The Riddle of The Sands By Erskine Chiders

Saturday-Night Theatre: The Riddle of the Sands
Sat 8th Jan 1994, 19:50 on BBC Radio 4 FM

Erskine Childers's classic story, with Laurence Kennedy as Carruthers and Charles Simpson as Davies. Dramatised by Roderick Graham

Two young men go sailing for pleasure, unaware that they're sailing into the greatest danger they will ever know.

Director Jane Morgan

Carruthers: Laurence Kennedy
Davies: Charles Simpson
Dollman: Frederick Jaeger
Clara: Jo Unwin
Von Bruning: Wolf Kahler
Grimm: Michael Wolf
Bohm: Gertan Klauber
Bartels: John Baddeley
Kiel Clerk: Colin Pinney
Hawkins: Simon Treves

When Charles Carruthers accepts an invitation for a yachting and duck-shooting trip to the Frisian Islands from Arthur Davies, an old chum from his Oxford days, he has no idea their holiday will become a daredevil investigation into a German plot to invade Britain.

Out of context, the story of Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands sounds like a bog standard thriller, but that's because so many books are pale echoes of this exceptional novel.

Published in 1903, it predicted the threat of war with Germany and was so prescient in its identification of the British coast's defensive weaknesses that it influenced the siting of new naval bases.

It is also credited as an inspiration to everyone from John Buchan to Ken Follett. The writing is gripping and it's a marvel that Childers manages to make the minutiae of sailing and navigation so engrossing. … The Guardian, 2009

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