Molly Childers, brought up in a family that traced its roots to the "Mayflower", also influenced her husband's outlook on the right of Britain to rule other countries. The ground was well prepared, then, when in the summer of 1908 he and his cousin Robert Barton took a holiday motor tour inspecting agricultural co-operatives in the south and west of Ireland, areas ravaged with poverty. "I have come back," he wrote to Basil Williams, "finally and immutably a convert to Home Rule... though we both grew up steeped in the most irreconcilable sort of Unionism."