Description

Robert Erskine Childers (1870-1922) was an Irish author and nationalist. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge and after graduation took a job as a clerk in the House of Commons. On the outbreak of the Second Boer War in 1899 he volunteered serving in the British Army. He was wounded in South Africa and invalided back to Britain. On his return he wrote the novel The Riddle of the Sands which was published in 1903. Based on his own sailing trips along the German coast, it predicted war with Germany and called for British preparedness. In 1919 he was made Director of Publicity for the First Irish Parliament and represented the Irish nationalists at the Versailles conference in Paris. Ireland slipped into civil war, soon Childers was regarded as a traitor not only by the British, but by the pro-Treaty Free State government in Dublin by which authority he was executed. Amongst his other works are In the Ranks of the C. I.V. (1900), German Influence on British Cavalry (1911) and The Framework of Home Rule (1912).