strength. Through his cousin, Robert Barton, he met Michael Collins and then the other senior members of the Sinn Féin and Volunteer movements. His influence was considerable, especially in the role of Director of Propaganda for the underground Dáil government. At the same time, he moved steadily away from the moderate centre of Sinn Féin.
Molly, still in London, had confirmation of Erskine's absolute commitment to the most extreme ambitions of Irish independence when she received a letter from him, declaring, "I have been growing more and more to dislike compromise". At about the same time he wrote to another friend, Alfred Ollivant, "No one dies for Home Rule. Freedom is the thing men die for and it is not a thing that can be disguised under phrases or whittled by imagination".
Conspiracy theorists on the anti-Treaty side have argued that Childers was a marked man; too intelligent and too influential to be allowed to live. His arrest at Glendalough and his hasty execution have been linked to claims of vendettas and the need for the Provisional Government to get an inconvenient figure out of the way. Leonard Piper adverts to these threads of suspicion but does not attempt to reinforce or add to them. Childers did become the focus of much hatred and rancour. Pro-treaty leaders were indeed scathing of him and saw him as a potential wrecker. But no sustainable evidence has ever been brought out to support the conspiracy theory. Yet it remains part of the myth and the mystery.
He was credited - or blamed - at the time, with responsibility for sustaining the anti-Treaty struggle to a degree that was not borne out by the realities. The Irish Times's special correspondent, probably informed by high sources within the Provisional Government, declared some weeks before his execution, "there is no doubt that Mr Childers is the chief military brain among the Irregulars".
In a statement from prison, a few days before his execution, Childers himself said: "I have been held up to scorn and hatred as an Englishman who, betraying his own country, came here to lecture and destroy Ireland. Another and viler version is to the effect that so far from betraying England, I have been actually acting as the secret instrument of Englishmen for ruining Ireland".
No more than the theory of his being singled out for execution by vengeful elements within the ProvisionalGovernment, no serious historian now entertains the notion of Erskine Childers as anything other than an idealistic romantic with an obsessive streak that came to dominate his personality.
Erskine Childers has had surprisingly little attention from historians of the period. Piper's is the first biography for more than 30 years. It is a sympathetic narrative of a life that knew the extremes of pain and fulfilment, of idealism and - at times - of blind unreason. Yet it does not spare its subject in portraying the darker and more troubled aspects of his character. It slips here and there in historical detail. It has Cathal Brugha, for example, dying in the bombardment of the Four Courts. But it is an immensely human narrative that puts a construct of flesh and blood around a sometimes-denied figure whose memory and contribution have sometimes been placed, to the convenience of some, at the margins of the historical page.
Conor Brady is a journalist and a former editor of The Irish Times
Dangerous Waters: The Life and Death of Erskine Childers. By Leonard Piper, Hambledon & London, 261pp, £19.95