Hugh Culling Eardley Childers (25 June 1827 – 29 January 1896) was a British Liberal statesman of the nineteenth century.

Childers then decided to seek a career in Australia and on 26 October 1850 arrived in Melbourne, Victoria along with his wife Emily Walker.

[4] Childers was elected to the inaugural Victorian Legislative Assembly for Portland in November 1856, a seat he held until resigning in February 1857.

"[5] He "initiated a determined programme of cost and manpower reductions, fully backed by the Prime Minister, Gladstone described him [Childers] as 'a man likely to scan with a rigid eye the civil expenses of the Naval Service'.

"[5] Childers was responsible for the construction of HMS Captain in defiance of the advice of his professional advisers, the Controller (Robinson) and the Chief Constructor Edward James Reed.

"[5] Childers "faced strong criticism following the Court Martial on the loss of HMS Captain, and attempted to clear his name with a 359-page memorandum, a move described as "dubious public ethics".

Vice Admiral Sir Robert Spencer Robinson wrote 'His endeavors were directed to throw the blame which might be supposed to attach to himself on those who had throughout expressed their disapproval of such methods of construction'."

He therefore had to bear responsibility for cuts in arms expenditure, a policy that provoked controversy when Britain began fighting; first the Boers in South Africa in 1880 and then the invasion of Egypt in 1882.

At the subsequent election in December 1885 Childers lost his Pontefract seat, but returned as an independent Home Ruler for Edinburgh South (one of the few Liberals who adopted this policy before Gladstone's conversion in 1886).

This found that, compared to the rest of the United Kingdom, Ireland had been overtaxed on a per capita basis by some £2 or £3 million annually in previous decades.

This economic reality forced the initial Irish Free State government to cut the old age pension from five to four shillings.

In 1932 on the start of the Anglo-Irish Trade War, the Irish government made a claim for £400 million in respect of past overtaxation, amongst others, but this was not mentioned when the dispute was settled in 1938.

[citation needed] Towards the end of his ministerial career "HCE" Childers was known for his girth, and so acquired the nickname "Here Comes Everybody", which was later used as a motif in Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.