Robert Erskine Childers

Robert Erskine Childers
Childers in uniform of the City Imperial Volunteers (CIV), 1899
Born	(1870-06-25)25 June 1870 Mayfair, London, England, UK
Died	24 November 1922(1922-11-24) (aged 52) Beggars Bush, Dublin, Southern Ireland
Occupation	Soldier, journalist, politician, novelist
Political party	Sinn Féin
Spouse(s)	Mary "Molly" Alden Childers, nee Osgood
Children	Erskine Hamilton Childers, Henry Childers, Robert Alden Childers

Robert Erskine Childers DSC (25 June 1870 – 24 November 1922), universally known as Erskine Childers,/ˈɜːrskᵻn ˈtʃɪldərz/ was the author of the influential novel The Riddle of the Sands and an Irish patriot who smuggled guns to Ireland in his sailing yacht Asgard. He was executed by the authorities of the nascent Irish Free State during the Irish Civil War. He was the son of British Orientalist scholar Robert Caesar Childers; the cousin of Hugh Childers and Robert Barton; and the father of the fourth President of Ireland, Erskine Hamilton Childers.

Childers was born in Mayfair, London, the second son of Robert Caesar Childers, a translator and oriental scholar from an ecclesiastical family, and Anna Mary Henrietta, née Barton, from an Anglo-Irish landowning family of Glendalough House, Annamoe, County Wicklow, with interests in France such as the winery that bears their name. When Erskine was six his father died from tuberculosis and, although seemingly healthy, Anna was confined to an isolation hospital, where she died six years later. The five children were sent to the Bartons, the family of their father's uncle, at Glendalough, County Wicklow. They were treated kindly there and Erskine grew up knowing and loving Ireland, albeit at that stage from the comfortable viewpoint of the "Protestant Ascendancy".