| The Electronic Telegraph Thursday 19 October 1995 Home News
Cabinet papers show public unmasking of hanged traitor's
homosexuality, writes Colin Randall
CABINET papers showing how Whitehall used evidence of Sir Roger
Casement's homosexual activities to deflect an international outcry after his
execution as a traitor were made public after nearly 80 years yesterday.
Files released at the Public Record Office in Kew confirm suspicion about
the importance attached by officials to details of Casement's secret life,
which included picking up teenagers and young men in public places and
paying them for sexual favours.
Casement, born in Co Dublin to an Ulster Protestant family, was executed in
August 1916 after being condemned for his efforts, at a time of war, to
obtain aid from Germany immediately before the Easter Rising of that year.
To most Irish nationalists, he remains revered as a patriotic fighter for
independence.
In a memorandum advising Asquith's Cabinet a month before the execution
to stand firm against a reprieve, Sir Ernley Blackwell, Home Office legal
adviser, said it was difficult to imagine a worse case of high treason.
He told ministers that they should allow the law to take its course and then
"by judicious means" use diaries charting Casement's unrestrained appetite
for homosexual liaisons to prevent him being treated as a martyr in America
or elsewhere.
The papers do not shed further light on how the diaries came into official
hands.
When the matter arose again in 1955, a senior Home Office official noted
that the diaries had come into the possession of the Metropolitan Police
shortly after Casement's arrest. He added that, although they were
considered irrelevant to the trial, information about their contents was
"disclosed in confidence to certain people who were supporting, or likely to
support, a move for a reprieve".
According to Sir Ernley, Casement's record of public service - his
knighthood was for his exposure of cruel treatment of native workers by
European trading companies in the Congo and Peru - aggravated rather than
mitigated his crime.
Sir Ernley referred to Foreign Office pressure to placate Irish-American
sentiment by allowing the publication of the diaries even before the
execution. He said there were obvious grave objections to any sort of official
"or even inspired" publication of such material while Casement was awaiting
execution.
He added: "I see not the slightest objection to hanging Casement and
afterwards giving as much publicity to the contents of his diary as decency
permits, so that the public in America and elsewhere may know what sort of
man they are inclined to make a martyr."
Sir Ernley's memorandum was written on July 18, the day before the
Cabinet decided that Casement would hang. A week before the execution,
Sir Basil Thomson, Scotland Yard head of CID, showed the diaries to the
American ambassador to London.
Sir Basil, who was arrested and fined for indecency with a female prostitute
in Hyde Park nine years later, informed Sir Ernley that he had shown the
ambassador both the "filthy part" of the diaries and innocuous passages
identifying Casement as the author.
Some copies of extracts also found their way into the hands of journalists, an
attempt to damage Casement's character that The Times denounced at the
time as "irrelevant, improper and un-English".
The closely-typed 1911 Casement diaries are accompanied by meticulously
detailed ledgers recording even such trivial items of expenditure as a penny
given to a beggar.
They also indicate what Sir Ernley described as an addiction to "the grossest
sodomitical practices", showing Casement to have "completed the full circle
of sexual degeneracy".
For many years, the diaries were widely regarded in Ireland and by
Irish-Americans as government forgeries. Their authenticity, however, has
not been in serious question since Rab Butler's decision as Home Secretary
to make extracts available to historians in 1959.
The diary entries include numerous references to organised and casual
homosexual encounters.
Foreign Office records appear alongside copies of some of the entries to
provide some corroboration. But the official desire to verify Casement's
homosexuality went further, as the papers released yesterday disclose.
On the same day that the Cabinet set itself against a reprieve, the British
vice-consul in Oslo took a sworn statement from a witness confirming
Casement's relationships with two men during a stay in Norway in 1914.
After Casement went to the gallows at Pentonville on Aug 3, the prison
medical officer, Dr Percy Mander, wrote to the medical commissioner of
prisons that he had carried out an examination which they had previously
discussed at the Home Office. This had revealed "unmistakeable evidence of
the practices to which, it was alleged, the prisoner in question had been
addicted".
In his memorandum to the Cabinet, Sir Ernley Blackwell advised ministers,
some of whom opposed execution as "inexpedient", to resist suggestions of
using a medical inquiry into Casement's sanity as a device by which a
reprieve might become possible.
"Nothing is to be gained by reprieving him on one ground and pretending to
have done so upon another," he wrote.
"So far as I can judge it, it would be far wiser from every point of view to
allow the law to take its course, and by judicious means to use these diaries to
prevent Casement attaining martyrdom."
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| The Electronic Telegraph Thursday 19 October 1995 Home News
He knew the Easter Rising was doomed
By David Millward
SIR Roger Casement had a forlorn hope that the Germans would send a
Zeppelin to support the ill-fated Easter Rising, according to the papers
opened yesterday.
The transcript of his interrogation by the British authorities shows that
Casement sailed to Ireland knowing that his mission was doomed to failure.
On the day of the rising, April 24, 1916, in which 450 people died, Casement
prophetically spoke of "what I can only regard as a hopeless rising in Ireland
where my countrymen will be shot down" as he was interrogated in Scotland
Yard.
He had been picked up as he landed at Co Kerry two days earlier.
The police found assorted items including three Mauser pistols, signalling
lamps, "one book entitled Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyan", and a green flag with
coat of arms and Latin motto.
Casement was questioned three times. On the first occasion, at Scotland
Yard, on April 23, he denied receiving any money from Berlin.
"I was not afraid to commit high treason"
"No penny ever came from Germany, not one cent. On one occasion the
German government offered to lend me money for the cause of Ireland."
This offer was refused. But he was prepared to accept arms from the Kaiser,
although the papers show that he regarded the military help he was given as
inadequate.
"I said that the danger would not lie from the shore but from the sea and our
machine guns would not be any good against a warship."
When he finally made the journey from Germany, the Kaiser provided
20,000 rifles and only a few machine guns.
On the day after the Easter Rising was quashed, Casement told the British
that the Germans were not willing to send another shipload of arms. "There
can be no other ship. All possibility of sending further arms to Ireland is all
off. I thought they would make a Zeppelin attack."
Throughout the interrogation Casement was unrepentant. "Some Irishmen
are afraid to act, but I was not afraid to commit high treason. I am not
endeavouring to shield myself at all. I face all the consequences."
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| The Electronic Telegraph Thursday 19 October 1995 Home News
Coffin secret that went to the grave
AS LATE as 1969, the Government withheld information that Roger
Casement had been buried without a coffin after his execution at Pentonville
Prison in north London because of concern that the disclosure would
inflame Irish public opinion.
Shirley Williams, then Home Office Minister of State in Harold Wilson's
Government, replied to a question from an Ulster Unionist MP, Sir Knox
Cunningham, confirming that Casement was buried in quicklime but
avoiding any reference to the lack of a coffin. A S Pratley, a senior Home
Office official who dealt with the Parliamentary inquiry, reported that it was
difficult to judge how much embarrassment would be caused by a more open
response.
The most probable outcome, he suggested, would be a reopening of
arguments on the authenticity of the remains exhumed and reinterred with
full honours in Ireland in 1965.
There had been suggestions that the remains sent to Dublin might even be
those of the murderer Crippen. "It is also possible that a sense of outrage
would be aroused in Eire by an official confirmation that instructions were
given to bury Casement without a coffin," wrote Mr Pratley at the time.
It could not be claimed that the instruction was standard prisons practice at
the time of Casement's hanging.
Mr Pratley doubted whether the reaction would have a seriously adverse
effect on Anglo-Irish relations "or on the Ulster situation" - a reference to
increasing violence in the province at the start of the recent Troubles.
Nevertheless, it seemed to him "advisable not to go much beyond the line
taken in reply to the Eire government in 1936 and to avoid specific reference
to the absence of a coffin".
In the event, Shirley Williams replied to Sir Knox merely that Casement
was buried in quicklime at Pentonville, "the practice that obtained at the
time in respect of persons executed within the walls of a prison".
The prison's medical officer, Dr Percy Mander, had noted that Casement's
death had been "absolutely instantaneous", stating: "The execution went off
without a hitch and prisoner was dead in 40 seconds from leaving the cell."
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