59 Facts About Roger Casement

Roger David Casement, known as Sir Roger Casement, CMG, between 1911 and 1916, was a diplomat and Irish nationalist executed by the United Kingdom for treason during World War I He worked for the British Foreign Office as a diplomat, becoming known as a humanitarian activist, and later as a poet and Easter Rising leader.

Roger Casement was arrested, convicted and executed for high treason.

Roger Casement was stripped of his knighthood and other honours.

Debates have continued about these diaries: a handwriting comparison study in 2002 concluded that Roger Casement had written the diaries, but this was still contested by some.

Roger Casement was born in Dublin to an Anglo-Irish family, and lived in very early childhood at Doyle's Cottage, Lawson Terrace, Sandycove, a terrace that no longer exists, but that was on Sandycove Road between what is Fitzgerald's pub and The Butler's Pantry delicatessen.

Roger Casement travelled to Europe to fight as a volunteer in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 but arrived after the Surrender at Vilagos.

The family lived in England in genteel poverty; Roger Casement's mother died when he was nine.

Roger Casement's father took the family back to Ireland to County Antrim to live near paternal relatives.

Roger Casement was educated at the Diocesan School, Ballymena.

Roger Casement left school at 16 and went to England to work as a clerk with Elder Dempster, a Liverpool shipping company headed by Alfred Lewis Jones.

Roger Casement was the inspiration for a character in Denis Johnston's play The Moon in the Yellow River.

Roger Casement drowned in Dublin's Grand Canal on 6 March 1939, having threatened suicide.

Roger Casement worked in the Congo for Henry Morton Stanley and the African International Association from 1884; this association became known as a front for King Leopold II of Belgium in his takeover of what became the so-called Congo Free State.

Roger Casement worked on a survey to improve communication and recruited and supervised workmen in building a railroad to bypass the lower 220 miles of the Congo River, which is made unnavigable by cataracts, in order to improve transportation and trade to the Upper Congo.

In 1890 Roger Casement met Joseph Conrad, who had come to the Congo to pilot a merchant ship, Le Roi des Belges.

Roger Casement later exposed the conditions he found in the Congo during an official investigation for the British government.

Roger Casement joined the Colonial Service, under the authority of the Colonial Office, first serving overseas as a clerk in British West Africa.

Roger Casement travelled for weeks in the upper Congo Basin to interview people throughout the region, including workers, overseers and mercenaries.

Roger Casement's report provoked controversy, and some companies with a business interest in the Congo rejected its findings, as did Roger Casement's former boss, Alfred Lewis Jones.

Roger Casement was attached as a consular representative to a commission investigating rubber slavery by the Peruvian Amazon Company, which had been registered in Britain in 1908 and had a British board of directors and numerous stockholders.

Roger Casement saw Peruvian Indians whose backs were marked by severe whipping, in a pattern called the Mark of Arana, and reported other abuses.

Roger Casement found conditions as inhumane as those in the Congo.

Roger Casement made two lengthy visits to the region, first in 1910 with a commission of investigators.

Roger Casement lived in London for years, then returned to Peru.

Roger Casement was elected a senator and died in Lima, Peru in 1952, aged 88.

Roger Casement wrote extensively for his private record in those two years.

Roger Casement kept them in London along with the 1903 diary and other papers of the period, presumably so they could be consulted in his continuing work as "Congo Casement" and as the saviour of the Putumayo Indians.

In 1911 Roger Casement received a knighthood for his efforts on behalf of the Amazonian Indians, having been appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in 1905 for his Congo work.

In Ireland in 1904, on leave from Africa from that year until 1905, Roger Casement joined the Gaelic League, an organisation established in 1893 to preserve and revive the spoken and literary use of the Irish language.

Roger Casement met the leaders of the powerful Irish Parliamentary Party to lobby for his work in the Congo.

Roger Casement did not support those, like the IPP, who proposed Home Rule, as he believed that the House of Lords would veto such efforts.

Roger Casement was more impressed by Arthur Griffith's new Sinn Fein party, which called for an independent Ireland.

Roger Casement retired from the British consular service in the summer of 1913.

Already in November 1913, Roger Casement had begun focussing on responding to "Carsonism" in kind: he became a Gaelic League member of the Provisional Committee of the Irish Volunteers launched at a meeting in the Rotunda in Dublin.

In July 1914, Roger Casement journeyed to the United States to promote and raise money for the Volunteers among the large and numerous Irish community there.

The Howth gun-running in late July 1914, which Roger Casement had helped to organise and finance, further enhanced his reputation.

In October 1914, Roger Casement sailed for Germany via Norway, traveling in disguise and seeing himself as an ambassador of the Irish nation.

In November 1914, Roger Casement negotiated a declaration by Germany which stated:.

Roger Casement spent most of his time in Germany seeking to recruit an Irish Brigade from among more than 2,000 Irish prisoners-of-war taken in the early months of the war and held in the prison camp of Limburg an der Lahn.

Roger Casement's plan was that they would be trained to fight against Britain in the cause of Irish independence.

The men were well treated and were often visited by Sir Roger Casement who, working with the German authorities, tried to get these Irishmen to desert their flag and join the Germans.

On 27 December 1914 Roger Casement signed an agreement in Berlin to this effect with Arthur Zimmermann in the German Foreign Office, renouncing all his titles in a letter to British Foreign Secretary dated 1 February 1915.

Roger Casement did not learn about the Easter Rising until after the plan was fully developed.

Roger Casement confided his personal papers to Dr Charles Curry, with whom he had stayed at Riederau on the Ammersee, before he left Germany.

Roger Casement wanted to reach Ireland before the shipment of arms and to convince Eoin MacNeill to cancel the rising.

Roger Casement sent John McGoey, a recently arrived Irish-American, through Denmark to Dublin, ostensibly to advise what military aid was coming from Germany and when, but with Roger Casement's orders "to get the Heads in Ireland to call off the rising and merely try to land the arms and distribute them".

Roger Casement sent word to Dublin about the inadequate German assistance.

Roger Casement's crimes had been carried out in Germany and the Treason Act 1351 seemed to apply only to activities carried out on English soil.

Roger Casement refused to agree to this and was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged.

Those who pleaded for clemency for Casement included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was acquainted with Casement through the work of the Congo Reform Association, poet W B Yeats, and playwright George Bernard Shaw.

Roger Casement was attended by two Catholic priests, Dean Timothy Ring and Father James Carey, from the East London parish of SS Mary and Michael.

Roger Casement's body was buried in quicklime in the prison cemetery at the rear of Pentonville Prison, where he had been hanged, though his last wish was to be buried at Murlough Bay on the north coast of County Antrim, in present-day Northern Ireland.

Roger Casement ultimately turned down the Irish request, citing "specific and binding" legal obligations that the remains of executed prisoners could not be exhumed.

Roger Casement's remains lay in state at the Garrison Church, Arbour Hill in Dublin city for five days, close to the graves of other leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, but would not be buried beside them.

British officials have claimed that Roger Casement kept the Black Diaries, a set of diaries covering the years 1903,1910 and 1911.

At a time of strong conservatism, not least among Irish Catholics, publicising the Black Diaries and Roger Casement's alleged homosexuality undermined support for him.

Historians and biographers of Roger Casement's life have taken opposing views.

Dudgeon suggested in a 2013 article that Roger Casement needed to be "sexless" to fit his role as a Catholic martyr in the nationalist movement of the time.

Roger Casement has been the subject of ballads, poetry, novels, and TV series since his death, including:.