Roger Casement: The Black Diaries - with a study of his background, sexuality, and Irish political life

by Jeffrey Dudgeon

In this revised and expanded second edition with more photographs, all Roger Casement's Black Diaries are, uniquely, again published together, including the never-before-seen erotically-charged 1911 Diary over which London threatened an obscenity prosecution. A number of new characters are introduced and some old mysteries solved. The volume provides both a comprehensive view of the diaries' texts, with explanations for many of the cast of characters, famous, infamous, and fleeting, and a context for the author whose significance and seminal role in the political development of independent Ireland has been masked by the debates over the diaries' authenticity. This is a uniquely fresh and original look at the Irish patriot and humanitarian, hanged in 1916 for treason. It was the same Casement whose reports on rubber slavery and genocide in King Leopold's Congo and the Peruvian Amazon, in 1904 and 1911, reflected in two of his Black Diaries, that shocked Edwardian England. The book also deals with the neglected sides of Casement's life, his involvement in Ulster politics, his family background in Co. Antrim, his Belfast boyfriend Millar Gordon, and his sociopathic companion, the Norwegian sailor, Adler Christensen, as well as a comprehensive view of the authenticity controversies, Casement's homosexuality, and his time in Africa and Brazil. Roger Casement had iconic status in life and after death was sanctified and vilified in equal measure. His real self was consequently obscured. This book combines a rigorous academic study of Casement, the public and political figure (with over 1,000 references and an extensive bibliography, updated to 2016), alongside an account of his personal life, sexuality, and consular career, and an informed view of how they all interlocked and originated. It also provides a fresh assessment of the events leading up to the Easter Rising and British intelligence failings, and an up-to-date account of the controversies that have swirled around Casement to this day, including the attempts made in Dublin, from the 1930s, to threaten the truth about the Black Diaries. ' No Roger Casement - No Easter Rising ': Casement groomed the key personnel who set about creating the Irish Republic, from 1904 to 1923. He commissioned the first arms for the IRA - on two occasions, in 1914 and 1916. To know about Roger Casement is to know why Ireland achieved independence and why Ulster stayed separate remaining in the UK after partition. This volume therefore provides an insight into the political conflict in the north and suggests how it could be diminished by both learning and respecting each other's stories and agreeing to disagree.

Genres: History, Queer, Biography, Nonfiction

728 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2001

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Since posting this review I have regretted not providing some comments on the question of the diaries authenticity and on Casement's homosexuality (I avoid describing historical figures as 'gay' as it is an 'identity' which didn't exist at the time but this doesn't mean that homosexual men didn't have a view of themselves as more then simply a way of having sex) and have added some comments after the review in brackets and headed 'Authenticity']

I read this book twice, the first time not long after its publication, and eventually acquired battered first edition very inexpensively back in the days before the second and third editions when second hand copies could command £200+ - I was never tempted to part with it because I thought it was one of the most fascinating and worthwhile books I had ever read about Casement.

If you are not Irish you will probably never have heard of Casement but he was a remarkable man who in the Congo (really if you never looked at 'King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa' by Adam Hochschild you must) and Putumayo (see: 'The Devil and Mr. Casement: One Man's Battle for Human Rights in South America's Heart of Darkness' by John Goodman) did some truly remarkable things. If, like me, you are Irish and gay then you know of Casement as the man whose homosexuality was used by the British to hang Casement as a traitor. You would also know that his homosexuality was most fervently denied by the Irish State and Irish people unwilling to accept that a 'martyr' of 1916 could have a sexual nature, never mind a perverse one. Even when the third edition of this book came out in 2017 there were still voices trying to maintain, despite all the evidence that the three black diaries were forgeries, and those, like Jeffrey Dudgeon who accepted their authenticity, were nothing but gay activists with a bee in their bonnets.

The marvellous thing about Dudgeon book is that he puts Casement back into his protestant, unionist roots, which also involved protestant nationalist roots, his family background and shows how much wishful thinking there is in all the self serving lies and distortions that have been pedaled over the years. Dudgeon, a gay men, also looks at Casement as a gay men, and it is within that context that so more can be discerned about Casement's complex and tragic life and character. The fact that he was a size queen (oh look it up if you don't know what I mean!) humanises him, for me.

I have the much improved expanded 3rd edition on my to buy list and I would suggest, if you can, to read or buy it rather than the earlier versions. Of course you have to be a Casement aficionado - but if you aren't you should consider becoming one!

[The Authenticity Arguments:

There always were and there still remain those who believe the diaries are forgeries and I am not going to go into even a fraction of the arguments pro and anti the genuineness of the diaries. I believe they are real and for one major reason - there has never been before or subsequently any example of a forgery produced by the British, or any Secret Service, of the size and complexity of the Black Diaries. Even today with the ease of acquiring information via online resources it is almost inconceivable to produce so many pages of irrelevant, but supporting entries, which are 100% accurate in terms of details like weather, the sailing times of ships, people met, etc. It is interesting to compare the Casement diaries to the 'Sissons Documents' (see Wikipedia entry at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisson_...) which purported to show that Lenin and the Bolsheviks worked under the direction of the German Imperial staff to ferment revolution in Russia) and more relevantly the Pigott forgeries (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard...) which were created to discredit Parnell and campaign for Home Rule. In neither Sissons nor Pigott cases were the forgeries as extensive or complex as the Black Diaries though discrediting Lenin and Parnell were far more important political campaigns then the one against Casement.

Why so many people still refuse to accept the diaries as genuine because they can not accept Casement's homosexuality. For me their position is rooted in homophobia, probably a deep internal homophobia, I am not suggesting that the various deniers from academia or journalism are the kind of people who indulge in crude name calling etc., but they are trapped in a view that for Casement to be homosexual some how diminishes him. That Casement was a 'size queen' and regular noted, with pleasure, when one of partners had an especially large 'membrum virile' particularly upsets them though I doubt if it had ben the size of women's breasts it would have attracted any notice. It is when dealing with questions like this that Dudgeon input, as a gay man, is invaluable. He doesn't have to have a fit of vapours or become all prissy when details of MonM sex are mentioned.

I could discuss some further areas regarding Casement's sex life as revealed in the diaries but I don't want to make this addendum any longer then it already is. But if you would like more send me a message or when GR closes messaging down post a comment and I will respond that way.]

[Malcolm Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Black Diaries is a big book about a big man. It is about a man who freed from the grip of the British Authorities three quarters of the oldest country originally held as part of The British Empire. The size of the book could be quite intimidating, but then the book matches what he achieved. At nearly 700 pages for the main text and over 80 pages references, bibliography, and a long index of personal names the book does a thorough job of explaining the diaries and the life.

As I read the earliest chapters I knew that when I reread the book I would skip the chapters about his family background, with their battles over the execution of Victorian wills, retrieving money owed so that the young Roger and other younger members of the family might have gone to better schools for longer, and might been raised in greater financial security. But even there, the story of family cover-ups and dwindling fortunes has it's resonance later. The diaries themselves are reproduced in full with extensive notes in bold type explaining the background an context. The diaries are revealing, but what they reveal is not necessarily what the reader might expect.

What they reveal is a man who when he worked, worked hard. They reveal a man who was frequently ill, and took his sociable pleasures seriously. He was both a gambler and generous with his money and any goods under his control. Also he played bridge and liked dogs, and as you might expect of a Victorian gentleman (he was born in 1864) he disguised his sexual pleasures by putting them in code. This is something that Victorian heterosexual males did just as much as their much rarer non-heterosexual counterparts. Where he differs from most Victorian gentlemen is that he left what he wrote intact so that anyone might find the key to the writings he kept. That his sexual pleasures were fleeting and mostly with young men who were a social class or two below him where he seems to have kept an intermittent bond with relatively few of them says more about Victorian/Edwardian and patriarchal ideas of social class than the reader would expect. Edward Carpenter, the English Socialist/Pacifist/Vegetarian, surely did the same, but if he ever kept a diary about his intimacies then it is lost to history.

From the time the Labouchere amendment was passed in 1885 until the 1970's, men who identified as gay had to be wary of what they kept in writing about their sex lives, names, phone numbers, personal accounts naming what they did; if it was discovered it could be used either to blackmail them, or to get them arrested by the police.

Flirting with detachment seems to be the norm or Casement. As to why he might be such a flirt-well one side of the equation is that it seemed normal in a away that nobody chose to accept or analyse for young men to make themselves available for sex with older males. The other side of being such a flirt, or being so cruisey, is the motive of the older male. For Casement, from my reading of where the codes fit around recordings of his working life, his going cruising for sex would seem to be a release from the pressures of work and travel.

If the Labouchere amendment of 1885 created the crime of 'gross indecency' and in the process made ALL same-sex sexual touch a crime, whereas before that only anal intercourse, 'buggery', had been illegal and it had been illegal since the 1500's, then the Labouchere amendment made the changes it did in an intensely patriarchal society.

So where such activities as it banned went on then how they were valued became ever more defined by that patriarchy, even though the illegal acts were an act against the patriarchy that banned them. One of the clearer points about Casement's codes is 'big one' meaning large penis. I do wonder how much patriarchy is measured in code by penis size; the larger the individual penis the more patriarchal the society the penis was seen to be part of, the smaller the lesser so. If so Casement was kind to history by writing the diary he did. It is a record of normal human behaviour in the face of abnormal rules about what could be done between two men, and what could be admitted to being done. On the other hand the most erotically charged parts of this diary, which were published here for the first time after a century of being kept secret, are no stronger than mild soft porn. And as the editor of the diaries, Jeff Dudgeon, drily notes the most sexual writings were facilitated by opportunity-the young men in the flush of their hormones that Casement found attractive did not wear underpants that hid their penises as they wore thin baggy cotton trousers, because underpants had not yet been invented. So in some ways with the diaries Casement was the erotic anthropologist that nobody expected to exist, about a subject that was legally well out of bounds but part of normal human behaviour.

There are chapters about the character of Irish politics as they were then. The nearer the rebellion the story gets the more important they become as background material. In 1914 Ireland is involved n two wars, one is WW1 as the Ireland in Great Britain and Ireland, the second war is the civil war that is being stoked up in which Casement takes a leading part abroad, and as he does so becomes aware of the isolating position he is getting into. Roger Casement's role in the rebellion, procuring money for arms is where as he returns to Ireland he loses his nerve and his footing as to where he should be to either be safe or foment the rebellion, or both. The British authorities come out of this narrative as uncertain and unaware a lot of the time of Casement's arrest of his moves,they also fail to recognise the strength of the animus against them in Ireland. The British have to avoid Casement unintentionally becoming a martyr.

The trial of Casement reads here as confused and desperate, with neither defence nor prosecution having purpose and clarity. The British don't want to try Casement for treason for consorting with the Germans, but keep him in the Tower of London, a place synonymous with treason. They know that trying him for homosexual offences is the surer path to a conviction but it is still carries risks. Revealing to the public that homosexual offences had happened, using the diaries, will ensure a conviction. But the revelation would dent the hysterical inhibition of the Labouchere amendment against homosexuality that up to then ensured the invisibility of homosexuality. The conviction would play poorly with the public to whom Casement was a hero only five years earlier. So what un-heroic crime, and choice way to smear his character, is there left to the British awash with wartime propaganda?

The last hundred pages of the book are where most readers desire to read all of the book will flag most. Of the last three chapters, the first of them is about whether the diaries are genuine or forged in some way. There are plenty of arguments for both perspectives. My opinion is that the original diaries are genuine and were not tampered with. But in the transcripts there were issued for press and propaganda purposes the transcriber's wish to distort the meaning and and context of what was presented in the original diaries is plainer with hindsight than it was at the time. In the second to last chapter whether Casement was a genuine homosexual is debated, it seems he was and the wider debate was about how long people resisted accepting him as such. In the last chapter his re-interment in Dublin in 1965 after being buried in Pentonville Prison in 1916 is described, thus his life is laid to rest. All that is left after that are his papers, and his reputation as a patriot for Ireland.

Finally there are three bibliographies at the end of the book, one for each edition of the book has gone through, in which well over 100 titles of books or articles are named along with their author and when and where they were published. Such thoroughness cannot be faulted but they may make the reader reluctant to engage with the size of the project they are presented with.

[Harry McDonald · Rating 4 out of 5]

I mean, just enormous. In detail and in scope.

[Anna Storgato · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most well researched essay about this controversial man. Not an easy lecture for starters who know little of the man and want to being introduced, this counts more as a dive in the deep of Casement's personal (and in particular sexual) life.