British Documents Prove Casement Forgery

The following is a two-part investigation of official documents held in the UK National Archives. These specific documents written by Home and Foreign Office officials are of crucial importance in the controversy about the diaries attributed to Roger Casement. Despite their importance, the extensive literature of the last sixty years has carefully avoided revealing their true significance. This article explains why.

Foreign Office confirms diaries forgery

In 1967 the British Government authorized the public release of once top-secret files to the Public Records Office. Among these were Foreign Office files relating to Casement in the period 1914 to 1916. Also in 1967 a new biography of Casement was commissioned from journalist-author Brian Inglis who was the first to access the secrets in those files. However, far from revealing those secrets in his 1973 book, Inglis ensured they would remain unknown to his readers. His book rapidly became the most influential study of Casement eventually producing a broad consensus that the former consul and humanitarian pioneer had been a disturbed pederast loner, an emotional fanatic traitor with a fractured personality. This portrait was copied verbatim by subsequent authors and Inglis went unchallenged for decades. Only in recent years has there been critical scrutiny of Inglis’ operation and that scrutiny has revealed the extent of his duplicity and sophistry.

Inglis contended the diaries were authentic but not from probative evidence; rather he created a portrait of Casement which made authenticity seem probable and credible. At the centre of this portrait we find the ambiguous figure of his manservant Christensen as a treacherous homosexual plotting to betray Casement to Findlay, Minister at the British legation in Christiania, Norway. It was Inglis who invented the allegation of Casement’s betrayal and it proved to be a potent propaganda weapon which was taken up by many later authors. Above all, it served to reinforce the defamation of Casement as pederast in the intensifying controversy about the diaries. To achieve this manipulation Inglis was constrained to suppress one of the secrets he had read in the released Foreign Office files. That secret was written in 1915 by Foreign Office official Arthur Nicolson who clearly confirmed that no betrayal took place or was contemplated.

The file in question is FO 95,776 and the narrative which emerges from its hundreds of pages reveals in convincing detail that no betrayal by Christensen took place and that, contrary to the allegation, Christensen successfully deceived Findlay for over two months with bogus letters, charts and fictions about Casement’s location and plans. Thus the magnitude of the false betrayal allegation is sufficient to discredit all Inglis’ supporting allegations and claims. Falsus in uno falsus in omnibus.

These documents were marked Private & Most Secret and they were written by British officials which signifies that their narrative constitutes an official account of events in those months. That account, kept secret until 1967, was contradicted by Inglis’ 1973 account which began with Christensen’s version of his encounter with legation secretary Lindley only to deny its veracity; “When the Foreign Office’s files on the subject were eventually opened for inspection, they told a different story.” Inglis’ ‘different story’ is a brief paraphrase of the top-secret memo invented by Findlay in October 1914 and sent at once to Foreign Secretary Grey. This shabby unconvincing document was also released in 1967 and it contains the first poisonous innuendo of homosexual scandal which Inglis cites. His paraphrase established the standard portrait of Christensen as a devious scoundrel who having ensnared Casement went voluntarily to the legation to sell him.

However, the official account was written in real time by the actual players Findlay and Nicolson and it is not credible that Inglis did not believe their account. Therefore, we must conclude he suppressed it in his book because he knew it was true and its truth compromised his plan to exploit the unknown Christensen as purported betrayer as the 1914 memo had insinuated.

Readers should note the following as symptomatic of the incoherence of the diaries controversy; at the same time that Inglis said nothing about the official account, US author B.L. Reid confirmed the official account and cited generously from FO 95,776 for his 1976 study.

Therefore the contents of that file testify not only to the falsity of Inglis’ version of events but also to all that derives from his version. What follows directly from Inglis’ version is the widely-believed claim that the diaries are authentic. It is important to note that Inglis contradicted the official account by replacing it with a paraphrase of Findlay’s invented memo. In the end it is the fact that no betrayal took place which is verified by FO 95,776 and it is this bare fact which demolishes all of Inglis’ subsequent claims for authenticity.

From late October 1914 until early January 1915 Findlay’s correspondence intensified with letters and telegrams almost daily to and from Nicolson in the FO; file FO 95,776 contains over fifty communications at this time which offer a detailed narrative of how Christensen systematically duped Findlay on Casement’s instructions.

TIMELINE

29 October: Findlay sent Lindley’s false memo to London. 30 October: Findlay met Christensen who on Casement’s instructions began the entrapment of Findlay. 28 November: Nicolson authorized the £5000 bribe. 3 January 1915: Findlay gave the handwritten bribe to Christensen. January 4: Nicolson advised nothing to be written, verbal only. January 6: Findlay apologized for written bribe. 13 January: Findlay apologized for the total failure of his coup against Casement. 14 January: Findlay sent a long typed letter to Nicolson apologizing again for his failure and errors. 14 January: a draft letter in FO 95766 reprimanded Findlay for his ‘great mistake’ in falling for ‘a ruse to get something from you in writing.’

A final most important fact is that on 5 January Christensen personally surrendered the bribe document to Meyer of the German Foreign Office thus definitively demonstrating the utter falsity of the Inglis betrayal claim.

This is what Nicolson wrote to Findlay on 14 January, 1915. “You will see that Christensen was playing a double game and that his reluctance to go on at the last was … merely a ruse to obtain something from you in writing. You made a great mistake in giving it … I have no doubt that Casement and his German friends will make the most of it.” What this confirms is that Christensen did not betray Casement and never intended to betray Casement. Expertise in hermeneutics is not required since no other interpretation is possible. It follows that the specific claim made by Inglis and repeated by Reid, Sawyer, Dudgeon, Ó Síocháin that Christensen betrayed Casement at the legation is categorically denied by the Foreign Office in the person of Arthur Nicolson CMG, KCIE, KCB, KCVO, GCVO, GCMG, GCB, Permanent Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs.

The deeper significance of Inglis’ duplicity is that the alleged betrayal of Casement slyly effects a fusion between treachery and sexual deviancy which infects and condemns both men as depraved politically, morally and sexually. The demonstrated falsity of the claim has serious repercussions for the dispute about the diaries. This is because the false claim of betrayal has conditioned the diaries dispute since 1973 and it constitutes the foundation stone of all authenticity accounts since published. All are dependent on this single deceit which effectively creates an illusory coherence in a subsequent pattern of interlocking deceits consisting of altered, forged and non-existent documents, selective framing, false attributions, omissions, circular reasoning, bogus logic and much innuendo. This elaborate web of duplicity is now without foundation and logically it follows that what it asserts is also without foundation.

Therefore the claim that the diaries are authentic cannot be sustained because it is founded on the demonstrated falsehood of an event which never happened. As it is false for Inglis so it is false for the other authors and likewise it is false for all claims that depend upon it as in a chain reaction. Therefore, it was the Foreign Office which guaranteed a priori the falsity of any future authenticity claims long before Inglis’ claim in 1973. Nicolson’s statement and Findlay’s apologies in FO 95,766 constitute a de facto proof of forgery.

Home Office proof of forgery

In October 1995 the British cabinet finally sanctioned the unrestricted release of the notorious diaries along with a large quantity of documents relating to Casement. Among these papers were extensive files compiled in 1958-59 when the Home Office was deliberating over the future of thediaries after the Home Secretary had come under increasing pressure from MPs and the press. At that point no-one outside government knew if the diaries even existed far less if they were genuine. Having refused all comment on the diaries for decades, the 1959 publication in Paris of the police typescripts finally forced the Home Secretary to instruct a Working Party to investigate, report and advise on a solution to the predicament.

The report of the Working Party of March 1959 contained a five-page ‘History of the Casement Diaries’ (PRO HO 144/23481). On page two we read “There is no record on the Home Office papers of the diaries or the copies having been shown to anyone outside the government service before Casement’s trial.” Although there is no official Home Office record, the typescripts were indeed shown to many influential non-government persons in the two months before the trial. They were also shown after the trial as confirmed by an official Note of the Working Party dated 7 May, 1958 which states “It was clear … that the diaries or copies of them, had been shown to a considerable number of people before Casement was executed. It would be difficult … to discover …the exact sequence of events in 1916 and who was responsible …”But while there are records of persons seeing the typescripts there are no records anywhere of anyone seeing manuscript diaries before or after the trial.

On the same page we also read “After the dismissal of the appeal a typescript copy was shown, on the Home Secretary’s instructions, to Mr. (later Sir John) Harris …” On that page and the next we read “Either copies or the diaries themselves were shown by Mr. (later Sir Basil) Thomson, Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, to the American Ambassador, apparently at the Ambassador’s request. The Ambassador was given photographs of two passages from the typescripts.” Therefore in 1959 the Home Office did not know exactly what was shown to the Ambassador. Nonetheless, Thomson confirmed the showing in a letter to Blackwell, cabinet legal advisor, who described ‘the diary’ as “ … many pages of closely typed matter.”

Theobald Mathew, Director of Public Prosecutions, also confirmed “there is no written record of what use was made of the copy extracts from the diaries …” In a letter dated March 9 we read “ … it was taken for granted in 1916 that the diaries were genuine …” Clutterbuck, Ambassador to Dublin, admitted his uncertainty about when the police found Casement’s luggage and accepted the possibility of its seizure long before Casement’s arrest. “The story of the diaries as revealed in the Home Office papers does not provide conclusive evidence that no forgery took place.”

What this signifies is that in 1959 the British government did not possess a single document which gave the name of any independent person who had seen manuscript diaries in 1916. But it did possess the names of several independent persons who had seen the police typescripts in 1916. Moreover, in 1959 it did not possess any of the photographs of the typescripts which were made and did not possess any of the photos allegedly made of manuscript diaries in 1916. In short, the Home Office in 1959 did not possess anything which would testify beyond all doubt to the material existence of manuscript diaries in 1916.

What is revealed in the Working Party papers is that the four civil servants were handicapped by an irrational cognitive model which compelled them to believe the diaries were self-evidently authentic which conveniently made empirical evidence unnecessary since there was none. This hostile cognitive trap led them to announce “…the diaries speak for themselves and are likely to convince all but fanatics of their genuineness.” They were aware of persistent claims of forgery both in Ireland and elsewhere but a kind of ‘patriotic faith’ sustained them against those they called “nationalist fanatics”.

To these facts we must add the following; the various biographies attesting to authenticity – by MacColl, Inglis, Sawyer, Dudgeon, Ó Síocháin, Philipps – some of these do give the names of independent persons who allegedly saw manuscript diaries in 1916. But in all these cases official documents confirm that only police typescripts were shown to the alleged witnesses. Sawyer, Dudgeon and Ó Síocháin falsely claim that Baptist missionary John Harris was shown manuscript diaries and the books by Dudgeon and Ó Síocháin ignore HO 144/23481 which was available to them at Kew. Philipps too falsely claims that Harris was shown “the photographs of the extracts” while he ignores the fact verified by HO 144/23481 that the photos shown to the US ambassador were photos of typescripts. Certainly photographs were made but none have survived; the destruction of official evidence betrays the evidence is false. Philipps ‘solves’ the problem by simply ignoring the existence of the police typescripts thus obliging his readers to assume manuscript diaries were shown; even so, Philipps fails to verify a single showing. Reid proves unable or unwilling to distinguish between the typescripts and manuscripts by referring vaguely to ‘diary materials’. Despite his claim on page 418 that “Apparently anyone of influence could have a look.” at the diaries, he is unable to name anyone who did ‘have a look’.

In conclusion, of these six authors whose research covers a seventy-year period with 3,400 pages, not one of them can state the name of a single independent witness who saw manuscript diaries in 1916. Taken together, the above verified official facts constitute sufficient grounds for asserting that today’s manuscript diaries were not shown to anyone in 1916 because they did not exist. From this it follows that PRO HO 144/23481 provides a de facto proof of forgery.

Information recorded in his 1910 notebook and known only to Casement remained secret until 1914 when the notebook was found by British intelligence who subsequently exploited its potential as testimony to ‘authenticate’ the invented 1910 ‘black diary’.

In the National Library of Ireland there is a long, handwritten document which is the undisputed work of Casement. This is a detailed account of his day-to-day investigation into the Putumayo atrocities in the latter months of 1910. Today this document is called The Amazon Journal. In the UK National Archives there is a handwritten desk diary attributed to Casement, most of which is a partial account of the same period and which contains around 22 references that allude to homosexuality. This is named the Dollard diary after the Dublin stationery firm.

The precise relationship between these two documents has never been fully determined and even where it is proposed that both are Casement’s work, it remains to be demonstrated which was written first. This is necessary because those who hold that both are Casement’s work insist the Dollard was written first and that The Amazon Journal is a later version. The Amazon Journal consists of 128 handwritten, double-sided foolscap pages containing around 143,000 words and it is 10.22 times longer than the entries for the same period in the Dollard diary; it contains no compromising writings whatsoever. Its existence has caused difficulties for those who believe that the Dollard diary was written by Casement, not least because the principal reason for believing Casement wrote the Dollard is a resemblance in the handwriting. Whereas there is evidence that Casement wrote The Amazon Journal in 1910, there is no evidence to show that it was written after the Dollard. To ease those difficulties, it has been suggested that both diaries are genuine and that The Amazon Journal is a cleaned-up version of the Dollard. Therefore it is the inclusion in the Dollard of the contentious references that provides the only rationale for its existence. This, however, does not explain why anyone would write some 14,000 words merely to conserve 516 words of nonsense.

In the introduction to his 1997 book Roger Casement’s diaries: the black and the white, Roger Sawyer claims that the Dollard diary was written by Casement when in Peru in 1910; it was his original diary complete with compromising entries. At the same time Casement was also composing the much longer Amazon Journal and drawing upon the Dollard as source material or as an aide-mémoire. According to Sawyer, The Amazon Journal was intended as preliminary material for a book. This explains why it contains no compromising references; ‘evidently it was written in the hope that it would eventually form the basis of a published work and … it had the initial value of being a useful aide-mémoire for the official report … ; as he writes a fuller, official, version eventually intended to form the basis of a published work.’

Sawyer is rightly concerned with sequence because the first written seems to have a strong claim to authenticity. It is counter intuitive to compose a false document first and then compose an authentic document ten times longer expanding on most of the events in the false document. The supposed later Amazon Journal seems to share its undisputed authenticity with the supposed earlier document. Sawyer does not contest Casement’s authorship of the Journal but he does not explain why two diaries were supposedly written by one person to record the same period of time save to suggest that the diarist intended to record erotic experience in the Dollard. Yet this is unconvincing because only 3.6% of that diary might be described as alluding to erotic matters. It will therefore be necessary to expose how Sawyer deploys specious reasoning and manipulated chicanery but will reveal precisely how and when the Dollard diary with its fake erotic evidence was manufactured.

Sawyer’s book refers to entries in the Dollard diary as follows: ‘On three occasions in the Black Diary, the author seems to be alluding to the White Diary (4, 21, 29 October), and on the blotter facing 6-8 October he actually quotes from it.’ While it is true that these allusions to the Amazon Journal do appear in the Dollard, it is misleading to claim the blotter text quotes from The Amazon Journal; only two words of 79 on the Dollard blotter appear in The Amazon Journal. In fact Casement left a blank space in the Journal where that text was intended. That blank space is intentionally omitted in Sawyer’s published version of The Amazon Journal (which he also calls the White Diary). Indeed Sawyer’s entire Amazon Journal entry for 8 th October does not correspond to the version published by Angus Mitchell which is considered authoritative. The motive for that omission will soon become clear since it is consistent with Sawyer’s manipulation of the original sequence of events recorded in his published version of The Amazon Journal entry for 8th October.

Here is the text on the Dollard blotter which Sawyer counts as of great importance:

‘On 8th Oct at Ultimo Retiro. Measurements of one man & a woman. The man’s name Waiteka, ‘the fearless skeleton’ of my Diary, who denounced the ‘cepo’ Age about 35-40. Weight, say 120lbs. Height 5’6’’. Chest 35’’. Thigh 17’’. Calf 11 ¼ ‘’ – (his ankle in cepo just fitted.) Biceps 9 ½ ‘’ Forearm 8’’ Stomach 32’’.

Woman Theorana by name. Age say 22 yrs. Weight 104. Height 4’7’’. Chest below breasts 31’’. Stomach 33’’. Thigh 19 ¾ ’’. Calf 12 ¼’’ . Biceps 9 ½ ’’. Forearm 8’’.’

The ‘cepo’ is the wooden punishment stocks used to torture and kill the native slave gatherers of rubber. Since the details cited above seem authentic their provenance must be established. In The Amazon Journal, however, these details are not present and there is merely the phrase ‘I was smiling with pleasure that this fearless skeleton had found tongue …’ That the phrase ‘’the fearless skeleton’ of my Diary’ appears in the Dollard confirms that the diarist has seen The Amazon Journal but that fact does not identify the diarist who Sawyer alleges is Casement. The source of the detailed measurements in the Dollard is certainly Casement which fact appears to identify Casement as author not only of those measurements but also of the entire Dollard diary. That impression remains intact until the true source of the details is revealed which will expose the Dollard diary as another example of manufactured evidence.

Sawyer at once runs into contradiction. He claims that the Dollard entry for 8th October was written before the same-date entry in The Amazon Journal yet he asserts that the Dollard diarist found the fearless skeleton reference in the 8th October entry of The Amazon Journal. But that entry, according to his thesis, had yet to be written. In fact this contradiction of which Sawyer is quite unaware establishes definitively that The Amazon Journal was written before the Dollard. It entirely escapes Sawyer that ‘the fearless skeleton’ phrase in the Dollard could just as logically have been lifted from the already-written Amazon Journal. In addition, the Dollard diarist blunders again by citing the name ‘Waiteka’ which does not appear in The Amazon Journal entry. Indeed that name comes from a source known the diarist and to Sawyer and concealed by both. It is the reference to ‘my diary’ that betrays the 8th October Dollard entry as an embedded authenticating device. Close scrutiny demonstrates that it fails. The Dollard entry derives an illusory authenticity from the authentic Amazon Journal by identifying the source of the words ‘fearless skeleton’ in The Amazon Journal. The parasitical mechanism creates a deceptive correspondence between statements in both documents so that the authenticity of the statement in one document passes imperceptibly into the statement in another document. But the repetition of the same words in the second document does not demonstrate that one person wrote those words in both documents.

The Amazon Journal consists of loose foolscap sheets which require a stable support hence only written when circumstances permitted and mostly indoors at night. Thus his Amazon Journal account of events at the stocks was written some time after his investigation earlier that day in the company of commission members. The physical measurements taken at the stocks were certainly noted in writing at once since such detail could not be recalled by memory later. It is confirmed that Casement used notebooks when outdoors as he was on this day inspecting the stocks. That he intended to insert these details later in The Amazon Journal is demonstrated by the incomplete locution in The Amazon Journal entry – ‘Here are it’s measurements … His name was …’ Conspicuously, Sawyer does not publish this locution in his manipulated version of the White Diary entry for 8th October.

When the Dollard diarist refers to ‘the fearless skeleton of my Diary’ he is confirming that The Amazon Journal entry of 8th October precedes the Dollard entry written on the blotter for 8th October. It is not clear when Casement wrote that 8th October Amazon Journal entry but at the earliest it would have been late on the 8th . It follows that the Dollard diarist wrote ‘’the fearless skeleton’ of my Diary’ after 8th October. The fact that Casement did not include the measurements of the ‘fearless skeleton’ in The Amazon Journal can be explained by the information being already recorded in situ in the green notebook referred to in both The Amazon Journal and the Dollard diary.

Confirmation of Casement’s use of notebooks when on the move is found in the Casement-Roberts Correspondence at Rhodes House. Brit. Emp. S22. When responding to MP Charles Roberts on 27th January, 1913 Casement referred to The Amazon Journal as follows; “…I have not read it for two and a half years!… Also I have two notebooks in which are other portions of the diary and sometimes letters are to go in when I have left blanks…. The mass of writing I had to do…generally carried me far into the night. … you have the diary … If you get it well typed I can fill up from my other notebooks any discrepancies or omissions.” That correspondence also confirms that Roberts made two typed copies of The Amazon Journal he received from Casement and in June, 1913 one of these was given to Casement along with the original. Thus the manuscript plus the typed copy plus the notebooks were in Casement’s possession in mid 1913 and would later have been stored in his luggage either at Ebury Street or at Allison’s warehouse.

It is now widely accepted that Casement’s luggage was seized in late 1914 by either police orintelligence officers. Sawyer himself and many other forgery deniers have long accepted that the luggage was in police possession long before the 1916 arrest; Dudgeon seems to be the only exception. Therefore intelligence officers were able in 1914 to examine both the manuscript and typescript Amazon Journal plus the notebooks. The names and physical measurements in the notebook would have made little sense until cross checked with either version of the Amazon Journal in their possession and the full context understood. The intelligence officers would note the ‘fearless skeleton’ sentence in the Journal and would see that the names and measurements from the notebook had not been entered in the blank space reserved for them in the Journal. This was an unexpected prize; they had found genuine information in late 1914 from a unique source known only to them and which would remain known only to them. Those details from the notebook would eventually appear in the 1916 Dollard typescript and later in the manuscript ‘black diary’ where they would ‘authenticate’ both. Obviously none of Casement’s notebooks have survived; a great deal of ‘tell-tale’ Casement material was destroyed soon after the execution.

Like the other ‘black diaries’, the Dollard is now demonstrated to be a definitively proven forgery. Sawyer’s consistent dishonesty over several decades was masked by a veneer of old-world courtesy performed with self-effacing modesty to deceive the unwary. However, where Sawyer went wrong was that his determination to deceive readers made him overlook the fact that copying a Shakespeare quotation into one’s diary does not demonstrate that Shakespeare wrote the diary.