October-November 2024 61
Jeffrey Dudgeon
The Devil and Mr Casementwas
nitpicking, not fatal analysis
A reply to Paul Hydes piece in the July Village magazine
By Jeff Dudgeon
P
aul Hyde in his article The
Devil and Mr. Casement
(Village, July 2024) tells of how
my reign as the leading expert
on the diaries came to an end”.
This is due to a minor change I made
between the 2nd and 3rd edition of my
book over whether Roger Casement in June
1911 recorded paying directly for the gift
of a motor bike or whether he refunded the
recipient purchaser, his Belfast boyfriend
Millar Gordon.
Somebody has since helpfully pointed
out it must have been a 21st birthday gift,
Millar being born on 23 June 1890. That I
reckon now Casement was definitely the
payee is based on evidence discovered by
Hyde himself in Essex County Council
archives, and certainly does not fatally
compromise [my] overall endeavour.
Hyde argues the motor bike gift is key as
MI5 discovered, within Casement’s
correspondence, a letter (of a non-sexual
nature) from a young Belfast man, Millar
Gordon. They then decided to set him up
by forging sexualised diary references and
adding mention of the gift of a motorbike.
This then required altering registration
records in Essex to prove an actual sale to
him by one Cyril Corbally.
The tortured reasoning is that Millar
could become a fall guy proving Casement s
diaries authenticity because he was
untraceable (his surname Gordon not
being specified in the diary entries) and
thus a clean skin.
Cyril Corbally, I then discovered, turned
out to have been the brother of Lady
rench, a close friend of Casement whom
he diaried meeting in London that summer.
This and Hydes other assertions on
diary forging are all based on a small
number of mistakes, errors or confusions
within the four Black Diaries or made later
by various Casement biographers like
Brian Inglis, Roger Sawyer and Séamas Ó
Síocháin.
Using a deduction dogma hinged to a
form of supposed mathematical precision,
he declares he is able because of a single
‘proven’ error to demolish opponents.
He is an admirable ferret when seeking
out discrepancies, majoring on perhaps a
score – all of which I have disputed or can
explain.
However, in the thousand diary entries
written by Casement there are perhaps ten
thousand other undisputed facts. Evidence
of the research required by government
agents for such a colossal faking project is
also entirely absent.
He has also developed a central
argument he reckons proves wholesale
forgery by a claim that the diaries were
handwritten at some date after Casements
execution in early August 1916. Instead,
what were seen or passed around earlier to
blacken him and prevent a reprieve were
typed fakes.
If accurate, this negates all statements
by those who report seeing manuscript
items before then and makes the four
diaries entirely confected. This is hard to
credit but uniquely crafted, and hinges
largely on the fact that there was next to
nobody outside government who specied
exactly what they saw in 1916 and a fair
number of influential people were shown
something.
OPINION
It would be more useful if, instead
of nitpicking, Paul Hyde accepted
a challenge to look into these large
gaps in Casement documentation
VillageOctNov24.indb 61 03/10/2024 14:27
62 October-November 2024
Belfast then the likeliest candidate for their
custodian is FJ Bigger. Montgomery Hyde
in an unpublished letter to The Times
confirmed that Bigger’s nephew, Joseph,
then a medical student at TCD, was shown
the papers consisting of several diaries
and also a number of compromising letters
from homosexual correspondents”.
After talking it over, the antiquarian
[Bigger] told him that that he thought the
best thing to do was to burn the lot which
he accordingly did”. The National Museum
actually has on display the very trunk
Casement left at Biggers house.
A clue to what may have happened is that
Gavan Duy actually donated to the BMH a
batch of letters written to Casement. They
are all highly political and dated 1913 and
early 1914 (BMH C.D. register 381 pp. 101-
105). This suggests he extracted and
retained late Irish material from the three
cases he inspected but not from the rest.
Another clue, this time about Gavan
Duffy’s state of knowledge about
Casement’s sexuality is a recently noticed
letter from Alice Stopford Green to the NLI
Director, Richard Best, about a donation
(MS 49,491/1/996).
Ms Green wrote: “I send the last letters I
received from R.C. evidently written in
great excitement. I had them copied by the
Gavan Duys. She is shocked beyond
measure, & would I think burn them all.
Obviously Duffy knew things his wife did
not. Sadly, the letters have disappeared so
we can only surmise what was in them.
Paul Hyde really needs to put his talents
into something other than the trivial and
drop his assertions over my work, and that
of others, which are so often rude and
unpleasant.
It would certainly be more useful, if
instead of nitpicking, as he does over a
small number of minor absences or
contradictions, he accepts a challenge to
look into these large gaps in Casement
documentation. That would really advance
the debate.
Jeffrey Dudgeon is the author of ‘Roger
Casement: The Complete Black Diaries with
a study of his background, sexuality, and
Irish political life’ (4th edition)
Evidence that Casement diary
manuscripts either the journals
themselves or photographed pages – were
displayed before the trial ended in late July
does exist in official government papers;
as do several precise descriptions of what
they consisted of and how they were
brought into Scotland Yard by a Casement
landlord after his arrest.
The US ambassador was certainly given
photographs and saw manuscript pages. A
Casement ally, Congo missionary John
Harris, sent to view the diaries for the
Archbishop of Canterbury, was convinced
of authenticity on seeing a manuscript
diary.
However, the accepted absence from the
archive of any typed or photographed
pages, which undoubtedly were handed
round, is what Hyde believes confirms his
theory.
A flaw in the reasoning, as pointed out
by a Casement author, Tim O’Sullivan,
himself a diary sceptic favouring the
interpolation theory, is that Hyde is happy,
when it suits him, to rely on official
government files or documents at one time
in their hands.
Senator Michael McDowell has picked
out one irrefutable argument against the
idea that the typed items came before the
manuscripts. He observed that the
author(s) obviously did not know Gaelic as
Casements words in Irish were mangled in
the supposed earlier typed versions but
came out perfectly in the faked
manuscripts.
Provenance mysteries in Casement
abound and are the stuff beloved by
historic and literary detectives. The
question of missing documents is of course
a two-way street and I have drawn attention
to the absence of a whole swathe of
Casement’s incoming correspondence
from the masses of papers in the National
Library of Ireland (NLI).
A 1950 statement in the Bureau of
Military History (BMH) from Casement’s
solicitor George Gavan Duffy reveals their
existence and what may have happened to
them. He wrote, “I had in fact received the
year before, [1915] from a friend of his,
three cases of his papers which the friend
thought it unwise to retain and he wanted
to dispose of them. I remember spending
an arduous week-end with Art OBrien,
whom I called in, going through these
documents to see what might be utterly
seditious in them”.
And that is all he said. The notion that
Casement had seditious material from
before the war is somewhat fanciful. It is
noteworthy that Gavan Duffy was always
silent on the question of the diaries and
Casement’s homosexuality.
Roger Csement beingescorted from his
ppel court hering in July 1916
I deduced the absence of letters to
Casement from his key correspondents
suggested they were destroyed by Gavan
Duffy. The technique I use is deduction
from the evidence or, in this case, the
absence of evidence perfectly reasonable
for historians.
Smoking guns are rarely apparent in the
archives. Paul Hyde however wrote, This
technique he also uses to incriminate
Gavan Duffy as destroying compromising
Casement papers in 1915 and once again
his source does not verify his contention”.
That absent group for whom there is
voluminous correspondence in archives
written by Casement but next to none by
them pre-1913, comprises his cousin
Gertrude Bannister, his best friend Dick
Morten, the Belfast solicitor and
antiquarian FJ Bigger, a long term consular
colleague in Lisbon Francis Cowper, Alice
Stopford Green and Bulmer Hobson.
There is also in the NLI only a tiny
proportion of the expected letters to
Casement from ED Morel, his Congo Reform
Association collaborator. All incoming
boyfriend letters, especially those from
South America, mentioned in the diaries,
have also disappeared.
Gavan Duffy did not explain what
happened to the three cases of papers,
after the inspection. If it took place in
Hyde claims that my reign as the leading
expert on the Casement diaries ended due
to a minor change I made over whether he
recorded paying directly for the gift of a
motor bike or refunded the purchaser, his
boyfriend
VillageOctNov24.indb 62 03/10/2024 14:27

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