Erskine Childers

Robert Erskine Childers was born in Mayfair, London, on 25 June 1870. His mother, Anna Barton, came from an Anglo-Irish landowning family in County Wicklow. When he was six his father died of tuberculosis, and his mother was confined to an isolation hospital and died of the same disease six years later. The five children were sent to the Bartons at Glendalough, and Childers grew up with a strong affection for Ireland.

In 1895 he became a House of Commons clerk. He took up sailing, and in 1897 he cruised to the Frisian Islands and the Baltic. He volunteered for the Boer War, and his letters to his sisters became his first book. In 1914 he used his yacht, Asgard, to smuggle rifles to the Irish Volunteers, and in the First World War he served with the Royal Navy.

The Riddle of the Sands (1903) grew out of his sailing trips along the German coast, and its character Davies is Childers himself. The novel predicted war with Germany and called for Britain to be prepared. It was hugely popular before the First World War, has never gone out of print, and influenced writers including John Buchan.

Childers moved from support for the British Empire to Irish republicanism. He was secretary to the Irish delegation that negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, but opposed the treaty and joined the anti-treaty side in the civil war that followed. He was arrested, tried by a military court for possessing a pistol, and executed by firing squad in Dublin on 24 November 1922.

Sources: wikipedia.org