Historic house: Childers’ revolver stored in a secret compartment in the stairs

Robert Erskine Childers is associated with 12 Bushy Park Road and also Glendalough House, which belonged to his mother’s family the Bartons in Annamoe, Co Wicklow, where he spent some of his childhood and where he was arrested in 1922.

Childers, a soldier, journalist, novelist and nationalist met his wife Mary (Molly) Alden Osgood in Boston in 1910, and received yacht, The Asgard, as a wedding present from the Osgoods.

A Unionist early in life he came to embrace Irish nationalism transporting guns for the Irish volunteers aboard the Asgard to Howth on July 26th 1914, some of which were used in the 1916 Rising. The Asgard is now on permanent display in Collins Barracks, Dublin.

In 1919, he returned to Ireland with his wife and two sons, Erskine and Robert, and while staying at Glendalough House he met Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera.

He was appointed director of publicity for the first Dáil and it is believed to be around this time that Collins gave Childers a small Spanish revolver that he always kept on his person. This revolver was stored in a secret compartment in a stair tread leading from the hall return to the first floor at 12 Bushy Park Road, Rathgar, a redbrick property the Childers moved into in March 1920. The house became a Republican press bureau and general post office for Dáil interdepartmental material, while Molly hosted foreign correspondents in the drawing room. It was raided for the first time in 1920.

One of the principal secretaries to the Irish delegation in London during the Treaty negotiations in 1921, Childers strongly opposed the Treaty, siding with de Valera against Collins.

In July 1922, the Bushy Park Road house was raided again and in his diary he wrote: “Bob caught. House watched. Constant alarm.”

Childers had been on the run for several months before his 1922 arrest. He was writing and editing An Phoblacht and sleeping at various safe houses. On November 10th he was at Glendalough House when it was raided. Childers is said to have emerged from his bedroom with the pistol Collins had given him drawn.

He was arrested and taken to Wicklow Gaol and on to Beggar’s Bush where he was executed on November 24th. He is buried in the Republican plot in Glasnevin Cemetery.