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IRISH EXAMINER | January 25th, 2017Fenian
Dead
Erskine Childers
(1870-1922)
By Jack McGrath
There might not have been
a 1916 Easter Rebellion at
all, if not for the sailing
talents of an Anglo-Irishman,
Erskine Childers, who sailed his
28-ton yacht, Asgard, into
Howth, Dublin, in June, 1914,
with 900 German mauser rifles
and 29,000 rounds of ammuni-
tion aboard, this contribution
to the cause of Irish freedom
made by a man few remember
today.
The son of a prominent British
Orientalist scholar, Robert Caesar
Childers, Robert Erskine Childers
was born in Mayfair, London on
June 25, 1870.
His mother, Anna Mary
Henrietta Barton, was from an
Anglo-Irish landowning family in
Annamoe, County Wicklow.
Childers’s father died of tuber- army to serve the Empire in the
culosis when Erskine was six, and
his mother died six years later,
leaving him and his four siblings
orphaned.
The children were sent to live
with the Barton’s at Glendalough
House, in Wicklow. It was there in
Ireland that Erskine found a home,
where all of the Childers children
were treated well and raised in
comfort as members of the
“Protestant Ascendancy.”
He attended Haileybury
College and Trinity College,
Cambridge, where he studied law,
became editor of the university
magazine, the Cambridge Review,
and distinguished himself as
President of the Trinity College
Debating Society.
His cousin, Hugh Childers, was
a member of the British Cabinet
and a supporter of the movement
for Home Rule for Ireland and no
doubt Erskine absorbed some of
his cousin’s separatist views.
One summer, while hill walk-
ing, he sustained a sciatic injury
that left him partly lame for the
rest of his life. He wouldn’t be
much for Rugby but he became a
prolific rower.
Once he received his law
degree, he passed a competitive
junior committee clerk exam and
took a job as parliamentary clerk
historyexaminer
for the House of Commons in
1895, where he prepared formal
legal documents for the govern-
ment, an education in writing that
would serve him well in the years
ahead.
Encouraged by a class-mate,
Childers took up sailing and
became quite proficient at it, cruis- tainly made a point of questioning
ing the English Channel, the
Frisian Islands, Nordernay and the
Baltic Sea, traveling with his broth- thinking.
er, Henry, in a thirty-foot cutter
named Vixen, in 1897. He fiction-
alized his seafaring adventures in a
novel, The Riddle of the Sands,
published in 1903, a well-received
spy story about sailing off the
German North Sea coast, that
involved German plans to invade
England.
Rather ironically, considering
his later life, Childers, as a young
man, was a believer in the idea of
the British Empire, no surprise,
given his social and educational
background, and, in 1898, with a
friend, he enlisted in the British
Boer War in South Africa as an
artilleryman. He saw little action
there, came down with a severe
case of “trench foot” and was evac-
uated to a hospital in Pretoria
before returning to England in
1899.
On 1904 he married an
American woman, Mary “Molly”
Osgood, the daughter of a promi-
nent Boston physician, whom he
had met on a visit to the US the
previous year. Returning to
London with his wife, he returned
to his work in the House of
Commons.
Knowing his new son-in-Law’s
love of sailing, her father’s wed-
ding present to them had been a
yacht, Asgard, which would later
play a key role in Ireland’s ever-
growing independence move-
ment.
Molly became a sailing enthusi-
ast herself and accompanied him
on many voyages in the early years
of their marriage. They had three
sons, Erskine, Henry and Robert,
and they lived in comfort in a
Chelsea apartment, thanks to his
income from his parliamentary
salary, his writing and the gener-
ous donations from Molly’s well-
to-do father in America. Childers was determined to do other challenge
Childers’s eventual conversion something for the rest of Ireland,
to counter the threat from the Ireland. For one t
from Loyal supporter of the north. In May 1914, a group of
Empire to Irish Nationalist was a like-minded people, organized a sel had engines
gradual one: Molly, with her committee of Anglo-Irish “cultural
Yankee background, somewhat of nationalists” to raise money, much ment. His crew of
a political activist and, although of it raised in London for guns for
not actually anti-British, she cer- the Southern Irish. of a British a
their right to rule other countries When a substantial sum had Shephard, two
and this had an influence on his been amassed, Childers, along
with Darrell Figgis, one of the Donegal and two
leaders of the Volunteers, went to
In 1910 he resigned his job as Hamburg, Germany to arrange a Molly, and M
Clerk of Petitions and joined the purchase from a German arms
Liberal Party, which was commit- company. whose father wa
ted to home rule for Ireland. A trip
to the south and west of Ireland in On July 12 1914, at the mouth of peer and whose
1908 with his cousin, Robert the River Scheldt, the arms and
Barton, convinced him that, ammunition were transferred British Amb
though he had been born and from a German tugboat onto
raised in the Unionist tradition, Childers’s yacht, Asgard, and the Washington.
home rule for Ireland was the right Kelpie, another yacht piloted by
idea. Conor O’Brien, a Dublin journalist There was load
and nationalist.
Tensions were high in the north 29,000 rounds
of Ireland among the pro-British The plan was that O’Brien
Unionists and their suspicions of a would land his shipment first, at jammed into the
home rule, all-Ireland government Kilcoole, County Wicklow, and
where they would be in the minor- Childers would land his yacht at of space in the
ity, leading to the very overt ship- Howth, in Dublin, the same day.
ment of German arms to Lame, to covered by the ar
be used, it was implicitly threat- It was far from an easy task,
ened, if home rule was ever legis- especially with the authorities Asgard made out
lated by the House of Commons. keeping a close watch on all the
ports of entry. And there were At Milford H
Shephard was
rejoin his unit. Bu
across the Irish S
suddenly came
storm on the Iri
two years.
Peter Derosa
Rebels, The Irish
described the fier
Childers and his c
that night: “He
wheel, entwining
spokes, determin
than let go. Risin
The peacemakers: George Gavan Duffy, Erskine Childers, Robert Barton and Arthur Griffith in a group (W. D.
Library of Ireland