Shifting Sands - Frank McNally on the dramatic real-life plot twist of Erskine Childers

“I have read of men who, when forced by their calling to live for long periods in utter solitude – save for a few black faces – have made it a rule to dress regularly for dinner in order to retain their self-respect and prevent a relapse into barbarism.”

So runs the first line of Erskine Childers’s spy novel The Riddle of the Sands, establishing the character of his narrator: a young, complacent (and mildly racist) official of the British Foreign Office at the height of empire.

But the book’s key line was arguably its last, rounding off an editorial postscript at time of publication, March 1903. There, the author abandons the cover of fiction, used in his tale of a thwarted German plan to invade England, and asks:

“Is it not becoming patent that the time has come for training all Englishmen systematically either for the sea or for the rifle?”

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The novel was an immediate and huge success, especially in the years before the first World War, although it has never been out of print since either. In combining fiction with a mass of authentic detail, it also led the way for a new literary genre, inspiring John le Carré and many others.

But it had enormous political influence too. Until the 1890s, Britain’s favourite enemy in Europe remained, as it had long been, France. The Riddle of the Sands marked a shift in perception towards a new and bigger threat: Germany.

Among the results was the foundation in 1905 of The Legion of Frontiersmen, a civilian “field intelligence corps” for defence of the empire. It invited membership from “men of good conduct who have frontier, military, or sea training”. Childers himself became secretary of the maritime branch.

Politicians also took his novel to heart. Winston Churchill is said to have credited it with persuading the Royal Navy to establish bases in Scotland (although in that same postscript, Childers writes approvingly that a new base is already planned for the Firth of Forth, and regrets only that it will take 10 years).

But soon after foreseeing the first World War and warning Britain how to prepare, the patriotic Childers was undergoing the sort of personal transformation that even a good spy novelist might struggle to make credible. In some ways he turned into a real-life Dollmann, the turncoat English villain of his book.

Having started out a “hide-bound Tory” and unionist, born in London’s Mayfair, he became first a convert to Irish Home Rule, then used his maritime skills to smuggle German rifles into Ireland, and completed his transformation as a hardline republican who fiercely opposed the 1921 Treaty, having been (non-voting) secretary to the negotiating team.

It was Childers’s ironic fate, for a skilled fiction writer, that he never fully persuaded some of his would-be allies in Ireland of his new credentials.

Arthur Griffith was suspicious. And according to his fellow writer, Frank O’Connor, even colleagues in the anti-Treaty IRA were in the habit of calling him “that Bloody Englishman”, considering him to be too notorious to be of practical use.

On the other hand, Churchill had no trouble believing the change of heart, or its (malign as he believed) effectiveness. While Childers awaited eventual execution by Free State forces in November 1922, having been arrested for possession of a revolver given to him by Michael Collins, Churchill prompted that verdict with his own:

“No man has done more harm [to] the common people of Ireland than this strange being, actuated by a deadly and malignant hatred for the land of his birth.”

Childers was famously fearless at the end, shaking hands with each member of his firing squad, then advising them: “Take a step or two forward, lads, it will be easier that way.” Éamon de Valera eulogised: “He died the Prince he was” and added: “Of all the men I ever met . . . he was the noblest”.

A more backhanded compliment came in the 1947 memoirs of Maurice Headlam, a British civil servant in Dublin from 1912-1920.

Considering himself at home in Ireland, Headlam was offended once when an Anglo-Irish female acquaintance, who spent most of her time in London, greeted him condescendingly with: “you English are wonderful.”

He later used this trick on Childers and claimed it always annoyed him. “With all his cleverness and bravery he was a simple soul, and […]I never failed to make him ‘rise’, like an unsophisticated trout, by [addressing him] as ‘you English’.”

Childers would then protest the many years he had spent here and the fact that his mother was Irish. “At any rate,” concluded the arch-imperialist Headlam, dismissing both the dead man and the legitimacy of the State that had taken his life, “it was not the ‘English’ who murdered him.”