The Ghost Knocks

In the 43 years since Roger Casement was hanged in England's Pentonville Prison and laid away in a grave of quicklime, successive British governments have been haunted by Yeats's doggerel:

The ghost of Roger Casement Is beating on the door.

Dublin-born Roger Casement, knighted in 1911 for services to His Majesty's consular service, had been caught after being put ashore on a wild stretch of the Irish coast by a German U-boat on Good Friday, 1916, when an Irish rebellion was in the making. What seemed to the British government a clear case of treason was to many an Irishman patriotism.

Many Englishmen, including G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy and the Webbs, pleaded in vain that Casement's life be spared. When he was hanged, a storm of anti-British feeling rose among the Irish in the U.S. just at a time when the British were eager to get the U.S. into World War I on their side. Something had to be done and quickly, the British government decided, to discredit the name of Roger Casement. Soon prominent figures on both sides of the Atlantic began to hear strange tales about Casement's scandalous "black diaries." These, it was slyly suggested, were the most detailed records ever kept about one man's homosexual orgies.

The Home Office's legal adviser told the Cabinet that Casement had "completed the full cycle of sexual degeneracy," and he urged that the government, "by judicious means, use these diaries to prevent Casement from attaining martyrdom." His advice was followed. The diaries were shown to King George V, who was shocked at their degeneracy; so was the Archbishop of Canterbury. More to the point, they were shown to U.S. Ambassador Walter Hines Page with the casual remark by Prime Minister Asquith that he "need not be particular" about whom he might in turn show them to. Gradually the pro-Casement agitation in the U.S. began to die away, but the ghost that has haunted the case ever since was the question: Were the black diaries genuine, or were they forged as a clever piece of wartime propaganda by the British?

Do Not Disturb. In 1930 a University College, Cork, professor asked permission to examine the diaries in connection with a biography he was writing. Back from the Home Office came the abrupt reply that was to be the policy of every government, Labor or Tory, since: "It was decided long ago not to make any official statement as to the existence or nonexistence of these diaries." In time another theory gained wide currency: that Casement had merely copied detailed descriptions of homosexual practices from the writings of a cruel employer in Peru whose exposure had helped win Casement his knighthood. According to this theory, Scotland Yard had forged Casement's handwriting in places, so that his copied descriptions would appear to be autobiographical.

In 1955 another Casement biographer--British Journalist Rene MacColl--was rebuffed by the Home Office. A year later, when Montgomery Hyde, M.P. for Belfast, suggested that the government might at least let experts examine the diaries for forgery, he was told that despite "inflammatory allegations" against the government, official papers were never published until "considerable time has elapsed." Apparently 40 years' wait was not enough. But continued secrecy only whetted curiosity. Only when a French publisher got hold of portions of the text that had been copied back in 1916, and published them this spring (a shorter version was also published in New York), did the Home Office finally relent.

"Frightful Collection." Since the diaries had turned out to be "of some historical interest," Home Secretary R. A. ("Rab") Butler said, to much laughter in the House of Commons, the government would allow a few historians and other qualified and responsible persons to see them. And so one morning last week a green metal box was brought up from the strong room of the Public Records Office and placed before Biographer MacColl and Montgomery Hyde, M.P.

Inside were five shabby notebooks, all written in the same tight hand, over the period 1903 to 1911. Wrote MacColl later: "A record of vice perhaps unparalleled in the English language." And nowhere was there "the slightest sign that this frightful collection is other than absolutely genuine." Hyde was also convinced that the diaries were genuine, but could not be sure whether Casement "committed all these acts or whether they were fantasies of a disordered mind."

Before the week was out, only one person who had been shown the diaries (the Dublin chairman of the Casement Repatriation Committee) went away still unconvinced. Barrister Letitia Denny Fairfield, a Casement expert and sister of Author Rebecca West, declared: "I examined the diaries with a large magnifying glass, and I couldn't see any trace whatever that they were forged or interfered with at all." Brian Inglis, editor of the London Spectator and formerly of the Irish Times, had previously supported the forgery thesis, but "a few minutes study sufficed to convince me that Casement was the author. Nobody could have forged so much so cleverly."

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