94

Sir Roger Casement

1864–1916

 

A figure of controversy in his own lifetime, Sir Roger Casement is even more controversial today.  Before his execution in 1916 the controversy surrounded both his work as a diplomat and his activities as an Irish republican.  Now the focus is on the nature of his sexuality, and the authenticity of his notorious Black Diaries.  But the continuing influence and future reputation of Casement will depend on a reappraisal of him as a most unusual person - a gay Irish patriot.  Already acclaimed as a hero of the Easter Rising, in this role we are only beginning to understand him.

      Though he was born in Sandycove, outside Dublin (on 1st September 1864), Roger Casement was an Ulsterman, and was reared in the north, being educated at Ballymena Academy.  Going to sea, he went to Africa with the merchant marine in 1884.  There he eventually joined the British Colonial Service in 1894.

      He was posted to far parts of Africa in the consular service.  In 1904 he made an official report to the British Parliament on the inhuman treatment of black workers in the remoter parts of the Congo Free State (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), then a personal domain of King Leopold of Belgium.  This report caused an international scandal, and led to the Belgian government taking over the administration of the colony from the king.

      Casement was then posted to South America, where he conducted a similar inquiry into the treatment of British West Indian workers of the wild rubber workings on the upper reaches of the Putumayo River, on the border of Ecuador and Peru.  Here rubber bosses ran the whole district with no regard to proper law and order.  Though he was empowered only to look into how the West Indian blacks were being treated, Casement was equally concerned about the treatment of the amerindians, who were little more than the brutalized slaves of the rubber companies.  His report causes another international outcry when it was released in 1912.  For these services Casement was knighted by the king.  He retired from the colonial service in 1912.

      By now his interests were engaged with Ireland and its affairs.  He joined the Irish National Volunteers when they were set up in 1913, and was involved in the importation of guns from Germany in 1914.  Thinking that the war would be a short one, like the Franco-Prussian war of 1871, he travelled to Berlin by way of Norway, to plead the case of Irish revolutionaries for military aid.

      He toured the prisoner of war camps to persuade Irish soldiers captured by the Germans to join a putative Irish brigade effectively in the service of the German Empire.  (Many of these would have been poor Dubliners who may have heard of the banner Connolly had strung across the front of Liberty Hall: 'We serve neither king nor kaiser, but Ireland.')  He found few to follow him.

      In April 1916 the German government at last dispatched a cargo boat, the Aud, to Ireland with a cargo of guns and ammunition.  Casement followed in a submarine.  He landed at night on Banna Strand, outside Tralee, and hid in an ancient fort, where he was arrested the next morning by the local police.  Meanwhile, the Aud failed to make contact with the local republicans, whom Casement intended to alert.  It was sighted by the British navy and had to be blown up by her crew to avoid capture.

      Within hours of his arrest, Casement was sent to London for interrogation.  Police had raided his flat in London and seized his papers.  Left among these, they alleged, were a series of diaries which revealed that Casement had for many years been an active homosexual.  Sexual relations between men was then a serious offence, but the charges laid against him were far more serious.  Under a medieval act he was charged with the treasonable offence of aiding and giving comfort to the king's enemies.

      He was duly convicted.  A campaign for his reprieve from a death sentence was begun and was backed by many influential people in England, Ireland, and the United States.  His supporters included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and GEORGE BERNARD SHAW [49].  To counter this campaign, the British authorities called in the American ambassador and some British notables, and showed them either pages removed from the diaries or typed-up extracts - accounts differ as to the actual appearance of the documents.  No-one seems to have been shown the actual diaries themselves, and this later aroused the serious suspicion of fraud.

      Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said that as a doctor he was unsurprised by such things, and that treason was a more serious matter in any case, but he based his view of the affair on his opinion that Casement, whom he had known well at the time of the Congo revelations, was now quite insane.  Others, however, were shocked, and silenced.

      Casement was hanged in Pentonville Gaol on 3rd August 1916; his body was buried within the jail.  In March 1965, the year before the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising, his remains were brought back to Ireland and were reinterred with state honours among other Irish patriots in Glasnevin Cemetery.

      For most Irish people, Casement's fame rested on his role as one of the republican patriots of 1916, but the scandal of the diaries remained.  Many Irish writers, including W.B. YEATS [8] were convinced that the diaries produced in 1916 had been forged by the British Secret Service to discredit Casement with the Irish-American community; they simply could not countenance the possibility that the documents might be genuine.

      In the 1920s a set of the typed copies of the diaries had been passed to a British journalist, Peter Singleton-Gates, but he was prevented by the invocation of secrecy laws from publishing them.  At the time, this may have been as much to save the embarrassment of the Irish Free State government as to hide the guilt of the British authorities.  However, he retained the copies.  In 1959 he eventually issued them through a Paris publisher (better known for the first edition of Lolita) under the rather lurid title of The Black Diaries of Sir Roger Casement.  Further controversy followed, which eventually ended with the disputed documents being placed in the British Public Record Office.  Though they could be read, they could only be given limited technical examination.

      More recently, new editions of the diaries relating to the investigation of the Putumayo incident have been published, against causing controversy.  There seems little doubt that the diaries are genuine.  What should now concern the admirers of Casement is the totality of his public life rather than the details of his sex life.  Though he died for Ireland, his real life had been devoted to the welfare of Africans and Indians, in an effort to prevent them from being mercilessly exploited.  On the basis of the diaries, his love for them seems to have arisen initially from sexual admiration.  There would be nothing wrong with this, but it is the heroism of his campaign rather than the nature of his private life that should concern the future.

      In his lifetime, Casement exerted great influence in ameliorating conditions in wretched parts of the world - one of them the very 'heart of darkness' which Conrad wrote of.  He will remain a hero to those who work to free the world of slavery and exploitation.