Roger Casement

Roger David Casement (1 September 1864 – 3 August 1916) was a British diplomat and Irish nationalist. He was executed for treason by the United Kingdom during World War I. Between 1911 and 1916, he held the title Sir Roger Casement, CMG. Casement began his career with the British Foreign Office, gaining renown as a humanitarian activist, and later became a poet and a leader of the Easter Rising. Often called the "father of twentieth-century human rights investigations," he was recognized in 1905 for his Casement Report on the Congo Free State and was knighted in 1911 for his work investigating human rights abuses in Peru’s rubber industry.

As a young man in Africa, Casement first worked for commercial enterprises before joining the British Colonial Service. In 1891, he was made a British consul, a role he held for over two decades. His experiences during the Second Boer War and his investigations into colonial atrocities against indigenous peoples led him to distrust imperialism. After retiring from consular service in 1913, he became increasingly involved in Irish republicanism and other separatist movements.

During World War I, Casement sought German military support for the 1916 Easter Rising, which aimed to win Irish independence. He was arrested, convicted, and executed for high treason, and was stripped of his knighthood and other honors. Before, during, and after his trial, British security agents and police circulated typescripts, said to be official copies of his private journals, to influential people. These documents detailed homosexual activities. Given the laws and attitudes of the time, this material undermined support for clemency. Debate over the diaries has continued; a private handwriting analysis in 2002 concluded Casement wrote them, though several scholars have disputed this.

**Early life**

Casement was born in Dublin and spent his earliest years at Doyle’s Cottage, Lawson Terrace, Sandycove—a terrace that no longer exists but was on Sandycove Road between what is now Fitzgerald’s pub and The Butler’s Pantry delicatessen. His father, Captain Roger Casement of the (King’s Own) Regiment of Dragoons, was the son of Hugh Casement, a Belfast shipping merchant who went bankrupt and later moved to Australia. Captain Casement served in the 1842 Afghan campaign and traveled to Europe to fight as a volunteer in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, arriving after the Surrender at Világos. After the family moved to England, Roger’s mother, Anne Jephson (or Jepson), had him secretly baptized as a Catholic at age three in Rhyl, Wales. However, the priest who arranged his baptism in 1916 stated it had been in Aberystwyth, 80 miles away. This confusion may be due to Casement misremembering the place name after 48 years. Casement was raised as a Protestant and remained one throughout his adult life.

In an 1892 letter, Casement claimed his mother descended from the Jephson family of Mallow, County Cork, but the Jephson family historian found no evidence for this. The family lived in genteel poverty in England; Roger’s mother died when he was nine. His father then took the family back to County Antrim, Ireland, to live near paternal relatives. When Casement was 13, his father died in Ballymena, leaving him dependent on the charity of relatives, the Youngs and the Casements. He was educated at the Diocesan School, Ballymena (later Ballymena Academy). He left school at 16 and went to England to work as a clerk for Elder Dempster, a Liverpool shipping company headed by Alfred Lewis Jones. Casement’s brother, Thomas Hugh Jephson Casement (1863–1939), lived a roving life at sea and as a soldier, later helping establish the Irish Coastguard Service. He inspired a character in Denis Johnston’s play *The Moon in the Yellow River* and drowned in Dublin’s Grand Canal on 6 March 1939, having threatened suicide.

**Observations of Casement**

In a 1938 comment, diplomat Ernest Hambloch, who knew Casement for three weeks in 1910, described an “unexpected” figure: tall and ungainly, “elaborately courteous” but with “a good deal of pose about him, as though he was afraid of being caught off his guard.” He was “an easy talker and a fluent writer” who could “expound a case, but not argue it.” “His greatest charm was his voice, which was very musical.” His eyes were “kindly” but not given to laughter: “a sense of humour might have saved him from many things.” Joseph Conrad’s first impressions of Casement, from an encounter in the Congo in 1890 he called “a positive piece of good luck,” were that he “thinks, speaks well, [and is] most intelligent and very sympathetic.” Later, after Casement’s arrest and trial, Conrad—by then a naturalized British subject—revoked his earlier judgment, saying: “Already in Africa, I judged he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don't mean stupid. I mean that he was all emotion. By emotional force (Putumayo, Congo report, etc.) he made his way, and sheer temperament—a truly tragic personality: all but the greatness of which he had not a trace. Only vanity. But in the Congo it was not yet visible.”

**British diplomat and human rights investigator**

Casement worked in the Congo for Henry Morton Stanley and the African International Association from 1884; this association later became known as a front for King Leopold II of Belgium in his takeover of what became the Congo Free State. Casement worked on a survey to improve communication and recruited and supervised workmen building a railroad to bypass the lower 220 miles of the Congo River.