SOURCE: "A Patriot for Whom? Erskine Childers, a Very English Irishman," in History Today, Vol. 38, October, 1988, pp. 27-32.

At least two books have been published called The Riddle of Erskine Childers and there will no doubt be more. Superficially, it is an inevitable title: the gung-ho junior imperialist from the heart of the English establishment, who published The Riddle of the Sands in 1903 to warn Britain of the strategic threat to her supremacy from Germany, ended his life in 1922 as an irreconcilable Irish republican, doing his best to sabotage the Anglo-Irish Treaty. His writing in the last year of his life took the form of violent and exalted propaganda for the Irregulars in the Civil War; the spy thriller had become real. He was shot by the Free State government—after a highly questionable judicial procedure—as a traitor to the new Irish regime, working to overturn it. After months on the run with the IRA guerillas, Childers was arrested in possession of a firearm—thus contravening an emergency proclamation declaring it a capital offence. But many, notably Winston Churchill, had already identified him as primarily a traitor to his British background. Technically, this was not so; though an engage Sinn Feiner from 1919, and Secretary to the Irish delegation that signed the Treaty, Childers had never actually taken arms against the British government in Ireland. But the trajectory of his career was no less dramatic for that.

Childers' ultimate destination, however, was not really a repudiation of the values in which he was reared. His father's family were firmly located in the English administrative élite—academics, professionals, some politicians (including Hugh Childers, a Gladstonian Chancellor and an early Home Rule convert). His mother was an Irish Barton—an Ascendancy Tory family with a fine house in the most beautiful part of Wicklow. Oddly described by Childers' biographer as a plain eighteenth-century house, it is anything but: a vigorous and rather grand essay in early Victorian Gothic, built in 1838 and reflecting a local tradition of prosperity, paternalism, improving landlords and model estates. A closely parallel background, some miles down the Avonmore valley, produced Charles Stewart Parnell.

The Barton house became Erskine Childers' home when he was orphaned traumatically through tuberculosis. His father, a gifted Orientalist, died in 1876 when Erskine was six, and the children were removed from their mother. Already infected, she lingered on in a sanatorium until her son was thirteen. Childers' own rather self-conscious masculinity, and his avoidance of women until his sudden and radiantly happy marriage at thirty-four, may have roots in this emotional deprivation. Despite the Wicklow background, his career followed a predictable pattern: Haileybury, Cambridge, friends like Walter Runciman and Basil Williams, service in the Boer War and later the Navy Air Arm, a House of Commons Clerkship. Liberal company and adapted Milnerite theory led him towards Home-Rule-All-Round; but the tone of his best-selling Riddle of the Sands indicates an unquestioning commitment to the values of the Boy's Own Paper. Dominion Home Rule for Ireland probably remained his ideal until 1919.

In that year, he decided to move permanently to Ireland and take up the Sinn Fein cause. As a Home Rule sympathiser in 1914, he had organised a much-publicised shipment of arms for the Irish Volunteers, intended as a public riposte to the anti-Home Rule Ulster Volunteer Force's stockpiling of weapons in the north. But for the duration of the war his energies were concentrated on imperial matters. In 1917 he acted as secretary to the ill-starred Irish Convention which attempted to pull the Home Rule chestnuts out of the fire, but there is no evidence that his ideas went any further than the Dominion Home Rule for all Ireland advocated by people like Horace Plunkett.

Childers ended the war ill, depressed and forty-eight years old. His sudden next step was a move to Ireland—strongly opposed by his wife, though she subsequently went to some trouble to conceal the fact. Galvanised by Sinn Féin's success in the 1918 election, Childers began to preach to surprised friends the pointlessness of negotiation and the iniquity of 'compromise'. Sinn Fein's tactics were still directed at pressurising international opinion at Versailles rather than shooting policemen in Ireland. But through his cousin, Robert Barton, Childers met the charismatic Michael Collins and the austere Eamon de Valera, and found new heroes.

Childers' advance in the movement was sudden, rising to Director of Publicity for the Dail during the Anglo-Irish war, then Minister of Propaganda, and finally Secretary to the ill-starred Treaty delegation. Unable to persuade the delegates not to sign, Childers subsequently joined the Irregulars as propaganda chief and editor of Poblacht. He was arrested at his old home, Glendalough House, on November 10th, 1922, and shot ten days later, dying as a nationalist martyr. The exalted and implacable nature of his republicanism, and the apparent repudiation of his background, carry echoes of Maud Gonne or Bridget Rose Dugdale. But the progression was not as crude as that.

Perhaps the parallels are closer to Constance Markievicz, or for that matter Patrick Pearse and Cathal Brugha: Irish nationalists from half-English backgrounds, psychologically orphaned and ready to find an identification. The compensatory potency of Anglo-Irish nationalism needs decoding. Famously accused by Churchill of Anglophobia, Childers strenuously denied the charge: 'I die loving England', he wrote to his wife. But by then he also denied being English. After Childers' arrest, Kevin O'Higgins publicly and disingenuously hinted that he would have to be shot, but not 'because he was an Englishman'. The prisoner haughtily remarked that this was 'a description habitually, though incorrectly, applied to me'. By then he had opted for Irish romanticism and the martyr's niche: by deciding to make an example of him, and ignoring the battery of appeals for clemency, the Free State government gave him his wish. Though the carrying out of the death sentence appalled many, Childers' execution at Beggar's Bush barracks was in some ways a logical and even a passionately desired, ending.

It was all a long way from Trinity College, Cambridge, or Leslie Stephen's Sunday Tramps club. But in a sense the romanticism was always there. The other side of the gruff lone-sailor persona (the Davies rather than the Carruthers aspect of Childers, in Riddle of the Sands terms) was a rather gauche and gushing Tennyson-worshipper, who wrote to his sisters on the death of the Poet Laureate:

His death seems to me to have just added the perfecting touch to his almost perfect life … You and I owe more to him than even we are faintly conscious of, I think. For my part there is hardly a good aspiration or a good emotion in me which has not either been heightened or originated by him. Now he has died there seems no change—there are his words and music still, only just with the added touch of perfection and consecration. Oh, I think such a life, such a life's work, and such a death are a treasure of unimaginable value to all English-speaking people.

The sentimental taste remained, along with a devotion to 'Rupert of Hentzau' and the like. Much later, after Childers' transformation, intellectual young republicans like Frank O'Connor were mildly shocked at their eminent comrade's taste in reading-matter: killing time in their bivouacs, when they pulled out a well-thumbed Dostoevsky, Childers became immersed in Fenimore Cooper or John Buchan.

Buchan supplies the motif for much of the Childers ethos. Himself a young Milnerite and Sunday Tramp, Buchan was deeply influenced by Childers' Riddle, responding then and later to the passion for small boats, espionage and doing down foreigners; Childers' lament that the book was spoiled by a love-interest is pure Buchan ('I was weak enough to "spatchcock" a girl into it and now find her a horrible nuisance'). Like a Buchan hero, Childers resolutely presented war as a public-school game: Richard Hannay might have written his letters home from the South African front with their phoney geniality and overdone sportingness. 'De Wet is the plucky one. Now that his cause is hopeless we have sworn to get him to London and give him a testimonial dinner for giving us the chance of a fight'. And like a Buchan hero, Childers chose for a wife a 'plucky' American girl, nearly as good as a man.

Erskine and Molly Childers appear most vividly as Buchan hero and heroine in the episode of the 1914 Howth gun-running, when with Mary Spring-Rice they landed a cargo of 1,500 obsolete Mauser rifles for the Irish Volunteers, precipitating a confrontation with the government. Childers was as yet unconnected with Sinn Fein, let alone the IRB: he had not met many of the hard-faced men who engineered the Asgard's reception. The idea of running in nationalist arms in order to expose the government's pusillanimity regarding Ulster's defiance had occurred to several exasperated Anglo-Irish Home Rulers: Childers was at one with Mary Spring-Rich, Alice Stopford Green, Lord Ashbourne, Conor O'Brien and others. The gesture was largely symbolic. (Unlike the chillingly effective Ulster Volunteer Force's importation of 25,000 rifles and three million rounds of ammunition three months before). But it was, for Childers, a commitment to real-life romance. The secret rendezvous with foreign freighters, the demanding seamanship, the camaraderie, the hero's welcome at Howth—all were lyrically evoked by him in his last, retrospective letters to his wife. The Buchan hero had stepped into a new role; the finale would be his execution, where he tried to reject a blindfold, and insisted on shaking hands with each member of the firing-squad, to their discomfiture. His last words were an instruction to 'take a step or two forward, lads: it will be easier that way'.

It was a wasteful ending to a life of considerable talents and generous impulses; but psychologically it seems all of a piece. Inside the man of action, there was a small boy seeking to belong. The theme of separation from his mother recurs; the part his strong-minded wife played in his life, resented by many of his friends, was significant. He wrote to her as a son to a mother, and generally deferred to her judgement (the move to Ireland in 1919 was a rare piece of self-assertion). Childers' cousin Robert Barton, a member of the Treaty delegation, initially decided not to sign its terms; but when Childers approvingly told him that Molly would not have wanted him to, something snapped, and Barton signed in defiance. (He regretted it later). Childers' insecurity struck those who knew him; Michael Collins remarked, in a striking phrase, that he always did the difficult thing just because it was difficult. He forced himself through physical and mental trials; as a middle-aged naval officer and later as an Irregular guerilla, he deliberately and sometimes unnecessarily courted danger. 'I recognised Childers as a crackpot', remarked an army acquaintance who declined to join the Howth venture. 'Something always happens to crackpots. Something always goes wrong …'

All his life Childers 'tested' himself; all his life he looked for father-figures and gurus, being deeply and contradictorily influenced by men like Hugh Childers, Earl Roberts, Basil Williams, and Roger Casement. With de Valera, he found a faith at last:

When all is said and done, my antecedents did of course make my use of the Cause infinitesimal enough by comparison with those whose sacrifices and sufferings made the Cause—did make me much less of an asset than I might have been had I come to the truth sooner. So all the more I value the faith and confidence you placed in me from the time of our first meeting … [I] would rather cut off [my] hand than weaken or injure the noblest of all Causes, or you, the greatest leader of a great Cause I have ever met.

All this helps explain the bewilderingly fast radicalising of his position from 1919—strange as it is to find him flintily refusing in 1921 just the kind of imperial Home Rule he had so recently campaigned for. Though he produced an argument based on the idea that Canada's position was not a relevant precedent, this was in fact the opposite of the case. Childers was supposedly appointed to the delegation for his expertise in imperial technicalities, but it was Collins who isolated in a private memorandum the relevant point: 'the only association which it will be satisfactory for Ireland to enter will be based, not on the present technical legal status of the Dominions, but on the real position they claim, and have in fact secured'. Nor did Ulster feature at the forefront of Childers' case, though he was more astute about that burked question than most.

By 1921, too, the infamous record of the Black and Tans had given republicanism the high moral ground. As editor of the Irish Bulletin, Childers collated and publicised every murder and atrocity committed by the other side; he had also brilliantly scaled up any military activity at all into a 'notorious' sacking or looting.

In many ways, until the recent painstaking work of scholars like Charles Townshend and David Fitzpatrick, the Anglo-Irish was has continued to be viewed through the vivid enlarging lens of the Bulletin. Childers had many of the qualities of a great publicist—including an ability to trim his ideological sails to a favourable wind. The tone of his terse and effective Daily Herald article in March 1919 about the government's military repression of strikers, and the implications for Ireland, is interesting. The piece is addressed to 'British workers' as 'a warning that the army has been transferred to the function of repressing liberties, first national, then social'; finally it appeals to James Connolly's memory and mounts an attack on 'capitalist imperialism'. This is not an approach characteristic of Childers at any other juncture; but given the conditions of 1919, it was important to keep an eye on the increasingly influential Labour Left and throw a line to Lansbury, Dutt and company. It may have influenced Churchill against Childers at least as much as his republican agitation. But at the time, the expatriot is revealed in the condemnation of Britain's current record in Ireland as equalling Germany's treatment of Belgium—still evidently for Childers the acme of repression. The echo of The Riddle of the Sands remains curiously resonant.

Nor was it forgotten among proGerman Irish nationalists. Much about Childers was deeply loveable, especially as a parent and a friend. But he was greatly disliked by many of his new colleagues. Arthur Griffith expansively accused him of causing the First World War, probably thinking of the celebrated 'Postscript' to the Riddle ('Is it not becoming patent that the time has come for training all Englishmen systematically either for the sea or for the rifle?'—a curiously Pearsean note). It must also be remembered that long before the Treaty split there was a deep divide between members of the Dail and the IRB clique who dominated the Irish Republican Army. Though they ostensibly formed two prongs of a united offensive, their priorities and tactics were often at odds, and the movement was rent by personal rivalries—notably between de Valera, President of the Dail, and Collins, the IRA supremo. Childers was always a Dail man and a de Valera man, and he went with his companions when the reckoning came.

This should be borne in mind when considering the vindictive, trumped-up and essentially indefensible procedure which led to his execution: he was being judged, and prejudged, by ex-colleagues who had always disliked and often distrusted him. Both in England and in Ireland, public statements were made before his trial which effectively called for the death penalty. Summary executions of Republican Irregulars had already been carried out, but Childers' record was almost entirely that of a publicist; he claimed to his wife that he would have used his pistol to resist arrest had there not been women in the house, but he was anything but the terrorist desperado pictured by Churchill and O'Higgins. Nonetheless, a brief military trial in camera condemned him to death, following pressure that was essentially political, and he was executed before appeal procedures could be properly carried through. The process was hastily rationalised by old enemies on both sides of the Irish Sea.

But many of his Irregular companions in those tragic last days on the run also resented him, and referred to him contemptuously; echoes come through contemporary memoirs, though they are muffled by the battery of posthumous publications in the Childers interest—including his last letter to his wife, who guarded his shrine for decades afterwards. His psychological background as well as his intellectual conditioning present an odd strain of weakness—the weakness of inflexibility. There was about him what his much-loved Tennyson discerned in Garibaldi: 'the divine stupidity of the hero'.

As has been said, Childers was not a 'traitor' to Britain; he did not take arms in the Anglo-Irish war, though remaining engaged in press and diplomatic work on Sinn Fein's behalf and acting as a Republican Justice in the Dáil courts. Nor, unlike Pearse and Casement, did he ever support Germany. In any case, he had satisfied himself that he had transferred his allegiance. It is interesting that in The Riddle of the Sands the villain Dollman is presented as the epitome of corruption because he has adopted another nationality, implacably opposed to his mother country: a creature of 'malignant perfidy', according to the narrator. It is oddly prophetic of how Childers would himself be described. 'Sixteen years ago he was still an Englishman', breathes Carruthers to Davies. 'Now he's a German. At some time between this and that, I suppose, he came to grief—disgrace, flight, exile. When did it happen?'

Only six years before addressing the firing squad in 1922, Childers had been a British naval officer, appalled by the 1916 Rising. Yet at his trial he said 'I am by birth, domicile and deliberate choice of citizenship an Irishman'. This adoptive Irishness was fully meant; he chose allegiance to the Irish 'Republic' platonically declared in 1919. The theological belief in this polity as 'virtually established' implied a theological citizenship of a never-never land: Republicanism, as defined a little later in a pamphlet commemorating Austin Stack, was 'not a political formula but the [sic] way of life'. Once anchored there, it was impossible for Childers to retreat to unglamorous if pragmatic Dominion Home Rule.

Yet he was not anti-English. Churchill denounced him as 'a mischief-making murderous renegade … a strange being, actuated by a deadly and malignant hatred for the land of his birth'—exactly, in fact, as Carruthers described Dollman. But Childers would have said that his values, even if ostensibly subversive, actually remained true to the ideal of England betrayed by the post-war government. The same argument was adopted, for different purposes, by another disillusioned First World War airman, Oswald Mosley. Another contemporary who oddly parallels Childers is T.E. Lawrence: like him a consummate propagandist, like him caught in the overlap between acting and action, and like him driven by inner demons. Something that did not ring quite true in Childers inspired his Free State enemies ludicrously to claim that he was a British double agent all along (a twist yet again worthy of a Buchan novel). It was not that complicated—or that simple. But in all his ambiguities, insecurities, commitments and defiances, Erskine Childers remains a figure far more deeply rooted in English culture than in that of his adopted Ireland.