In an interview on Victorian Adventures

We come to your final choice, The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers.

It’s the Great Game again, but this time it is played out in a small sailing boat on the Frisian Coast in Germany around 1900. It is a marvellous read and it was written by an extraordinary man. Erskine Childers went to Trinity College, Cambridge, became a civil servant, joined the Royal Navy in the First World War, supported Irish independence, smuggled arms into Ireland, and was shot during the Irish Civil War by an Irish firing squad. His son became the president of Ireland.

However this book has nothing to do with Ireland. Rather it is a fictional account of a German plan to mount a surprise invasion of Britain. The plot is uncovered by two young Englishman on a sailing holiday.

It’s a great spy story and a classic description of sailing small boats. I first read it when I was in the army in Germany during the 1970s. I’ve always kept a copy – this is my tenth because I keep giving it away to friends.

In an interview on the Secret Service

Tell me about your first book, The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers, which is seen by some as the first modern spy thriller and said to have inspired the likes of Graham Greene and John le Carré. 

Yes, it is a wonderful book both for the espionage aficionado and also for the yachtsman. It testifies to the fact that if you are writing any novel with a technical basis, it is good to do research and get it right. This is the only novel he wrote; he went on to become a very committed political fellow.

It is basically a serious novel about a sailor called Davies who invites a friend to join him sailing around the German coast from the Baltic to the North Sea. The narrator is Carruthers, a civil servant who works in the Foreign Office, and he is at a loose end in August because everyone has gone away. Suddenly he gets this invitation to go yachting from someone he used to be at university with. He packs his white shoes, cap, blazer and white trousers, only to discover when he gets there that this is not how it is going to be. Instead it is a rather dirty, two-man sailing boat. What they do is sail around the Frisian Islands and discover that the Germans have been building up resources to invade England. So there is this kind of mystery gradually unfolding as they explore those sandy channels in Germany’s North Sea coast.

Published in 1903, the book was one of a series of scares that alerted the British public about the possibility that Germany might be up to no good. At this stage Germany was England’s chief European challenger. Safely protected by living on an island, the British traditionally didn’t get much involved with the continent of Europe and remained in ‘splendid isolation’, secured by the Royal Navy, the greatest in the world. But after Germany united in 1871 it began to take on global ambitions and try to emulate Britain by looking for colonies all over the world. And they began to build a world-class navy that many suspected was to use against Britain. There is this idea that they are sending in spies to Britain to work out their weaknesses. And there is a concern there might be a surprise attack on Britain’s undefended East Coast. This novel is one of the first that focused people’s attention on this. 

By 1909 these worries have percolated into some members of the government, and one way of meeting the danger was to set up a new Secret Service with a home department to look for German spies in Britain (which turned into MI5) and a foreign department (which turned into MI6). They were both founded at the same time in October 1909. And the MI6 job is, of course, to spy on Germans in Germany and see about German capabilities and intentions.