EXECUTION OF ERSKINE CHILDERS

SHOT AT DAYBREAK.

REPRISALS FEARED.

Mr. Erskine Childers is no more. He paid the penalty of his devotion to the desperate cause of the Irish Republican party at seven o’clock this morning. The facts are set forth coldly in the words of the official report issued by the National Army Headquarters. It runs: Mr. Erskine Childers was tried by a military court at Portobello barracks, Dublin, on Nov. 17, 1922, and charged with having possession, without proper authority, of an automatic pistol when apprehended by a party of National forces on Nov. 10, 1922, at Annamoe, Co. Wicklow. The accused was found guilty and sentenced to death. The finding and sentence were duly confirmed, and the execution was carried out this morning at seven o’clock.

Mr. Childers held the rank of staff captain in the Irish Republican army, and was one of the most daring and resourceful of the band that took their stand with Mr. De Valera. He was the ablest and most intrepid of the Provisional Government’s opponents. No other man in recent Irish movements has shown the same resource and courage in the difficult domains of propaganda and action. Mistaken, wrong he may have been, but was consistent to a fault, and he has sealed his conviction with his blood. One cannot but regret that the rare qualities he displayed were not exerted in a higher cause.

He was educated at Haileybury and Trinity College, Cambridge. He joined the staff in the Committee Office in the House of Commons in 1895. While on the House of Commons staff he fought on the British side during the Boer War, subsequently publishing a book entitled “In the Ranks of the C.I.V.” His name came into prominence with a novel, “The Riddle of the Sands,” in which he described German preparations among the inlets and channels on the coasts of Holland and Schleswig Holstein for an invasion of England.

After the Great War broke out he placed his services at the disposal of the authorities and was gazetted to the R.N.A.S., being appointed a navigating lieutenant to the Engadine. He did good work and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for conspicuous gallantry during an air attack on German blast furnaces at Burbach when he fought five engagements with enemy aircraft.

He had long been an ardent Home Ruler, and was already the author of a work, “The Framework of Home Rule”. In 1917 he acted as one of the secretaries of the Irish Convention, on the possibility of an agreement between North and South. As the Sinn Fein party refused to have anything to do with the Convention, Childers’s presence indicates that at that time he was a Constitutional Nationalist. But to an increasing extent he came under the influence of Mr. De Valera, and was swept into the revolutionary movement

Mr. Childers had led some of the most daring of the Republican exploits against the Free State forces. He was taken, not in action, but at the residence of his cousin, Mr. Barton, in county Wicklow, on the morning of Nov. 10. Troops went to Annamore House and surrounded it, and Mr. Childers tried to draw a Colt revolver to defend himself, but soon was overpowered.

The news created some anxiety, for not a few believed that the Republicans to-night or by to-morrow at the latest, would take measures of reprisal. This view was strengthened by last night’s experience, for shortly after nine o’clock promiscuous shooting took place in the streets of Dublin, and continued until after midnight. Various military posts, both in the centre of the city and on the outskirts, were attacked with more or less ferocity.