“It doesn’t matter what you think of me, I know you love me.” So wrote Erskine Childers to his friend Ivor Lloyd-Jones on 24th November 1922, hours or even minutes before he faced a firing squad. Robert Erskine Childers was executed at Beggars Bush Barracks, Dublin, in the recently formed Irish Free State. Before his execution, he shook the hand of each of the men in the firing squad and, with his last words, encouraged them, saying “Take a step or two forward, lads, it will be easier that way.” In the letter to long time friend Lloyd-Jones, Childers describes their friendship as “indestructible”. The letter, along with a copy of Childers’ only novel, The Riddle of the Sands, inscribed to ‘Ivor from Erskine 1905’, was donated to Trinity College by Ivor Lloyd-Jones in June 1935. In his letter to Trinity (Add.ms.a.599) asking if the library might take the items, Lloyd-Jones writes “I should be only too grateful to know they are there”.
Erskine Childers was the son of Robert Caesar Childers and Anna Mary Henrietta Barton. His father was a prominent professor of Pali and Buddhist literature, and donated several manuscripts to Trinity College in 1871. One of these, R.1.78, has been digitised and is available through the Wren Digital Library.
His mother was from an Anglo-Irish family who had an estate in Glendalough, Co. Wicklow and it was here that Erskine spent much of his childhood. He and his siblings were sent to live with their relatives in Ireland after the death of their father from tuberculosis in 1876. His mother was confined to an isolation hospital, where she died six years later.
Childers was admitted to Trinity College in 1889 and he immersed himself fully in college life, sporting and intellectual. He took up rowing and won a position in the Trinity Second Boat, he showed his literary flair as editor of the Cambridge Review, and he was elected to the college debating society the Magpie and Stump. In 1892 he ran for president of the society, in a campaign that caused so much excitement it made national news. According to the history of the society by C.L. Ferguson, it was said by some that the contest was “a Great Rag” deliberately engineered to rouse the society from the sluggish torpor into which it was supposed to have sunk. Childers ran as the Legitimist candidate, representing the existing order in the society against the Reform candidate, George Arthur Maurice Hamilton-Gordon. Hamilton-Gordon had been expelled from the society for failing to speak and ran under the slogan: “Speech is Childers, but silence is Gordon”. Both sides issued manifestoes and walls all over Cambridge were covered with posters and chalked with slogans, Blue for the Legitimists and Red for Reform. Ferguson describes how Bertrand Russell ran around the town with coloured chalk on the day of the election in a last-minute effort to rouse voters. When the results were counted Hamilton-Gordon beat Childers with 127 votes to 103. He however appointed Childers as Vice-president and his successor. Interestingly in Magpie and Stump debates Childers opposed the policy of Irish Home Rule and showed no sympathy to the Nationalist cause to which he would later dedicate his life.
Childers’ life was nothing short of adventurous. He served as driver in an artillery company during the Boer War. He wrote several books, the most famous being The Riddle of the Sands, published in 1903. It is widely regarded as the first espionage novel which inspired the popular genre of the spy novel. His growing support for and commitment to Irish Home Rule led to him and his wife, Molly, smuggling German rifles to the Irish Volunteers on their own yacht just months before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 . During the war he served in both the Royal Navy and Royal Airforce, and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. The policies of the British Government in Ireland during the war, from the suppression of the Easter Rising in 1916 and the execution of its leaders, to the proposal to extend conscription to Ireland, deeply upset Childers. On his discharge in 1919 he moved to Ireland, committing himself fully to Irish independence. He got involved in the self-declared Irish Government where he was appointed director of publicity for the First Irish Parliament, Dáil Éireann, and he was elected to the second Dáil in 1921. At the conclusion of the Irish War of Independence in 1921, he was selected to be a member of the delegation sent to negotiate peace terms with the British Government. Childers was strongly opposed to the terms agreed in the Anglo-Irish treaty because of its failure to achieve a fully independent Irish Republic. The treaty was ratified by the Dáil in January 1922, leading to bitter divisions throughout the country and eventually to the outbreak of civil war in June 1922. Childers sided with the anti-treaty Irish Republican Army and worked on producing its newspaper, War News.
In August 1922 Michael Collins, chairman of the Free State government and commander-in-chief of the National Army, was killed in an IRA ambush. In response, the government passed emergency legislation giving the army power to try, sentence, and punish those aiding and abetting attacks on the National Forces and those caught in possession of unauthorised firearms. It was under this legislation that Childers was arrested. He was tried by a military court and sentenced to death for possession of a small semi-automatic pistol which ironically had been gifted to him by his former friend, Michael Collins. He was buried at Beggars Bush Barracks, but 1923 was reinterred in the Republican Plot in Glasnevin Cemetery.
As well as the note mentioned above, the Trinity College Archive also holds the papers of Erskine Childers which include correspondence, printed material, writings, personal papers, and photographs documenting his life in England.
Trinity College Library, Cambridge 
Thank you for this information. These materials could be the basis for an important political and historical study of the Irish independence movement, and could be relevant to similar efforts in Scotland today. D.Phil topic, anyone?