Sir Roger Casement hero, yet still hanged

Roger Casement (1864–1916) was born near Dublin to a Pro­testant father & Catholic mother! After his parents’ early deaths, he spent his childhood with Protest­ant relations and was raised as an Anglo-Irish Protestant among the Uls­ter landed gentry; he was not a starv­ing rev­ol­ut­ionary.

Sir Roger Casement at trial, 

London, July 1916

He joined Elder Dempster Shipping Line Liverpool as a stew­ard and later became British consul in the Congo. In this time Casement mixed loyalty to the British Empire with a desire to expose the atroc­ities of the brutal Belgian rule in the Congo. His cons­ul­ar duties took him to Portuguese East Af­rica then back to the Congo, where in 1903 he was asked to re­port on alleg­ations of widespread at­rocities un­­der the personal rule of King Leopold of the Belgians. His passionate rep­orts of br­utal forced labour in the upper Congo’s rubber industry led to a gov­ern­men­t­al White Paper in 1904. It caused outrage, lead­ing to rad­ical changes in the Congo, which was formally annexed as a Belgian colony.

Casement then lived in Britain where he joined forces with anti-slavery and anti-colonial movements and helped to establish the Congo Reform Assoc­iat­ion. In 1906 he returned to work as the Brit­ish consul in Brasil, where he saw more barbarity ag­ainst local popul­at­ions. Writer Arthur Conan Doyle, who befriended Casement in London in 1910, wrote The Crime of the Congo, and pledged his sup­port for Case­ment’s campaigns against colonial atrocities.

When Casement went to South America, he wrote further reports on the brutal practices of Peruvian Amazon Co, a British-registered rub­ber company working among the Ind­ians. Again there was a media furore! Awarded a knighthood, Sir Roger became wholly disillusioned with his consular role; he wished to re­tire and to explore his own identity.

Casement backed the Irish Volunteer Force which promoted Home Rule, so he initiated gun running into a Dublin port in July 1914. Be­coming increasingly militant, he travelled to the USA and Germany during the Great War, buying arms and recruiting among Ir­ish pri­s­oners of war for an Irish Brigade to be part of an anti-British in­sur­­rection! His politics had always been radical, but now during the Great War, his negotiations with Germany were unbelievably dangerous.

All Sir Roger’s movements abroad were being tracked by the British Secret Services. It was discovered that when he went to Germany via Norway in 1914-6, he got poor res­p­onses from both the German high command and Irish prisoners of war. Con­vinced that an uprising in Ireland now had no chance of succ­ess, Case­ment went home in a German submarine and was captured in Kerry in Ap 1916.

Then Casement was taken to London for trial in July 1916. Old docu­m­ents were found in his luggage by officers from Brit­ain’s Special Branch under Basil Thomson,  a Scotland Yard commissioner. One document was Casement’s legitimate business as a British agent in Brasil from 1910, while 5 were pers­onal diaries that contained graphic details of his homosexual affairs in Africa & South America.

Post-arrest, the British government used these Black Diaries unscrupul­ously, to drum up support for a treason conviction. Knowing how imp­ort­­ant it was to tarnish Casement’s name, Basil Thomson sent the documents to prominent British and American decision-makers, including the American Ambassador in London.

The trial for his role in Ireland’s Easter Rising was horrible. Irishman George Duffy was app­roach­ed to become Casement’s solicitor, but the partners in his leading London law firm clarified that he'd have to resign if he accepted. As no other London barris­ter was found to defend Casement, Gavan Duffy had to look to his brother-in-law A.M. Sullivan. Both these lawyers had long histories of involve­ment in Irish nation­alism, though they loathed the 1916 revolutionar­ies’ violence. Worse, the prosecution team was led by the very pro-Unionist lawyer F.E Smith. And the case was heard before another ard­ent Unionist, Chief Justice Lord Reading!

Newspapers put Casement's hanging on their front pages

Aug 1916
 
After a quick, failed appeal, Casement was hanged at Pentonville Prison in Aug 1916. Justice hadn’t been done: the Black Diaries were distrib­uted, pros­ec­ution and def­ence teams app­eared to collude, the law was from 1351AD and the appeal judge was a biased, ex-Conserv­at­ive MP.

When WW1 ended, Basil Thomson became Britain’s first Director of Int­elligence; this was a crucial time when the fear of Bolshevism over­took fears of German power. Thomson himself was con­sidered too hard­ line, just as the Irish civil war was ending, given the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the Irish Free State in Dec 1921.

When Basil Thomson was sacked, he took copies of Casement’s diaries with him, hoping to supplement his meagre pension. Thom­son passed his cop­ies to a Fleet St reporter, but when the rep­orter tried to publish ex­tracts in 1925, the Home Secretary warned that Thomson would face pro­secution under the Official Secrets Act. Decades passed before the Black Diaries were published in Paris, 1959.

Sir Roger had been a caring human being who, as a result of his exp­er­iences in Africa and South America, raised issues that were crit­ic­al: human rights, corporate duty and environ­mental just­ice. He may have played a minor role in the 1916 Rising, having been isolated in Germ­any seeking guns and men. But he was on the very wrong side in WW1.

Irish President Eamon de Valera speaking at the funeral of Irish nationalist Roger Casement
Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, 1965.

The Guardian

After a campaign to repatriate his body to Ireland won in March 1965, Casement was buried near Dublin, with a huge crowd. His diaries were placed in the British National Archives Kew in 1994.

Read The Guardian, 2016 by Kevin Grant and “The Irish Volunteer” by Andrew Lycett in History Today, 2016.