Roger Casement

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Lore & Background

Casement was born in Dublin and lived in very early childhood at Doyle's Cottage, Lawson Terrace, Sandycove. His father, Captain Roger Casement of the (King's Own) Regiment of Dragoons, was the son of a Belfast shipping merchant who went bankrupt. After his mother died when he was nine and his father when he was thirteen, Casement was left dependent on the charity of relatives. He was educated at the Diocesan School, Ballymena, and left at sixteen to work as a clerk with Elder Dempster, a Liverpool shipping company. In Africa as a young man, he first worked for commercial interests before joining the British Colonial Service. In 1891 he was appointed as a British consul, a profession he followed for more than 20 years. In 1903 the Balfour Government commissioned Casement, then its consul at Boma in the Congo Free State, to investigate the human rights situation. He travelled for weeks in the upper Congo Basin and delivered a long, detailed eyewitness report to the Crown that exposed "the enslavement, mutilation, and torture of natives on the rubber plantations." This became known as the Casement Report of 1904. He was knighted in 1911 for his important investigations of human rights abuses in the rubber industry in Peru. Influenced by the Second Boer War and his investigation into colonial atrocities against indigenous peoples, Casement grew to mistrust imperialism. After retiring from consular service in 1913, he became more involved with Irish republicanism and other separatist movements. During World War I, he made efforts to gain German military aid for the 1916 Easter Rising that sought to gain Irish independence. He was arrested, convicted and executed for high treason. He was stripped of his knighthood and other honours. Before, during and after the trial, British security agents and police showed typescripts prepared by the Metropolitan police to influential persons. These were said to be official copies of his private journals which detailed homosexual activities. Given prevailing views and existing laws on homosexuality, this material undermined support for clemency. Disputes have continued about these diaries; a private handwriting comparison study in 2002 concluded that Casement had written the diaries, but this was contested by several scholars.

Reader's Guide

Casement's significance lies in his dual legacy as a pioneering human rights investigator and as an Irish nationalist martyr. His 1904 Casement Report on the Congo Free State exposed the enslavement, mutilation, and torture of natives on rubber plantations, and his later investigations of human rights abuses in the Peruvian rubber industry earned him a knighthood in 1911. He is described as the "father of twentieth-century human rights investigations." However, his turn to Irish republicanism and his attempt to secure German military aid for the 1916 Easter Rising led to his arrest, conviction for high treason, and execution. A private handwriting comparison study in 2002 concluded Casement had written the diaries, but this was contested by several scholars. His knighthood was stripped after his conviction. Casement remains a complex figure: celebrated for his humanitarian work, condemned for treason by the British state, and revered by Irish nationalists.

Did You Know?

• Casement was secretly baptised as a Catholic at the age of three in Rhyl, Wales, though the priest who arranged his baptism in 1916 stated it had been in Aberystwyth, 80 miles from Rhyl.
• Joseph Conrad, who met Casement in the Congo in 1890, initially called him 'most intelligent and very sympathetic,' but after Casement's arrest called him 'a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all' and 'all emotion.'
• Casement's brother, Thomas Hugh Jephson Casement, drowned in Dublin's Grand Canal on 6 March 1939, having threatened suicide.
• Casement's 1904 Casement Report forced the Belgian Parliament to set up an independent commission of inquiry, which confirmed the report's essentials in 1905.
• In July 1904 Casement was appointed Consul in Lisbon, a promotion he accepted but said 'might relieve the Foreign Office of some embarrassment were I to resign from the Service.'