[Sir] Roger Casement (1864-1916)

Bibliographical details

Casement’s Blue Book on Putumayo: Miscellaneous No. 8 (1912) / Correspondence / respecting the /TREATMENT OF BRITISH COLONIAL SUBJECTS AND NATIVE INDIANS EMPLOYED IN THE COLLECTION OF RUBBER IN THE PUTUMAYO DISTRICT / Presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of His Majesty / London: Published by His Majesty’s Stationary Office / to be purchased, either directly or through any bookseller from WYMAN [London] ... OLIVER & BOYD [Edinburgh] ... PONSONBY [Dublin] / Printed by HARRISONS & SONS [London] [Cd 9366 Price 1s 5d. ] (See Angus Mitchell, ‘Ireland, South America, and the Forgotten History of Rubber’, in History Ireland (July/Aug. 2008), p.45.

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Commentary
See infra.

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Quotations
‘Sir Edward Grey is not a Liberal in any real meaning of the word. Can you imagine a real Liberal carrying out the Egyptian massacre - “executions” they called it - three years ago, when the pigeon shooting officers were avenged of a whole rural population by widespread public floggings and hangings. Can Liberalism be one thing in England and another in Egypt?’ (Quoted in J. Ardle McArdle, review of Séamus Ó Síocháin, Roger Casement: Imperialist, Rebel, Revolutionary, in Books Ireland, Summer 2008, p.140.)

On the Elgin marbles: ‘give back the Elgin marbles, let them lie / Unsullied, pure beneath the Attic sky / The smoky figures of our northern clime / More ruin work than all ancient time ive back the marbles let them vigil keep / Where art lies still over Phidias’ tomb.’ (Quoted by Patrick Comerford in The Irish Times, 4 Aug. 1998.)

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Irish blood (Letter to the Irish Independent, 1914): ‘If Irish blood is to be “the seal that will bring all Ireland together in one nation and in liberties equal and common to all” then let that blood be shed in Ireland, where alone it can be righteously shed to secure those liberties [...] let our graves be that patriot grass where alone the corpse of Irish nationality can spring to life.’ (Quoted in quoted in Brian Inglis, Roger Casement, London: Hodder & Stoughton 1973; cited in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 1991, Vol. 2, p.299.

Irish Language: ‘I bethought me that a people’s language was a living thing, and that it was a shameful thing for an Irishman to stand by and see the soul of his country being dragged out through his lips. I accordingly gave up my club in London, and devoted the amount of the annual subscription thus saved to a training college in Munster where Irish teachers are perfected in a fuller knowledge of, and a more scientific method of imparting, “kitchen Kaffir”.’ (‘On the Prosecution of Irish’, in H. O. Mackay, The Crime Against Europe, Dublin 1958, p.96; cited in Brian Ó Cuív, ‘Irish Literature and Language, 1845-1921’, William Vaughan, ed., A New History of Ireland, Vol. VI: 1870-1921, OUP 1996, p.410.)

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Diary entry (end of 1915): ‘I very much hope that peace would come [...] it is dreadful to think of all the world beginning the new year with nothing but death - killing and murdering wholesale, and destroying all that makes life happy [...]’ (Brian Inglis, op. cit., 1990; FDA2, p.305).

1916 Rising?: ‘The vast bulk of Irishmen are law-abiding and peace-loving. The will bitterly resent bloodshed and civil strife in Ireland - forced on, as will then seem apparent, by a filibustering expedition launched from Germany for that purpose. And in truth that is just what it is being sent for ... And if it becomes clear - as it surely will become clear - that Germmany tried to incite a revolt or “rising” in Ireland by a paltry gift of second-hand rifles put in the hands of excitable young men, all that is solid and respectable in Ireland will be moved to the deepest resentment - “pro-German” feeling today will be changed into wrath and contempt.’ (Diary of 5 April 1916, written in Berlin; quoted as epigraph [inter al.] to Francis Shaw, ‘The Canon of Irish History: A Challenge’, in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, LXI, 242 (Dublin 1972), p.116.)

John MacBride: ‘I begged him to write the story, he did splendid work there.’ Casement found MacBride ‘a congenial character ... he comes from Ballycastle - from Glenshesk - my own glen and I know his family.’ (Quoted in B. L. Reid, The Lives of Roger Casement, 1976, p.172, and Brian Inglis, Roger Casement, 1972, p.287; cited in Anthony J. Jordan, The Yeats Gonne MacBride Triangle, Westport 2000, p.113.) Note, however, that Casement is prob. mistaking his own native Ballycastle in Co. Antrim for Ballycastle in Co. Mayo, frequented by the MacBrides.

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Dock Speech (1): ‘Home Rule when it comes, if comes it does, will find an Ireland drained of all that is vital to its very existence - unless it be that unquenchable hope we build on the graves of the dead. We are told that if Irishmen go by the thousand to die, not for Ireland, but for Flanders, for Belgium, for a patch of sand on the deserts of Mesopotamia, or a rocky trench on the heights of Gallipoli, they are winning self-government for Ireland. But if they dare to dream even that freedom can be won at home by men resolved to fight for it there, then they are traitors to their country. But history is not so recorded in other lands. In Ireland alone in the twentieth century is loyalty held to be a crime. If loyalty be something less than love and more than law, then we have had enough of such loyalty for Ireland and Irishmen. If we are to be indicted as criminals, to be shot as murderers, to be imprisoned as convicts because our offence is that we love Ireland more than we value our lives, then I know not what virtue resides in any offer of self-government held out to brave men on such terms. Self-government is our right, a thing born in us at birth; a thing no more to be doled out to us or withheld from us by another people than the right to life itself - than the right to feel the sun or smell flowers, or to love our kind. Freedom is not something given by the English as a gift, but something which is mine and Ireland’s natural right.’ (Quoted in León Ó Bróin, Protestant Nationalists in Revolution Ireland: The Stopford Connection, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1985, p.135; see comment, infra.)

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Dock Speech (2): ‘Ireland, that has wronged no man, that has injured no land, that has sought no domination over others, Ireland is treated today among the nations of the world as if she was a convicted criminal. If it be treason to fight against such an unnatural fate as this, then 1 am proud to be a rebel, and shall cling to my’rebellion’with the last drop of my blood.’ (Quoted in in J. Ardle McArdle, review of Séamus Ó Síocháin, Roger Casement: Imperialist, Rebel, Revolutionary, in Books Ireland, Summer 2008, p.140; following ‘ ‘... on such terms.’)

Dock speech (3): ‘Judicial assassination today is reserved for only one race of the King’s subjects, for Irishmen [...] In Ireland alone in this twentieth century is loyalty held to be a crime.’ (Quoted in Richard Kain, Dublin in the Age of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce, Oklahoma UP 1962; Newton Abbot: David Charles 1972, p.124.) Kain adds: ‘Casement’s character is still debatable. No final decision has been reached regarding the insinuations of perversity, so unbelievable in a man of his character [...] Irish minds have never forgotten the Pigott forgeries about Parnell [...] He won the respect and friendship of Joseph Conrad, [Arthur] Conan Doyle, and many others.’ (Ibid., pp.124-25.)

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Last thoughts: ‘It is a strange strange fate, and now I stand face to face with death I feel just as if they were going to kill a boy - and my hands so free from blood and my heart always so compassionate and pitiful that I cannot comprehend how anyone wants to hang me.’ (Manuscript written in the condemned cell at Pentonville Prison [priv.]; a short memoir by Father James McCarroll, ref. Herbert O. Mackay, 18 Jan. 1950; quoted in Richard Kirkland, ’Rhetoric and (Mis)recognitions: Reading Casement’, in Irish Studies Review, August 1999, pp.168-69; p.168.)

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References
Seamus Deane , gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2, selects ‘Speech from the Dock’ [295-300]; further remarks: John Devoy, the man who arranged Casement’s meeting with the German ambassador in 1914, 265; Casement is the sixteenth of W. B. Yeats’s title, ‘Sixteen Dead Men’ [806]; In Yeats’s ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’, a characterisation of [Lavery’s] painting, ‘Casement upon trial, half hidden by the bars,/Guarded; ...’ [824]; Joseph Conrad’s refusal to sign a petition for clemency, 1012n, & 368-69, Biog. & Criticism [as above]; and note, 295: A. M. Sullivan conducted Casement’s defence, arguing against the inclusion of commas in the Act under which he was tried, but failed to drive home the point that Smith, the prosecuting lawyer, was equally as guilty as an Ulster Volunteer and gun-runner as Casement - or more so being guilty of rebellion in the King’s realm; Sullivan chary of alienating the authorities [Deane, Ed.]. But this is not Bantry A.M. Sullivan (d.1884). Further, quotes letter to the Irish Independent in 1914 [see supra].

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COPAC [Works] lists: The Crime against Ireland and how the War may right it. [Articles written from 1911 to 1914] (1914); The Crime against Europe. A possible outcome of the war of 1914 [2nd edn] (1915); Come combatte l’Inghilterra nella guerra attuale (1915); The Causes of the War and the Foundations of Peace. The Keeper of the Seas (1915); Gesammelte Schriften. Irland, Deutschland und die Freiheit der Meere und andere Aufsätze. [With a portrait] (1916); Putumayo, caucho y sangre: relación al Parlamento inglés (1911); C. Reginald Enock, ed. & intro., The Putumayo, the Devil’s Paradise. Travels in the Peruvian Amazon region, and an account of the atrocities committed upon the Indians therein ... Together with extracts from the report of Sir Roger Casement confirming the occurrences [1912] With 16 illustrations and a map; ilustraciones recabadas de fotografías por Segundo Obando (1985); D. Vangroenweghe, intro. & annot., Le Rapport Casement: rapport de R. Casement, consul britannique, sur son voyage dans le Haut-Congo [1903] with préface et règles d’édition par J. L. Vellut (1985); also, Three poems [reprinted from the “Irish Review”] (1916). Query: Alice Stopford-Greene, The Grey House on the Hill; or “Trust in God and Do the Right” (1874).

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COPAC [Commentary] lists: Alfred Noyes, The Accusing Ghost; or, Justice for Casement (1957) [With a portrait]; Angus Mitchell, ed. & intro., The Amazon journal of Roger Casement (1997); P. S. O’Hegarty, A Bibliography of Roger Casement. (1949); Peter Singleton-Gates & Maurice Girodias, comp. [ed], The Black Diaries. An account of Roger Casement’s life and times with a collection of his diaries and public writings. With illustrations, including portraits] (1959); Britisches gegen deutsches Imperium. Von einem amerikanischen Iren. [trans. from “British versus German Imperialism”] Mit einem Vorwort von Sir Roger Casement. (1915); Franz Rothenfelder, Casement in Deutschland, etc. (1917); Antonie Meyer, Der Casement-Prozess und seine Ürsachen. Zusammengestellt und aus dem Englischen übersetzt [.] Mit einem einleitenden Vorwort von Dr. Th. Schiemann [Universität Berlin] Dritte Auflage (1916); Captain Robert Monteith, Casement’s Last Adventure [... IRA] (1932), ill. with ports.; Do. [rev. & rewritten] (1953); Casement slanders refuted. / [by] Casement (1968); Roger Sawyer, Casement: The Flawed Hero (1984); Herbert O. Mackey, The crime against Europe: the writings and poetry of Roger Casement (1958); [G. B. Shaw,] A Discarded Defence of Roger Casement, suggested by Bernard Shaw. With an appendix of comments by Roger Casement [and an introduction by Clement Shorter] (1922); Francis Stuart, Der Fall Casement. Das Leben Sir Roger Casements und der Verleumdungsfeldzug des Secret Service ... Deutsch von Dr. Ruth Weiland (1940); H. Montgomery Hyde, Roger Casement: Famous trials [9th ser.], ed. James H. Hodge (1964), with revisions and the addition of a short extract from the 1911 Casement diary); William Joseph Marie Alois Maloney, The Forged Casement Diaries (1936), with plates, including a portrait, and Do. [new edn]; [Das geheimnisvolle Schiff] Kapitän Carl Spindler, Gun Running for Casement in the Easter Rebellion, 1916, trans. by Lieut. W. Montgomery [RNVR] and E. H. McGrath (1921), and Do. [new edn. The Phantom Ship (1929); Denis Rolleston Gwynn, The Life and Death of Roger Casement (1930), with plates, incl. ports.; Herbert Owen Mackey, The Life and Times of Roger Casement (1954), with plates, incl. ports.; Martin Daly, Memories of the Dead ... Some impressions of Roger Casement, Eamonn Ceannt, [and others], &c. (1920); Kapitän Carl Spindler, The Mystery of the Casement Ship, &c. (1931; another edn. 1965); Thomas Ashe, IRA Commandant, Oration delivered at Casement’s Fort, 1917 [on the ideals of Sir Roger Casement] (1917); James McCarroll, Pages taken from the manuscript written by Roger Casement in the condemned cell at Pentonville Prison [memoir] (1950); Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Petition to the Prime Minister on behalf of Roger Casement (1916); Padraic Colum and Edward J. O’Brien, eds., Poems of the Irish revolutionary brotherhood [Thomas MacDonagh, P.H. Pearse/Padraic MacPiarais, Joseph Mary Plunkett, Sir Roger Casement]; Montgomery Hyde, Roger Casement (1964); René Marie Maccoll, Roger Casement (1965); Brian Inglis, Roger Casement (1973); René Marie Maccoll, Roger Casement: A New Judgement (1956), with plates, incl. ports.; H. W. Guenther-Franken [pseud.], Roger Casement. Ein Leben für Irlands Freiheit. Von England verraten. (1940); Roger Sawyer, ed., Casement’s diaries: 1910, the black and the white (1997); Roger Casement [With a portrait] / [by] Parmiter, Geoffrey Vincent de Clifton; Frederick Grant (Dent 1936); Herbert Owen Mackey, Roger Casement: The Forged Diaries (1966); Louis G. Redmond Howard, Sir Roger Casement: a character sketch without prejudice (1916); Dr. Charles Emerson Curry, ed., Sir Roger Casement’s Diaries: “His mission to Germany and the Findlay Affair [Sir Mansfeldt de Cardonnel Findlay, GBE] (1922), with plates, incl. ports.]; Karin Wolf, Sir Roger Casement und die deutsch-irischen Beziehungen (1972); Some poems of Roger Casement (London: Fisher Unwin Dublin: Talbot Press 1918) [Fearon Collection]; Mario Borsa, La Tragica impresa di Sir Roger Casement (1934, with pls., incl. ports.]; George H. Knott, ed., Trial of Sir Roger Casement. [With plates, including a portrait] (1917).

Ulster Libraries: Belfast Public Library holds Some Poems (1918). Ulster University Library (Morris Collection) holds The Life and Death of Roger Casement (1930). Belfast Linenhall Library holds Roger Sawyer, The Flawed Hero (1984).

Cathach Books (Cat. 1996-97) lists Some Poems (Dublin: Talbot 1918), rep.

Hibernia Book (Cat. 19): Passages Taken from the Manuscript written by Roger Casement in the condemned cell at Pentonville Prison (Dublin: priv. 1950), 7pp.

Emerald Isle Books (Cat. No. 95), lists A Protestant Protest, 24 Oct. Ballymoney 1913 (Belfast: Carswell 1913), 54pp., speeches of 30 Oct.

Private collections: Library of Herbert Bell (Belfast) holds Sir Roger Casement Diaries Edited by Chris E. Curry [Munich] 1922.

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Notes
The Black Diaries: The diaries containing records of his homosexual life, became the subject of long-running controversy involving charges of forgery aimed at the British government and supposedly motived by the desire to turn public opinion against Casement. Bulmer Hobson refused to believe the allegations but Eamonn Duggan, an Irish Treaty plenipotentiary in 1921, was disgusted by his purported conduct. Their authenticity was disputed publicly by Dr. W. J. Maloney [1882-1952; b. Edinburgh; neurologist and holder of the Military Cross, 1919], as well as H. O. Mackay and others, chiefly Irish nationalists - while Denis Gwynn airbrushed the accusations in his biography, Roger Casement (1931). The supposed forgeries became the subject of ‘ferocious’ ballads by Yeats supporting the theory advanced by Maloney (“The Ghost of Roger Casement” - though in private Yeats wrote, ‘if Casement were a homosexual, what matter!’ Eamon de Valera refuses to take up the issue with British Govt. (‘his reputation is safe in the affections of the Irish people’), 1939. The Black Diaries were publ. by Olympia Press (1959), partially from Peter Singleton-Gates’ typescript copy, and soon followed by a concession from the Home Secretary R. A. Butler that interested researchers might inspect them at the Public Records Office. In an article for Spectator Brian Inglis pointed an accusing finger at Sir Basil Thompson and Admiral Sir Reginald Hall, 1955 - a master-spy associated with the fake Lusitania medal and other propaganda forgeries, while Roger McHugh in Threshold (1960) also charged the British Government with British secret service with deliberate forgery and misrepresentation in an article based on the same charges in 1960. [Cont.]

The Black Diaries - cont.: The diaries were finally by the British Govt. released for general public inspection in 28 March, 1994 and adjudged to be authentic by Roger Sawyer but considered forgeries by Angus Mitchell, editor of Casement’s Amazon Journal - the former view generally holding in conjunction with the belief that the offending passages were fantasies rather than true records on Casement’s part. The diaries held by the British Public Records Office, and released in 1964; subjected to forensic testing by Audrey Giles of the Giles Giles Document Laboratory, and deemed genuine, March 2002. Her findings were contested by others on stylistic and lexical grounds, but also on the grounds that no cross-references to their contents have been discovered in sundry Casement papers copiously gathered by the National Library of Ireland. The Diaries became the subject of an academic colloquium in February 1998 at Goldsmiths College, London, organised by W. J. McCormack, leading to the publication of Roger Casement in Death (2002) in which they are deemed to be genuine. That finding is, however, contested by Kevin Mannerings & Marcel B. Matley in “The Black Diaries Attributed to Sir Roger Casement”, an online article which countercharges that the documents examined by the colloquium in Goldsmiths were not in fact the right ones, overlooking the contemporary evidence of entries in the so-called White Diaries kept by Casement during Oct. 1910 when he was suffering from eye infection. The authors also refer to evident of obvious bleaching and interpolation in the Letts diary of 1911 [See Mannerings & Matley, op. cit. - online; accessed 18.04.2011.]

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Casement in Ulysses: ‘Well, says J. J., if they’re any worse than those Belgians in the Congo Free State they must be bad. Did you read that report by a man what’s this his name is? - Casement, says the Citizen. He’s an Irishman. [...] - Yes, that’s the man, says J. J. Raping the women and girls and flogging the natives on the belly to squeeze all the red rubber they can out of them.’ (Bodley Head Edn., p.435.)

James McKendrick, “Casement Crosses the Line” [poem], in Times Literary Supplement (14 Feb. 2003, [p.10]), includes terms: ‘wounds ... whip ... hands ... stations ... piano keys ... tyres ... knighthood ... enquiry ... murder ... Black Diaries ... degradation ... write his book ... ‘s penis ... Vaseline ... dispossessed ... Banna Strand ... for Ireland ....Kaiser’s ... gaols ... unlike his own ... line’ [copied from torn an illegible page - BS].

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Bash at Buswell’s: The Roger Casement Foundation hosts a “Casement Symposium” at Buswell’s Hotel, Molesworth St., Dublin, on 22 October 2005, in conjunction with the launch of Mairead Wilson, Roger Casement’s “Black Diaries”: Unreavelling the Riddle (Belfast: Athol Books 2005).

Diaries on Radio: Vincent Browne conducted a discussion of the Casement controversy with Jeff Dudgeon, Bill Mc Cormack, et al. on RTE (“Tonight”, Monday, 2 December at 10 p.m.). In the following week “Roger Casement: The Black Diaries” edited by Dudgeon was the subject of a panel-review programme on RTE (Tues. 10 December), accompanied by a reading by Dudgeon.

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Mario Vargas Llosa (1): ‘Despite the doubts of historians such as Angus Mitchell and Jordan Goodman about the authenticity of the “Black Diaries”, the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa says researching his new novel based on Casement’s life leaves him inclined to believe that they are the work of Casement’s own hand but do not recount actual experiences. “My impression about the big controversy is that probably Roger Casement wrote the “Black Diaries”. But that does not mean that he really lived everything that he told in his diaries. My impression is at least a good part, if not all, of what he told in his diaries he did not experience. It was impossible. There was such exaggeration, particularly in the sexual dimension. / You must remember the kind of times in which he lived. Victorian morals were alive, so it was absolutely impossible that he did everything that he wrote in his diaries. Probably he wrote it because it was the only way in which he could believe in these kinds of experiences. / It was a very symbolic way of having the liberty to do things that in the real world it was impossible for a British diplomat to do. / I think [in Ireland] Casement is not still totally accepted or understood as he was. I think he does not fit into the stereotypical image of a hero. He was not perfect or a saint. He is a hero who is a human being." (See Tom Hennigan, ‘A “traitor” in Britain but an Irish hero in the Amazon’, in The Irish Times, 4 Sept. 2010, Weekend; online - accessed 06.10.2010.) See also Hennigan, ‘An unflinching witness to colonialism’s legacy of brutality’, on Llosa, in The Irish Times [Fri] 8 Oct. 2010, online; accessed 10.10.2010.

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Mario Vargas Llosa (2): The Peruvian-born novelist and later Spanish citizen - having run unsuccessfully for President and lost to Fujimero - issued El Sueño del Celta [The Dream of the Celt] (Nov. 2010), a novel about Roger Casement nvolving research trips to the Congo and Banna Strand, in Co Kerry, where Casement was arrested in 1916. Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010.

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