Early Life
Childers was born in the Embankment Gardens, London, to a Protestant family originally from Glendalough, Ireland. Although also born in England, his father, Robert Erskine Childers, had had an Irish mother and had been raised by an uncle in County Wicklow, and after the First World War took his family to live there. His mother, Mary Alden Childers was a Bostonian whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower. Robert Erskine Childers and his wife, Mary, later emerged as prominent and outspoken Irish Republican opponents of the political settlement with Britain which resulted in the establishment of the Irish Free State. Childers was educated at Gresham's School, Holt, and the University of Cambridge, hence his striking British upper class accent. In 1922, when Childers was sixteen, his father was executed by the new Irish Free State on politically-inspired charges of gun-possession.The pistol he had been found with had been given to him by Michael Collins. Before his execution, in a spirit of reconciliation, the older Childers obtained a promise from his son to seek out and shake the hand of every man who had signed the death warrant. After attending his father's funeral, Childers returned to Gresham's, then two years later he went on to Trinity College, Cambridge.
Read more about this topic: Erskine Hamilton Childers
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“There’s something tragic in the fate of almost every person—it’s just that the tragic is often concealed from a person by the banal surface of life.... A woman will complain of indigestion and not even know that what she means is that her whole life has been shattered.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)