Erskine Childers

• Born: June 25, 1870
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: November 24, 1922
• Place of death: Dublin, Ireland

Types of Plot: Espionage; thriller

Contribution

Erskine Childers’s fame as a mystery novelist rests on a single work of literary genius, The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service Recently Achieved (1903), which introduced a new literary genre to English literature: the espionage adventure thriller. The only novel Childers ever wrote, it achieved instant acclaim when first published in England and has found admiring readers through many editions published since. It was published first in the United States in 1915 and has continued to be reissued almost every decade since then. John Buchan, writing in 1926, called it “the best story of adventure published in the last quarter of a century.” It paved the way for Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), John Buchan’s The Thirty-nine Steps (1915), W. Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden: Or, The British Agent (1928), and many similar espionage adventure thrillers by English novelists such as Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, and John le Carré.

Childers invented the device of pretending that a manuscript narrating the adventure of two young men sailing a small boat in German coastal waters had come to his attention as an editor. He immediately saw the need to publish it to alert the general public to a situation that endangered the national security. He hoped that the story would cause public opinion to demand prompt changes in British national defense policy. Childers deliberately chose the adventure-story genre as a more effective means to influence public opinion than the more uninspired prose of conventional political policy treatises. This has remained an underlying purpose of many subsequent espionage adventure novelists.

Biography

Erskine Childers was born Robert Erskine Childers in London on June 25, 1870, the second son of Robert Caesar Childers, a distinguished English scholar of East Indian languages, and Anna Mary Barton, daughter of an Irish landed family from Glendalough, County Wicklow, Ireland. The early death of Childers’s father resulted in the removal of the family from England to the Barton family’s home in Ireland, and it was there that Erskine Childers was reared and ultimately found his nationality. He was educated in a private school in England and at Trinity College, Cambridge University. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1893, he was appointed a clerk in the House of Commons, serving there from 1895 until he resigned in 1910 to devote his efforts to achieving Home Rule for Ireland.

In 1900, Childers joined a volunteer company and served in action in the war against the Boers in South Africa. The daily letters sent to his sisters and relations, recording his impressions of the war as he was experiencing it, were edited by them and published without his knowledge as a surprise on his return (1900). The success of this volume of correspondence with the public led to Childers’s second literary work, a history of the military unit in which he served (1903), and ultimately a volume in the London Times’s history of the Boer Wars (1907).

During the long parliamentary recesses, Childers had spent his free time sailing a small thirty-foot yacht in the Baltic and North Seas and the English Channel. He had first learned to love the sea as a boy in Ireland, and he was to use his knowledge of these waters in July, 1914, to smuggle a large shipment of arms and ammunition from a German supply ship off the Belgian coast into the harbor of Howth, north of Dublin, to arm the Irish National Volunteers, a paramilitary organization formed to defend Ireland against the enemies of Home Rule. These arms were later used in the Easter Rebellion of 1916, which proclaimed the founding of the Irish Republic.

Childers’s experiences as a yachtsman were put to good use in his first and only effort to write a novel, The Riddle of the Sands, published in 1903 and immediately making its author a celebrity. Shortly thereafter, while visiting Boston and his old military company, Childers met and married his American wife, Mary Alden Osgood, who was his constant companion in war and peace, on sea and land, until his death. She espoused his own enthusiasm for the freedom of Ireland, for republicanism, and for the joys of yachting.

When war between Germany and Great Britain erupted in the late summer of 1914, Childers became a naval intelligence officer with special responsibility for observing the German defenses along the Frisian coast, the scene of his 1903 novel. He learned how to fly aircraft and was among the first to engage in naval air reconnaissance. For his services he received the Distinguished Service Cross and retired with the rank of major in the Royal Air Force. Returning to civilian life in 1919, Childers espoused the cause of the Irish Republic and was a tireless propagandist for the Republican movement in Irish, English, and foreign presses. He was elected to the Irish Republican parliament in 1921 and appointed minister for propaganda. He served as principal secretary to the Irish delegation that negotiated the peace treaty with England in the fall and winter of 1921.

Childers refused, however, to accept the treaty during the ratification debates, clinging steadfastly to the Republican cause along with Eamon de Valera, the Irish president. When the treaty was nevertheless ratified, Childers refused to surrender and joined the dissident members of the Irish Republican Army as it pursued its guerrilla tactics against its former comrades, who now composed the new government of the Irish Free State. He was hunted down by his former colleagues, captured in his own childhood home in the Wicklow hills, and singled out to be executed without trial and before his many friends might intervene. He was shot by a firing squad at Beggar’s Bush barracks in Dublin on November 24, 1922. His unswerving loyalty to and services on behalf of the Irish Republic were ultimately honored by the Irish people who elected his son, Erskine Hamilton Childers, fourth president of the Irish Republic in 1973.

Analysis

For readers who are yachtsmen, sailors, or deep-sea fishermen, Erskine Childers’s depiction of the joys, hardships, and terrors of the sea and the skills needed to master the oceanic forces in his sole novel, The Riddle of the Sands, are stunningly vivid, authentic, and insightful. His tale is a classic depiction of the sport of yachting, and the novel continues to find an appreciative audience among its admirers. In an essay on Childers, E. F. Parker noted, “In Ireland he is a legendary hero—one of the founders of the nation—but outside Ireland in the rest of the English speaking world, it is as a yachtsman he is best remembered and as the author of the splendid yachting thriller The Riddle of the Sands.”

The Riddle of the Sands

Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands has been considered a masterpiece from three different perspectives. First, it is a remakable piece of political propaganda. Childers explicitly claimed that he had “edited” the manuscript for the general public to alert it to dangers to the English nation’s security posed by German naval maneuvers allegedly detected by two English amateur yachtsmen while sailing among the Frisian Islands off the northwestern coast of Imperial Germany. Childers had seen action as an ordinary soldier in the recent Boer Wars and had become very critical of Great Britain’s military inadequacies. He had written several historical accounts of the Boer Wars before publishing The Riddle of the Sands and subsequently wrote several other military treatises urging specific reforms in British tactics and weaponry.

In the preface to The Riddle of the Sands, Childers reported that he opposed “a bald exposition of the essential facts, stripped of their warm human envelope,” as proposed by the two young sailor adventurers. He argued that

in such a form the narrative would not carry conviction, and would defeat its own end. The persons and the events were indissolubly connected; to evade, abridge, suppress, would be to convey to the reader the idea of a concocted hoax. Indeed, I took bolder ground still, urging that the story should be made as explicit and circumstantial as possible, frankly and honestly for the purpose of entertaining and so of attracting a wide circle of readers.

Two points may be made about these remarks. First, the novel can be seen as a clever propaganda device to attract public attention to Great Britain’s weaknesses in its military defenses. In fact, Childers’s novel coincided with a decision by British naval authorities to investigate their North Sea naval defenses and adopt measures that came in good stead during the Great War, which broke out in 1914. (See the epilogue Childers inserted at the end of the story.) Childers’s novel proved to be a successful stimulus for public support for national defense policy reforms. Significantly, the book was banned from circulation in Germany. Childers’s use of an espionage adventure novel to comment on wider issues of national defense policies has been emulated by many later authors of espionage adventure thrillers.

Second, the novelist achieved a masterful characterization of the two heroes, Carruthers and Davies. The readers’ knowledge of these men unfolds gradually and naturally through the action. A steady buildup of mystery is structured on a chronological framework and descriptions of wind and weather reflective of a traditional sea captain’s log. Verisimilitude is also heightened by myriad colorful details of personal dress, habits, moods, meals, and the trivia of the tasks of the two sailors. Details of the boat—its sounds and movements—along with the descriptions of the islands, sandbanks, and estuaries where the story unfolds are used to create spellbinding realism for the reader. In his preface, Childers states that he had foreseen and planned this method of exposition as necessary to involve the reader personally in the underlying propagandistic purposes of the novel.

From a third perspective, the novel is a tale of the hero’s personal growth to new levels of maturity through exposure to physical and moral challenges unexpectedly confronted. Carruthers, a rather spoiled, bored, and supercilious young man, is suddenly caught up in an adventure that will test his mettle and allow the reader to watch him develop unexpected strengths of a psychological, moral, and intellectual character. His companion Davies is a masterful, self-contained, and skillful yachtsman who is seemingly as mature and psychologically solid as Carruthers is not. Yet Davies also is undergoing the pain of growth through an aborted romance with the only woman in the novel, the daughter of the suspected spy.

Carruthers, out of sheer desperation to escape his previous boredom and not look the fool before his companion, is gradually introduced to the skills and spartan lifestyle of the master yachtsman Davies. He also detects a mystery about Davies and, after some testing of his spirit, is told of a strange event that Davies encountered while sailing along the Frisian Islands off the German coast. Intrigued, and now thoroughly admiring the manliness and virtues of Davies, he joins in a potentially dangerous effort to explore the channels and sandbanks lying between the Frisian Islands and the German coast.

The direct, simple construction of Childers’s prose and its ability to create character and atmosphere through vivid and detailed yet economical description probably were the product of his earliest form of writing: the diary-as-letter, which he wrote almost daily during his South African adventure in 1900. That his letters were able to be successfully published without the author’s knowledge or redrafting suggests that Childers’s literary style was influenced by the directness of the letter form and the inability to adorn the prose, given the unfavorable physical situation in which the fledgling soldier-diarist found himself. The prose has a modern clarity and directness rarely found in late Victorian novels.

It is not surprising that Childers became a successful journalist and newspaper editor during the Irish war for independence. His ability to convey scenes with an economy of words yet richness of detail was already a characteristic of his prose in his great novel published in 1903.

Bibliography

Boyle, Andrew. The Riddle of Erskine Childers. London: Hutchinson, 1977. An early examination of the enigmas at the heart of Childers’s life and the difficulty of understanding his motivations.

Cox, Tom. Damned Englishman: A Study of Erskine Childers. Hicksville, N.Y.: Exposition, 1975. Focuses on the relationship between Childers’s Englishness and his embrace of the Irish Republican Army.

Hitz, Frederick P. The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Hitz, the former inspector general of the Central Intelligence Agency, compares fictional spies in the work of Childers and others to actual intelligence agents to demonstrate that truth is stranger than fiction.

Kestner, Joseph A. The Edwardian Detective, 1901-1915. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000. Study of the brief but distinctive Edwardian period in detective fiction. Discusses the importance of Childers and the Edwardians in the genesis of modern spy fiction.

Piper, Leonard. Dangerous Waters: The Life and Death of Erskine Childers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Biography of Childers, emphasizing the extent to which his life was as full of intrigue, violence, and conspiracy as any of his novels.

Ring, Jim. Erskine Childers. London: John Murray, 1997. Looks at Childers’s family papers and other sources to document the author’s attempts to follow his conscience in political and colonial matters, attempts that would ultimately lead to his execution.

Seed, David. “The Adventure of Spying: Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands.” In Spy Thrillers: From Buchan to Le Carré, edited by Clive Bloom. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. A study of Childers’s famous novel and its central role in the history of modern realist spy fiction.