Dictionary of Literary Biography on (Robert) Erskine Childers
Erskine Childers intended The Riddle of the Sands (1903) to be a warning, in the guise of a light adventure story, about England's vulnerability to invasion by sea. Today it is viewed by many as the first important British spy novel, a genre that runs from Childers to John Le Carré. Its steady popularity is reflected in numerous reprintings, including translation into French, American republication (1976), and a British film version (1979).
Robert Erskine Childers was born in London on 25 June 1870, the son of Anna Mary Henrietta Barton Childers and Robert Caesar Childers, the famous Orientalist. On the death of his father from consumption in 1876, Childers was sent from England to live with relatives at Glendalough House, County Wicklow, Ireland. He seemed destined to enjoy the privileged life of an Anglo-Irish gentleman. Educated at Haileybury and Trinity College, Cambridge, he became a clerk in the House of Commons and spent weekends indulging his craving for adventure and love of the sea with solitary sails in the Thames estuary. In the summer of 1897 he made the first of six cruises along the Dutch, German, and Danish coasts and in the North Sea that provided intimate knowledge of the Frisian Islands, the setting for The Riddle of the Sands.
He was among the first to join the City Imperial Volunteers for the Boer War. In the Ranks of the C.I.V. (1900), his first published book, was the personal record of his experiences. He coauthored with Basil Williams, the official history of his company, The H.A.C. in South Africa (1903), and edited volume five of The Times History of the War in South Africa (1907). He also wrote War and the Arne Blanche (1910) and German Influence on British Calvary (1911), two books arguing for modern weapons and training.
He began writing The Riddle of the Sands in the winter of 1901. In September 1903 on a visit to Massachusetts he met Mary Alden (Molly) Osgood. They were married in Boston on 5 January 1904 and returned to England. The couple had two sons, Robert and Erskine (elected president of Ireland in 1973).
Although of a unionist family, Childers came back from the Boer War with inclinations toward home rule for Ireland. His argument for this position, The Framework of Home Rule, was published in 1911. In July 1914 after passage of Herbert Asquith's home rule bill and the subsequent arming of the Ulster Volunteers, Childers and his wife ran their yacht, the Asgard, laden with Mauser rifles and ammunition, from Hamburg into Howth Harbor north of Dublin and delivered to waiting Irish Volunteers arms that were used in the 1916 Rising of Easter. After distinguished service in the British Army in World War I, Childers returned to Ireland to become immersed in the cause of Irish independence. A member of the Irish Treaty delegation to London in 1921, he renounced the treaty establishing the separation of Ireland into north and south and sided with Eamon de Valera in the civil war. He was captured by Free State soldiers and condemned to death. Robert Erskine Childers died on 24 November 1922 before a Free State firing squad in Dublin after he had shaken hands with his executioners and asked them to step closer.
In The Riddle of the Sands Childers places at nautical play in the Baltic, North Sea, and Frisian Sands two Oxonians, Carruthers and Davies. A deadly game ensues in which they uncover a sinister scheme that threatens the security of England. Carruthers, a snobbish, self-absorbed Foreign Office dandy, affects ennui with duties that leave him alone in an empty London in September to move in a dignified rut between club and chambers. With lofty condescension, for he regards Davies as an indifferent dresser and eccentric, boring nonentity, he accepts an invitation to join him on his Dulcibella, ostensibly to sail and shoot ducks in the Baltic.
Carruthers's kit contains "two faultless pairs of white flannels" when he boards the seven-ton, thirty-foot, flat-bottomed craft that offers, instead of the "creamy purity of Cowes," the reek of "paraffin, past cookery, tobacco and tar" and impossibly cramped and grimy quarters. Despite discomfort Carruthers comes to respect Davies, "a sun-burnt, brine-burnt zealot who draws inspiration from the wind and spray" and who "communed with his tiller." Such nautical talk combined with the technical details of inshore sailing packed into Childers's story attracted and held the interest and admiration of sailor readers. Davies's literary hobby is naval warfare, represented in part by a worn copy of Alfred T. Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power on History, 1660-1783 (1890) on his shelf, a clue to those readers who were Whitehall and Admiralty strategists that this book was more than an adventure yarn.
Various clues suggest that Davies has invited Carruthers for more than duck hunting. Carruthers is taken aback when his host declares there are no ducks in the Baltic and proposes that they sail into the North Sea and explore the sandbanks and shallow channels of the Dutch and North German coasts. Carruthers gives skeptical consent to this dangerous passage in the course of which Davies confesses that he had sailed the same waters earlier in the year and had encountered a luxurious German yacht, the Medusa, whose master is a mysterious figure named Dollmann. On pretense of guiding Davies on a shortcut through the sands, Dollmann had raced ahead in the Medusa to disappear in the fog, leaving Davies and the Dulcibella stranded and in imminent danger of breaking up. Convinced that Dollmann had tried to murder him, Davies has resolved to return and confront the man whom he believes to be an Englishman in German service. Why did Dollmann try to lead him to his death? Davies suspects the motive was to prevent discovery of vital information about this flat and dreary coast that seemingly has no strategic importance.
This, then, is the riddle of the sands, and Davies realized that to solve it he needed Carruthers, who knew the German language and the rudiments of sailing. For Davies the trip is "a little secret service on the high seas"; for Carruthers it becomes medieval romance, "the gay pursuit of a perilous quest" that has injected welcome excitement into his dull life as a haunter of clubs, a diner-out and dancer, a smug Foreign Service junior careerist who had nothing but contempt for meddlesome alarmist journalists.
But Carruthers finds that "to reduce a romantic ideal to a working plan is a very difficult thing." The sudden revelation of Dollmann's true identity, Davies's infatuation with Dollmann's daughter (inserted grudgingly in revision by Childers in response to his publisher's insistence that the story contain "love interest"), and the ominous presence of a commander in the Imperial German Navy force Carruthers to the foreground to become the tactician of the pair. Davies, the remarkably self-possessed sailor, begins to lose control when the action shifts from sea to land. It is Carruthers who figures out connections, makes associations, and fits clues into meaningful theories. Disguised as a common seaman, Carruthers penetrates the veil of secrecy with which the Germans have surrounded their scheme to invade England by landing on the flat Lincolnshire coast, north of The Wash. Singlemindedly he pursues his objective: "to get Dollmann, secrets and all, daughter and all, away from Germany altogether." On the hairbreadth perilous homeward journey Dollmann (revealed to be Lt. "X", a disgraced British naval officer) jumps into the sea rather than face humiliation.
In a long "Epilogue" Childers presents skeptical readers, who may fear that "a baseless romance has been foisted on them," with a half-burned "memorandum" in cipher recovered from Dollmann's stove. It contains the details of the German invasion plan. "Perfect organization and perfect secrecy" underlie the riddle of the sands, writes Childers, and no one should doubt the German capacity for executing the plan at the critical moment when Germany might have little to lose and much to gain.
To its author's surprise The Riddle of the Sands met with immediate public and critical approval. Convinced of England's vulnerability to an invasion launched by Germany from the desolate Frisian sands, Childers had registered his concern in an adventure story based on firsthand observations set down in logbooks in the years he had cruised those shoals. Many of the book's minor characters are based on real-life encounters during those excursions, and the main figures of Carruthers and Davies, two English innocents abroad, appealed to readers as first they cope with the dangers of the sea and then find themselves involved in solving a riddle that is fraught with explosive geopolitical implications. For a decade The Riddle of the Sands helped fuel a national debate on England's supposed state of military unreadiness. For yachtsmen it remained an excellent tale of men against the sea, and in its many republications the book has continued to attract readers who admire a good spy story.
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