Caoimhin O’Muraile ☭ Robert Erskine Childers was perhaps one of the most arcane characters of Irelands revolutionary period. 

He and his cousin, Robert Barton, were both part of the Irish delegation to The Treaty talks of 1921, both having gone through a complete political metamorphosis. Like an insect which goes through a complete biological metamorphosis Childers completed his political variant going from unionist to republican via Home Rule. The unionist egg and lava went into a stage of Home Rule pupae to the fully-fledged republican adult. This process, for both Childers and Barton, took time but once the process had begun the end result appeared inevitable, insofar as becoming republicans went. It was not inevitable that Childers would be executed by his former comrades on 24th November 1922.

Erskine Childers was born on 25th June 1870 in Mayfair, London, England and executed by the Irish Free State on 24th November 1922 aged 52. His father, Robert Ceasar Childers died of TB when Erskine was just six years old and he was brought up by his aunt on his mother’s side, Anna Mary Henrietta Childers (nee Barton), who came from an Anglo-Irish landowning family of Glendalough House, Annamore, Co. Wicklow. Along with his cousin Robert Barton Erskine would be part of the Irish delegation with plenipotentiary powers at the peace talks, resulting in the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921. Like his cousin Childers had been brought up in strong unionist tradition and was an avid supporter of the British Empire. When the Boer War began in 1898 (ironically the centenary year of the United Irish Rebellion) over voting rights for British settlers in the Boer regions of the Transvaal and Orange Free State in South Africa Erskine went to fight. This was traditional for a man of his background being an “old boy” of Haileybury College near Hertford, a school founded to train young men for colonial service in India so, many thought, it was inevitable the young Childers would follow in this tradition. 

Childers joined the City Imperial Volunteers as an artilleryman, part of his duties being to care for the horses. On 24th August 1900 Erskine Chiders was evacuated from the front-line suffering with Trench Foot. While he was undergoing treatment for this condition, he noticed approvingly how loyal the Irish troops were to Britain and the crown, how resilient they were to any suggestion of support for Irish Home Rule. Despite this optimism Childers felt niggling doubts were creeping in over Britain’s policy in South Africa could, for example, the war have been avoided had negotiations been given more of a chance? The political opinions over the next two decades of Erskine Childers would change dramatically.

Childers was a first cousin of British politician, Hugh Childers, who was a member of the Liberal Party. Hugh Childers supported the various Liberal Governments policy of Irish Home Rule. Erskine, despite niggling doubts about British colonial policies, joined the Liberal Party and although still a unionist doubts were growing about this policy also as well as his overall questioning attitude toward British colonial policies in general. In 1901 he began writing on his book, The Riddle of the Sands a fictional tale with a real warning of a German naval build up, a warning the British greatly ignored.

On 5th January 1905 Childers married Mary (Molly) Osgood in Boston, USA. She could trace her family back to the Mayflower and the early settlers in what became the United States of America. She did not share her husband’s unionist and imperial views which, as we noted, were beginning to be questioned by Childers himself. Couple Molly’s (as she preferred) influence with these doubts which were now more than niggling and Childers conversion away from unionism had begun. These doubts were confirmed in 1908 when in a letter to his friend, Basil Williams, he told of his transformation when he wrote:

A jolly motor jaunt with my cousin, Barton, through a good slice of central and western Ireland, mainly to inspect the cooperative societies in which he is so interested, and in which Sir Horace Plunkett and a good many other well-known people look for the salvation of Ireland. I have come back finally and immutably a convert to home rule, as is my cousin Barton, though we both grew up steeped in the most irreconcilable sort of unionism. 

This was perhaps the first stage of his political metamorphosis from unionism to republicanism, the pupae stage of development.

In 1912 the Ulster Volunteers were formed to fight against domestic Home Rule for Ireland. This force was based mainly in the “Northern Irish” province of Ulster, becoming the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in 1913. In response to this, and to fight for Home Rule, the Irish Volunteers were formed in November 1913, but unlike the UVF whom the British authorities and army turned a blind eye to and even collaborated, the Irish Volunteers had no such advantage.

Erskine Childers was an accomplished yachtsman and by now a committed Home Rule supporter. He was recruited by the Anglo-Irish Committee chaired by Alice Stopford-Green as a candidate to carry out a secret operation. In April 1914 the UVF, under the command of Major Fred Crawford, had imported, supposedly illegally, 25,000 state of the art rifles into Larne in north-east Ulster. The British authorities, yet again and despite a ban being in place on firearms in the country, turned a blind eye to this operation. The rifles were to equip the UVF further in their fight against Home Rule. The Anglo-Irish Committee decided the Irish Volunteers must be armed if they were to stand any chance of forcing through Home Rule, should the British renege on their promise. At this stage Childers was still very much a Home Ruler and even though the rifles he was to bring to Ireland were eventually used in the Easter Rising of 1916 it is doubtful he had any idea of them being used for any purpose other than Home Rule, and only then if necessary.

Childers possessed a 51ft long yacht, the Asgard, which was to be one of two vessels involved in what has become known as the Howth Gunrunning of July 1914. The other vessel, the Kelpie, was owned by Mr Connor O’Brien, would import between them between 900 and 2,500 Mauser rifles M1871 11mm calibre along with 49,000 to 170,000 rounds of ammunition (estimates greatly differ as to the exact number). The rifles were dated by comparison with those brought in by the UVF but they would prove invaluable in 1916 especially with the loss of the Aud, with 20,000 up to date German rifles which unfortunately had to be scuppered off the Kerry coast, never then to be used in the rising.

Childers took up the challenge to bring the weapons in and he assembled his team of his wife, Molly, Mary Spring Rice and Patrick McGinley and Charles Duggan, two sailors from Donegal. He assembled the team at Conway, North Wales, and planned to sail down the Welsh coast crossing the Bristol channel, sailing around Cornwall along the English south coast through to the North Sea stopping at Cowes to meet with O’Brien. It was an audacious task but, and against all the odds the team pulled it off bringing the rifles successfully into Howth harbour on 26th July 1914.

The following year, proof that Childers had not yet reached the republican stage of his political conversion, he volunteered for service in the Royal Naval Air Arm when he was stationed to Gallipoli during the First World War. According to his C/O, Colonel F.H. Sykes, Childers was a morale raiser as an instructor at Naval Air Headquarters. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross (DSC) for his service in Gallipoli. It was not unusual for home rule supporters to fight for the crown in the First World War as they were under the naïve belief that fighting for Britain was also fighting for Irish Home Rule. The war split the Irish Volunteers with a minority remaining at home to defend Home Rule, so they thought, and oppose conscription should it be introduced in Ireland. This minority retained the name Irish Volunteers, while a majority followed the advice of the Irish Nationalist Party MP, John Redmond, and went to fight for what they also thought for Home Rule by fighting for Britain, becoming the National Volunteers. Childers also saw a British victory over Imperial Germany as beneficial to Ireland - after all the British had gone to war over the right of small nations to self-determination hadn’t they??? So, the logic was as perceived at the time, Ireland being a small nation would benefit from a British victory when hostilities ended!!

The First World War ended in November 1918 and in December of that year a General Election was called. Sinn Fein, now the republican party, won 73 out of the 105 seats for Ireland wiping the board in nationalist Ireland. Redmond, the man who split the Irish Volunteers over whether to fight in the war or not, his party, the Irish Nationalists, were all but obliterated. The mood of the Irish people had swung dramatically towards republicanism as home rule would no longer be sufficient. What had caused this shift? Some argue it was the execution of the 1916 Easter Rising leaders which forced this change in political direction, a revenge vote to avenge the martyred dead. A fair point and certainly a factor but was it The Factor? I would argue an equally important game changer was the attempt by Lord French, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, to introduce conscription during the final year of the war, something bitterly opposed by the Irish people. This had an impact on the Irish voters, and was far more recent to 1916 which was over two years passed. Perhaps a combination of both factors changed the thoughts and opinions of the Irish electorate but one thing is unarguable, Sinn Fein were now the party in Ireland to be reckoned with!

When Childers returned from the war, he was devastated to see how the British were treating the democratic mandate given to Sinn Fein by the British authorities. This placed Childers firmly in the republican camp as his political metamorphosis was complete. The Irish Volunteers, now styling themselves the Irish Republican Army (IRA) began waging a war on behalf of the republic and its democratically elected government, Sinn Fein, against the British. This war became known as the “War of Independence” and raged from 21st January 1919 to 11th July 1921 and was a bloody confrontation between guerrilla warfare and a standing army along with their auxiliaries. The IRA won a partial victory, forcing the British Government to the negotiating table, something they vowed never to do, which resulted in the Anglo-Irish treaty signed on the 6th December 1921. Erskine Childers was the Chief Secretary to the Irish delegation and was against the terms of the treaty. Childers, as secretary, was not a signatory to the treaty.

The treaty split the IRA into pro and anti-treaty sides and this eventually resulted in the Irish Civil War being fought between the two factions of the once unified IRA. Childers took the anti-treaty side in this Civil War and was regarded as a staff officer in the anti-treaty IRA. An IRA field officer, David Robinson, an Englishman, suggested Childers be ferreted away abroad as the “Staters” were sure to want him dead. Childers commanding officer rejected this, informing Robinson, “staff officer Childers will go where I tell him.” It was this, Robinson maintained, which was the fatal decision to cost Childers his life. Robinson likened the Irish Civil War as family feuding, and Childers was outside the family as such, and therefore sacrificed. This does not make sense in any way because he, Robinson, was also an Englishman, like Childers, and therefore, by this criteria, was also outside the family. Why was he not set up to fall? Robinson was an exceptional field officer and perhaps too vital to the anti-treaty side?? 

A perhaps more realistic explanation may be that the British Government, who were really pulling the strings of the pro-treaty side, wanted Erskine Childers dead. He had been, after all, one of their own and once a unionist and supporter of the empire who, in their eyes, had betrayed his class and his country. Whatever the reason the official version of events were that Childers was found in possession of .32 pistol, ironically given to him by Free State Army Commander in Chief, Michael Collins. Either way the possession of any firearm was in breach of the Free State Governments regulations and was punishable by death. Childers was found guilty of breaking this government order and was subsequently sentenced to death. Robert Erskine Childers, the enigmatic revolutionary was executed by firing squad on 21st November 1922 at Beggars Bush Barracks Dublin. He reportedly shook the hand of his executioners one by one before they shot him. There is no doubt in my mind that Childers was executed on the clandestine orders of Churchill, Birkenhead and probably the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George.

The irony here is that fifty-one years after his death Chiders son, Erskine Hamilton Childers, was elected President of 26 of Irelands 32 counties. The Taoiseach of the time, from February 1973, was Liam Cosgrave, the son of W.T. Cosgrave who was the President of the Executive Council (the title of the office before 1937 when the office holder became called Taoiseach, introduced by Eamonn de Valera) who presided over Erskine Childers senior’s execution. So here we were, fifty-one years later, where the father of the Taoiseach was party to the father of the President being executed. I wonder what kind of working relationship would have developed had Childers junior not died prematurely of heart failure on 17th November 1974 aged 68? It would have been an interesting political scenario indeed!

Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent 
Socialist Republican and Marxist

The Enigmatic Erskine Childers

Caoimhin O’Muraile ☭ Robert Erskine Childers was perhaps one of the most arcane characters of Irelands revolutionary period. 

He and his cousin, Robert Barton, were both part of the Irish delegation to The Treaty talks of 1921, both having gone through a complete political metamorphosis. Like an insect which goes through a complete biological metamorphosis Childers completed his political variant going from unionist to republican via Home Rule. The unionist egg and lava went into a stage of Home Rule pupae to the fully-fledged republican adult. This process, for both Childers and Barton, took time but once the process had begun the end result appeared inevitable, insofar as becoming republicans went. It was not inevitable that Childers would be executed by his former comrades on 24th November 1922.

Erskine Childers was born on 25th June 1870 in Mayfair, London, England and executed by the Irish Free State on 24th November 1922 aged 52. His father, Robert Ceasar Childers died of TB when Erskine was just six years old and he was brought up by his aunt on his mother’s side, Anna Mary Henrietta Childers (nee Barton), who came from an Anglo-Irish landowning family of Glendalough House, Annamore, Co. Wicklow. Along with his cousin Robert Barton Erskine would be part of the Irish delegation with plenipotentiary powers at the peace talks, resulting in the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921. Like his cousin Childers had been brought up in strong unionist tradition and was an avid supporter of the British Empire. When the Boer War began in 1898 (ironically the centenary year of the United Irish Rebellion) over voting rights for British settlers in the Boer regions of the Transvaal and Orange Free State in South Africa Erskine went to fight. This was traditional for a man of his background being an “old boy” of Haileybury College near Hertford, a school founded to train young men for colonial service in India so, many thought, it was inevitable the young Childers would follow in this tradition. 

Childers joined the City Imperial Volunteers as an artilleryman, part of his duties being to care for the horses. On 24th August 1900 Erskine Chiders was evacuated from the front-line suffering with Trench Foot. While he was undergoing treatment for this condition, he noticed approvingly how loyal the Irish troops were to Britain and the crown, how resilient they were to any suggestion of support for Irish Home Rule. Despite this optimism Childers felt niggling doubts were creeping in over Britain’s policy in South Africa could, for example, the war have been avoided had negotiations been given more of a chance? The political opinions over the next two decades of Erskine Childers would change dramatically.

Childers was a first cousin of British politician, Hugh Childers, who was a member of the Liberal Party. Hugh Childers supported the various Liberal Governments policy of Irish Home Rule. Erskine, despite niggling doubts about British colonial policies, joined the Liberal Party and although still a unionist doubts were growing about this policy also as well as his overall questioning attitude toward British colonial policies in general. In 1901 he began writing on his book, The Riddle of the Sands a fictional tale with a real warning of a German naval build up, a warning the British greatly ignored.

On 5th January 1905 Childers married Mary (Molly) Osgood in Boston, USA. She could trace her family back to the Mayflower and the early settlers in what became the United States of America. She did not share her husband’s unionist and imperial views which, as we noted, were beginning to be questioned by Childers himself. Couple Molly’s (as she preferred) influence with these doubts which were now more than niggling and Childers conversion away from unionism had begun. These doubts were confirmed in 1908 when in a letter to his friend, Basil Williams, he told of his transformation when he wrote:

A jolly motor jaunt with my cousin, Barton, through a good slice of central and western Ireland, mainly to inspect the cooperative societies in which he is so interested, and in which Sir Horace Plunkett and a good many other well-known people look for the salvation of Ireland. I have come back finally and immutably a convert to home rule, as is my cousin Barton, though we both grew up steeped in the most irreconcilable sort of unionism. 

This was perhaps the first stage of his political metamorphosis from unionism to republicanism, the pupae stage of development.

In 1912 the Ulster Volunteers were formed to fight against domestic Home Rule for Ireland. This force was based mainly in the “Northern Irish” province of Ulster, becoming the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in 1913. In response to this, and to fight for Home Rule, the Irish Volunteers were formed in November 1913, but unlike the UVF whom the British authorities and army turned a blind eye to and even collaborated, the Irish Volunteers had no such advantage.

Erskine Childers was an accomplished yachtsman and by now a committed Home Rule supporter. He was recruited by the Anglo-Irish Committee chaired by Alice Stopford-Green as a candidate to carry out a secret operation. In April 1914 the UVF, under the command of Major Fred Crawford, had imported, supposedly illegally, 25,000 state of the art rifles into Larne in north-east Ulster. The British authorities, yet again and despite a ban being in place on firearms in the country, turned a blind eye to this operation. The rifles were to equip the UVF further in their fight against Home Rule. The Anglo-Irish Committee decided the Irish Volunteers must be armed if they were to stand any chance of forcing through Home Rule, should the British renege on their promise. At this stage Childers was still very much a Home Ruler and even though the rifles he was to bring to Ireland were eventually used in the Easter Rising of 1916 it is doubtful he had any idea of them being used for any purpose other than Home Rule, and only then if necessary.

Childers possessed a 51ft long yacht, the Asgard, which was to be one of two vessels involved in what has become known as the Howth Gunrunning of July 1914. The other vessel, the Kelpie, was owned by Mr Connor O’Brien, would import between them between 900 and 2,500 Mauser rifles M1871 11mm calibre along with 49,000 to 170,000 rounds of ammunition (estimates greatly differ as to the exact number). The rifles were dated by comparison with those brought in by the UVF but they would prove invaluable in 1916 especially with the loss of the Aud, with 20,000 up to date German rifles which unfortunately had to be scuppered off the Kerry coast, never then to be used in the rising.

Childers took up the challenge to bring the weapons in and he assembled his team of his wife, Molly, Mary Spring Rice and Patrick McGinley and Charles Duggan, two sailors from Donegal. He assembled the team at Conway, North Wales, and planned to sail down the Welsh coast crossing the Bristol channel, sailing around Cornwall along the English south coast through to the North Sea stopping at Cowes to meet with O’Brien. It was an audacious task but, and against all the odds the team pulled it off bringing the rifles successfully into Howth harbour on 26th July 1914.

The following year, proof that Childers had not yet reached the republican stage of his political conversion, he volunteered for service in the Royal Naval Air Arm when he was stationed to Gallipoli during the First World War. According to his C/O, Colonel F.H. Sykes, Childers was a morale raiser as an instructor at Naval Air Headquarters. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross (DSC) for his service in Gallipoli. It was not unusual for home rule supporters to fight for the crown in the First World War as they were under the naïve belief that fighting for Britain was also fighting for Irish Home Rule. The war split the Irish Volunteers with a minority remaining at home to defend Home Rule, so they thought, and oppose conscription should it be introduced in Ireland. This minority retained the name Irish Volunteers, while a majority followed the advice of the Irish Nationalist Party MP, John Redmond, and went to fight for what they also thought for Home Rule by fighting for Britain, becoming the National Volunteers. Childers also saw a British victory over Imperial Germany as beneficial to Ireland - after all the British had gone to war over the right of small nations to self-determination hadn’t they??? So, the logic was as perceived at the time, Ireland being a small nation would benefit from a British victory when hostilities ended!!

The First World War ended in November 1918 and in December of that year a General Election was called. Sinn Fein, now the republican party, won 73 out of the 105 seats for Ireland wiping the board in nationalist Ireland. Redmond, the man who split the Irish Volunteers over whether to fight in the war or not, his party, the Irish Nationalists, were all but obliterated. The mood of the Irish people had swung dramatically towards republicanism as home rule would no longer be sufficient. What had caused this shift? Some argue it was the execution of the 1916 Easter Rising leaders which forced this change in political direction, a revenge vote to avenge the martyred dead. A fair point and certainly a factor but was it The Factor? I would argue an equally important game changer was the attempt by Lord French, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, to introduce conscription during the final year of the war, something bitterly opposed by the Irish people. This had an impact on the Irish voters, and was far more recent to 1916 which was over two years passed. Perhaps a combination of both factors changed the thoughts and opinions of the Irish electorate but one thing is unarguable, Sinn Fein were now the party in Ireland to be reckoned with!

When Childers returned from the war, he was devastated to see how the British were treating the democratic mandate given to Sinn Fein by the British authorities. This placed Childers firmly in the republican camp as his political metamorphosis was complete. The Irish Volunteers, now styling themselves the Irish Republican Army (IRA) began waging a war on behalf of the republic and its democratically elected government, Sinn Fein, against the British. This war became known as the “War of Independence” and raged from 21st January 1919 to 11th July 1921 and was a bloody confrontation between guerrilla warfare and a standing army along with their auxiliaries. The IRA won a partial victory, forcing the British Government to the negotiating table, something they vowed never to do, which resulted in the Anglo-Irish treaty signed on the 6th December 1921. Erskine Childers was the Chief Secretary to the Irish delegation and was against the terms of the treaty. Childers, as secretary, was not a signatory to the treaty.

The treaty split the IRA into pro and anti-treaty sides and this eventually resulted in the Irish Civil War being fought between the two factions of the once unified IRA. Childers took the anti-treaty side in this Civil War and was regarded as a staff officer in the anti-treaty IRA. An IRA field officer, David Robinson, an Englishman, suggested Childers be ferreted away abroad as the “Staters” were sure to want him dead. Childers commanding officer rejected this, informing Robinson, “staff officer Childers will go where I tell him.” It was this, Robinson maintained, which was the fatal decision to cost Childers his life. Robinson likened the Irish Civil War as family feuding, and Childers was outside the family as such, and therefore sacrificed. This does not make sense in any way because he, Robinson, was also an Englishman, like Childers, and therefore, by this criteria, was also outside the family. Why was he not set up to fall? Robinson was an exceptional field officer and perhaps too vital to the anti-treaty side?? 

A perhaps more realistic explanation may be that the British Government, who were really pulling the strings of the pro-treaty side, wanted Erskine Childers dead. He had been, after all, one of their own and once a unionist and supporter of the empire who, in their eyes, had betrayed his class and his country. Whatever the reason the official version of events were that Childers was found in possession of .32 pistol, ironically given to him by Free State Army Commander in Chief, Michael Collins. Either way the possession of any firearm was in breach of the Free State Governments regulations and was punishable by death. Childers was found guilty of breaking this government order and was subsequently sentenced to death. Robert Erskine Childers, the enigmatic revolutionary was executed by firing squad on 21st November 1922 at Beggars Bush Barracks Dublin. He reportedly shook the hand of his executioners one by one before they shot him. There is no doubt in my mind that Childers was executed on the clandestine orders of Churchill, Birkenhead and probably the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George.

The irony here is that fifty-one years after his death Chiders son, Erskine Hamilton Childers, was elected President of 26 of Irelands 32 counties. The Taoiseach of the time, from February 1973, was Liam Cosgrave, the son of W.T. Cosgrave who was the President of the Executive Council (the title of the office before 1937 when the office holder became called Taoiseach, introduced by Eamonn de Valera) who presided over Erskine Childers senior’s execution. So here we were, fifty-one years later, where the father of the Taoiseach was party to the father of the President being executed. I wonder what kind of working relationship would have developed had Childers junior not died prematurely of heart failure on 17th November 1974 aged 68? It would have been an interesting political scenario indeed!

Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent 
Socialist Republican and Marxist

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