Erroll Collins

Her 1944 Mariners of Space is for its time a very advanced piece of science fiction. It envisages a future world where there were populations on Mars and Venus as well as Earth flying around the solar system, and, inevitably, getting into wars. As it was serialised in the then popular Boy's Own Paper it was read widely and must have influenced many boys of that generation to take an interest in the possibility of space travel. To some extent it anticipates the later work of Robert A. Heinlein, though it is clearly just aimed at boys. It was published by Lutterworth Press in hardback in 1949.

In The Secret of Rosrnerstrand, 1941, Redknap also made a guess about what the German Army was up to on the sea bed. In this novel, described by the publisher as a prophetic, thrilling, ominous tale of modern warfare, the Nazis develop an under-water base from which submarines and troop carriers fitted onto tractors prepare for a sea-bed invasion of Britain. Even she was surprised when in 1957, when vast quantities of captured Nazi documents were published and it was revealed that they had just such a project on the drawing board.

Redknap never married. Instead she took on the role of looking after her younger siblings and father, after her mother died and then later she looked after her brother Earnest. He had had a notable war record enlisting in the army in 1939 and becoming a commando, taking part in the 1940 raid on the Lofoten Islands. Later he became a glider and small plane pilot in the Glider Pilot Regiment being discharged after the war with the rank of Staff Sergeant. He then worked in research for the Paint Research Association. He died in 1979 and his sister lived on until 1991 dying alone in her home in Isleworth on 11 March.

Erroll Collins (pseudonym of Ellen Edith Hannah Redknap, 15 April 1906 – 11 March 1991) was a British writer active during the 1940s, specialising in adventure and science fiction for boys. Ellen Redknap wrote under several other names.

Collins was born Ellen Edith Hannah Redknap in 1906 in Shadwell, London, the eldest of four children and daughter of Frederick Redknap (1887–1950), a master-plumber. As a child she set such a good example to her younger siblings, she was called "Goody Two Shoes" and as such by many in the family, in the last years of her life, she was known and addressed as Auntie Goody. As a child she had been an excellent pianist, but never played again after the death of her mother in 1934. She went to St. Mary's College on the Twickenham Road (possibly now known as Gumley school) where even then she wanted to write. She also enjoyed painting in watercolours occasionally. She was a keen breeder of terrapins and would often have one in her apron as she went about the housework. She had a very broad general knowledge and read a great deal, after she died one room was almost impossible to enter due to there being more than two thousand books packed floor to ceiling.