Robert Erskine Childers

Robert Erskine Childers (born June 25, 1870, London, Eng.—died Nov. 24, 1922, Beggar’s Bush, County Dublin, Ire.) was a writer and Irish nationalist, executed for his actions in support of the republican cause in the civil war that followed the establishment of the Irish Free State.

Childers, a first cousin of the English politician Hugh Childers, was a clerk in the House of Commons from 1895 to 1910, except for a period he spent serving in the South African War. He resigned this position to devote himself to the cause of Irish Home Rule. In July 1914, at Howth, north of Dublin, he landed from his own yacht a cargo of rifles that he had purchased in Germany for the revolutionary Irish Volunteers.

Despite his position on British rule in Ireland, Childers served the British in World War I as an intelligence and aerial reconnaissance officer. But by the end of the war, he supported a wholly independent Irish republic. In 1921 he was elected to Dáil Éireann (Irish Assembly) as a Sinn Féin deputy from County Wicklow and became the Dáil’s minister of propaganda. Later that year he served as secretary to the Irish delegation to the Anglo-Irish Treaty conference. Opposing the concessions that Irish leaders Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins made to the British in signing the treaty (Dec. 6, 1921), Childers used his propaganda and publicity skills to support the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the ensuing civil war. After being captured by Free State forces, Childers was court-martialed in Dublin on a charge of unauthorized possession of a revolver and was shot by a firing squad.

Childers was the author of The Riddle of the Sands (1903), a popular spy story involving an imaginary German raid on England.