In May, 1916, workers at Madame Tussauds – the famous tourist attraction in London – poured hot wax into a new life-size mould. It was then shaped, painted and displayed prominently. Its subject, Sir Roger Casement, was being interrogated elsewhere in the city on suspicion of treason. Three months later, “the Irish Judas” was executed in a shed in the yard of Pentonville Prison.
Apparently it was quite a handsome effigy, but it is hard to imagine the wax version was particularly accurate or convincing. As Rory Carroll points out in A Rebel and a Traitor: a Fugitive, the Manhunt and the Birth of the IRA, another version of Casement was materialising at the same time. Malicious gossip created a grotesque image, concocted from the toxic mixture of Casement’s admitted war-time political betrayal and a decades-long history of cruising for sex.
For more than 100 years commentators, politicians, academics and other writers have been shaping their own versions of this extraordinary man, arguing about his significance and poring over his notorious and disputed ‘Black’ diaries. It is Carroll’s purpose here to restore him to life as much as is possible, a living and breathing character in a story that is simultaneously improbable, inspiring and tragic. His narrative starts after Casement’s heroic achievements in exposing colonial brutality in the Congo and the Putumayo region of the Amazon, which were officially recognised in 1911 by a knighthood.
Carroll’s previous book, Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown (2023), was deservedly successful. In that account he was able to interview some of the participants in the story of the 1984 Brighton bombing. The British prime minister narrowly escaped with her life in the Grand Hotel explosion, though five people died and more than 30 were injured, some very badly. At the core of that story was the long, patient planning of the IRA, particularly its bomber Patrick Magee, as the Iron Lady was stalked with murderous intent: Magee v Maggie.
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In A Rebel and a Traitor, it is an Englishman who relentlessly hunts an Irish target. While Casement’s story is familiar in Ireland, that of his nemesis Reginald “Blinker” Hall is far less so. His nickname came from an eye condition which made him blink uncontrollably, those hypnotic blue eyes scrutinising others “like a peregrine falcon”. When angry, he became a “crazed Mr Punch”. He had been captain of the state-of-the-art battlecruiser HMS Mary, but then his bosses moved him to a very different role as Director of Naval Intelligence. He navigated the politics of Whitehall adeptly, a risk-taker in ways that oddly echo Casement, his greatest triumph being the creation of the Room 40 code-breaking department, fore-runner of Bletchley Park.
The book is packed with other vivid portraits. Carroll has a gift for rapid painterly touches in his descriptive writing. One of the most sympathetic of these portraits is that of Joseph Plunkett, who Carroll gives more time to than the headline rebels from the Easter 1916 Rising, such as Patrick Pearse and James Connolly.
Born into economic privilege, Plunkett was cursed from the age of two with very poor health. In upbringing and poetic temperament, he was an unlikely figure to feature in an armed rising, but, already dying, he faced the challenge with flamboyance. The Rising briefly delayed his wedding to Grace Gifford, Carroll drily commenting: “Instead of placing a ring on her finger, he sent an aid to give her a pistol and cash for emergencies. Grace had zingy one-liners for most occasions but probably not that one”.
In a desperate physical state by Easter Monday, “he covered his bandaged throat with a silk scarf, put on a green tunic with gold braid and leather riding boots with spurs. He completed the outfit with bangles, large rings and a sabre. Whatever happened, he was going to look fabulous.” He was married to Grace for just a few hours before being executed.
Then there is Robert Monteith, the Irish Volunteer sent to Germany to whip the underwhelming Irish Brigade into shape. A disciplined professional soldier, he almost worshipped the chaotic Casement. He accompanied him (alongside Sergeant Daniel Bailey) in the German submarine U-19 which deposited them by dinghy on Banna Strand in Kerry, thinking of it as “the smallest invading party known to history”.
Somehow he evaded capture after the Rising, eight months later disguising himself as a stoker on a liner out of Liverpool. Back in New York, he found out where his family were living, after 14 months away, but his little daughter did not recognise the “grimy scarecrow” who came to the door.
Monteith proved his loyalty. By contrast, there was the betrayal by the least attractive person in this narrative, Adler Christiansen, the young Norwegian (a husband and a father) who Casement disastrously used as a valet and a source of sexual pleasure after picking him up on a stroll along Broadway. Carroll calls him a sociopath.
When the pair arrived in Norway in October 1914 on the way to Berlin, Christiansen fed damning personal information to the sensationally-named chief of the British Legation, Mansfeldt de Cardonnel Findlay. Casement compartmentalised his life, but he was now entering a phase during which the walls between those compartments would start to break down irretrievably.
Other key figures in a teeming narrative are Tom Clarke, the originator of the Rising; John Devoy, the veteran Clan na Gael organiser in New York; Eoin MacNeill, the Irish Volunteers chief who was out-manoeuvred by the IRB as the Rising kicked off; Blinker Hall’s professional partner Basil Thomson, assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard, who lethally uncovered in his interrogation the damning diaries; and Raimund Weisbach, the German U-boat operative who fired the torpedo which sank the Lusitania and later commanded U-19 into Tralee Bay. Carroll interweaves the narrative strands of all these characters skilfully.
Everyone orbits around Casement, the complex figure who dominates the narrative. The arc of his tragedy is well-known, with this book in its early pages just sketching the high points of his investigations into the rubber industries of the Congo and the Amazon.
Casement started as a loyal servant of the Empire, but the faultlines of his character ineluctably shifted him in a very different direction. His consular letterheads specified that he represented Great Britain and Ireland, and he wrote: “In those lonely Congo forests where I found Leopold, I found also myself, the incorrigible Irishman. I realised I was looking at this tragedy with the eyes of another race, of a people once hunted themselves.” Within a few years, he found himself the subject of a manhunt.
When captured in Kerry after his failed attempt to postpone the Rising and transferred to London for interrogation, he knew what was coming. He had tried to dispose of the explosive evidence of his sexual past, which he meticulously compiled in a series of diaries, but the documents were weaponised in his destruction. In the decades since, they have become some of the most scrutinised and debated pieces of writing in Irish literature. Carroll sides with the now-mainstream belief that they were genuine and not forgeries.
The puzzle is why he provided on a plate so much potential material for his enemies. Perhaps it was naivety, though Colm Tóibín has cited Jeffrey Dudgeon’s belief that the diaries were for Casement’s own erotic delight, “written conversations with himself”. How sad that this lonely man, travelling through Africa, South America, Europe and the United States and rarely spending time in Ireland, had no supportive emotional outlet.
Near the end, his close (heterosexual) friend Richard Morten visited him in prison and asked him about “the other thing”. Casement just closed him down with: “Dick, you’ve upset me.” Of all the people in this book, perhaps only his cousin Gertrude Bannister, faithful to the last, truly loved him.
There has been talk recently that nonfiction is in decline, its sales eaten into by podcasts such as Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland’s deservedly successful The Rest is History. Rory Carroll’s book will swim against that tide. It takes its place beside books such as Ben Macintyre’s A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. Similarly, the superb A Spy Among Traitors.
The latter is about the Russian KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky, who escaped from Moscow the year after the Brighton bombing and was much admired by Margaret Thatcher. Moving into fiction, the first two volumes of Joseph O’Connor’s Roman Escape Line trilogy, My Father’s House and The Ghosts of Rome (last year’s An Post Irish Book of the Year) use history in a similarly exciting way.
This latest version of the Casement story is a rapidly-paced, expert marshalling of a huge range of characters and locations, written with brio. It is a thrilling account of one of the most unpredictable, memorable and poignant figures in our history.
Julian Girdham teaches English at St Columba’s College in Dublin.
Further reading
Frank MacGabhann in his review in these pages called Angus Mitchell’s 16 Lives: Roger Casement “superlative” from “the foremost authority”.
In his 2004 New York Review of Books essay ‘The Tragedy of Roger Casement, Colm Tóibín called Jeffrey Dudgeon’s Roger Casement: the Black Diaries (2002, first edition) “the most complete so far” by “the biographer Casement has been waiting for”, particularly for insights into his sexual life.
For background to Casement’s heroism in the Congo, there is no more powerful reading than Adam Hochschild’s account of horror King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998).
There are only a few pages directly on Casement in W.G. Sebald’s unclassifiable masterpiece The Rings of Saturn (1995, originally in German, brilliantly translated into English by Michael Hulse in 1998), but the ideas in those pages ramify throughout the book. Sebald discovers Casement’s connection with the novelist Joseph Conrad. They met in the Congo in 1890, Conrad later writing the novella Heart of Darkness (1899).
