Robert Erskine Childers — author, sailor, and passionate Irish republican — was executed by firing squad on 24 November 1922, at Beggars Bush Barracks, Dublin, on the order of the Provisional Government he had opposed. He was forty-two years old. His execution was one of the most controversial acts of the Civil War period, carried out just weeks after the government had introduced emergency powers allowing execution for possession of arms.
Family tradition holds that Albert Power made a death mask of Childers in the aftermath of his execution, adding him to the sequence of masks he made of Cathal Brugha, Arthur Griffith, and Michael Collins in the same year. This claim is not yet independently confirmed. No photograph of an Albert Power death mask of the elder Erskine Childers has been located in the family archive, and a search of National Museum of Ireland and other public collection records did not turn up a corroborating record.
Significance, if confirmed: would form part of the most concentrated sequence of revolutionary death masks ever made in Ireland — four major figures of the independence movement, all within months of each other in 1922.
Erskine Childers’s son, also named Erskine Childers, later became the fourth President of Ireland (1973–1974) — a separate person from the subject of this entry.