King George V conferred an MBE on her for this work. She was also awarded the Médaille de la Reine Elisabeth from Queen Elisabeth of Belgium. She and her husband were members of the Irish White Cross Society, which existed before the Irish Red Cross, she as a trustee, and he as a member of its executive committee. Activist Maud Gonne was also a member of this organisation. From 1916 to 1918, Childers was honorary secretary of the Chelsea War Refugees Fund. After the Great War, in 1920, she joined the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), one of the world's oldest peace organisations, later to be merged into the UNESCO of the United Nations. Ireland and Republicanism She was central to the July 1914 Irish Volunteers Howth gun-running on her and her husband's yacht Asgard. A photograph taken at the time with fellow-sailor Mary Spring Rice shows her beside the rifles and ammunition boxes. Allegation of spying In 2006, historian Michael T. Foy published a book, Michael Collins's Intelligence War: The Struggle Between The British and the IRA 1919–1921, in which he suggested that Childers might have been a spy for the British during the Irish War of Independence. Foy speculated that she had volunteered for British intelligence before the couple moved to Ireland in 1918. The claim was described by reviewers in Irish newspapers as "dramatic", "sensational" and "a bottle of smoke". The author had discovered in the British national archives a series of intelligence reports to indicate that a woman with high-level access to Sinn Féin had been passing intelligence to the British forces. However, the name of the agent had been obscured by blue pencil. The author noted circumstantial evidence which, in his opinion, suggested that Childers might have been the spy, including the assertion that she had not shared her husband's enthusiasm for Irish independence and the person's use of American phraseology. He proposed that Childers had "the qualities to carry off such a dangerous role" and that she "consistently displayed intelligence, courage, decisiveness and single-minded determination", but acknowledged that there was no conclusive evidence. However, Foy went beyond scholarly speculation when he claimed that she was the only person who could fit the profile of the spy. Nessa Childers, the daughter of Childers' son President Erskine Hamilton Childers, dismissed the evidence as "circumstantial", saying in a television interview that "it just doesn't