Erskine Childers was an amazing man. I don't use that word lightly. He was born in Mayfair in 1870, educated at Haileybury and then Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became chairman of the debating society and editor of the Cambridge Review, the university magazine. His father, an oriental scholar, died of tuberculosis when he was six; and his mother, who was from an Anglo-Irish landowning family, of the same disease when he was 11. After her death he would go to the family home in Glendalough in Ireland to stay during school holidays. He was a keen sportsman, in particular a rugby player, but sustained a sciatic injury, so he took up sailing. He taught himself in the Thames estuary, in 1895 he crossed the channel alone, and in 1897 made the first of many voyages to the Baltic, along the German coast and around the Frisian Islands (where the name, Frisby, comes from by the way). These trips along the German coastline would become the inspiration for his book,
Erskine Childers
Erskine Childers
Erskine Childers
Erskine Childers was an amazing man. I don't use that word lightly. He was born in Mayfair in 1870, educated at Haileybury and then Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became chairman of the debating society and editor of the Cambridge Review, the university magazine. His father, an oriental scholar, died of tuberculosis when he was six; and his mother, who was from an Anglo-Irish landowning family, of the same disease when he was 11. After her death he would go to the family home in Glendalough in Ireland to stay during school holidays. He was a keen sportsman, in particular a rugby player, but sustained a sciatic injury, so he took up sailing. He taught himself in the Thames estuary, in 1895 he crossed the channel alone, and in 1897 made the first of many voyages to the Baltic, along the German coast and around the Frisian Islands (where the name, Frisby, comes from by the way). These trips along the German coastline would become the inspiration for his book,