Erskine Childers’ life was stranger than his fiction: From British army soldier to Asgard gun-runner

Man of action: Erskine Childers in the British army. Photo by Hulton Archive via Getty

Peter Cunningham

No novelist gets close to Erskine Childers when it comes to living the life of the books. Ian Fleming and John le Carré may have worked as intelligence agents before using their protagonists, James Bond and George Smiley, to play out their fantasies, but Childers first invented the modern spy thriller, then spent the rest of his turbulent life trying to outdo the adventures of his own creation. Executed by firing squad in Dublin 100 years ago this month, to the very end he exhibited the cool, upper-class insouciance of the character he so desperately wanted to become.

Robert Erskine Childers was born in London in 1870 into an English family with distinguished political connections. When he was six, his father died of tuberculosis and his mother was removed to an isolation hospital from which she never emerged. Childers and his four siblings were sent to Glendalough House, Co Wicklow, to live with their mother’s family, the Bartons, wealthy Anglo-Irish Protestant landowners with Irish nationalist leanings.