Casement · 1916
Casement on Banna Strand
On the early morning of Good Friday, the twenty-first of April 1916, on the long flat sand of Banna Strand on the western coast of County Kerry, three days before the planned Easter Rising in Dublin, Sir Roger Casement, fifty-one years old, former British consular officer, knight of the realm for his humanitarian work on the Belgian Congo and the Putumayo, presently a Captain in the Imperial German service, was put ashore from the dinghy of the German U-boat *U-19* with two companions (Robert Monteith and Daniel Bailey) at three in the morning. The U-boat had been escorting the German freighter *Aud*, which carried twenty thousand rifles, one million rounds of ammunition, and ten machine guns for the Irish Volunteers, on the long passage from Lübeck. The *Aud* had failed to make the secret rendezvous on Easter Sunday morning at Fenit pier; the captain had scuttled her off Daunt's Rock, near Cork harbour, when intercepted by the Royal Navy. Casement, ill with malaria, exhausted, and (by his own letter to his sister Nina from prison) increasingly disillusioned with the German alliance, was found by an Irish farmer named Mary Gorman at McKenna's Fort, half a mile inland, at one in the afternoon. He was held at Tralee gaol overnight, transferred to Dublin Castle on the morning of the twenty-third of April, and taken to London by steamer the same day. The Rising began the next morning without him and without the *Aud*'s arms. He was tried in London in June, hanged at Pentonville Prison on the third of August 1916.
It is twenty minutes past three on the morning of Good Friday, the twenty-first of April 1916, on the soft wet sand of Banna Strand on the western coast of County Kerry, in heavy darkness with a fine cold rain coming off the Atlantic. He is fifty-one years old. He is Sir Roger David Casement, born at Lawson Terrace, Sandycove, Dublin, on the first of September 1864, raised at Magherintemple near Ballycastle in north Antrim, formerly British consul at Boma in the Congo Free State, formerly Consul-General at Rio de Janeiro, knighted in 1911 for the Putumayo report, retired from the consular service in 1913, presently a Captain of the German Imperial Reserve and a Specialist Adviser to the German Foreign Office on Irish republican affairs.
He has, in the previous three minutes, climbed out of the German Navy dinghy of U-19 (Lieutenant Raimund Weisbach commanding) onto the sand. His two companions, Captain Robert Monteith of the Irish Volunteers and Sergeant Daniel Bailey of the Royal Irish Rifles (a German-recruited member of the abortive Irish Brigade), are with him. The U-boat is half a mile out, on the surface in the dark, ready to leave when the men have made the inland line of dunes. The dinghy is being pulled back by two German seamen.
He has, on the sand at his feet, no firearm and no military equipment except a revolver and three pre-printed German telegrams in a leather wallet at his belt. He has a four-day fever (recurrent malaria from his Congo years). He has, by his own statement to Monteith in the dinghy a quarter of an hour ago, been turning over for the last hundred miles of the U-boat's run a question to which he does not yet have an answer.
He thinks: the Aud has not made the rendezvous. Karl Spindler is meant to have brought her into the bay last night and to have run her into Fenit pier at dawn. The U-boat reports the Aud has not been signalled since Wednesday morning.
He thinks: if the Aud has not landed, the Volunteers do not have the twenty thousand Mausers. If they do not have the Mausers, the Rising is the small group of about a thousand-two hundred Dublin Volunteers with their existing eight hundred working rifles. The Rising at that scale is a city action only and will not bring the country out. The country has been promised the country will rise on the back of the German rifles.
He thinks: the German government's commitment to the Irish question is a commitment of opportunity, not of principle. The German army has not given me, in three months of negotiation, any of the things I asked for beyond the Aud. The Irish Brigade was a recruitment failure. The plan has been, from the German General Staff side, the plan of a wartime nuisance operation.
He thinks: I have spent thirty years on humanitarian missions in the Congo and the Amazon and the Putumayo. I have spent the past three years, in fact, away from human-rights work and inside German diplomatic offices. I am not the man I was at thirty-five.
He thinks: I have to get word to Pearse and Connolly that the Rising is to be cancelled because the German arms are not coming.
He walks up the strand to the line of dunes with Monteith. Bailey is sent ahead to find a local sympathiser. They take shelter in the overgrown earthwork of McKenna's Fort, an Iron-Age ring-fort half a mile inland behind the dunes, at half past three. Monteith goes off to find a bicycle and ride to Tralee with the cancellation order for the Volunteer commander.
Roger Casement is found at the fort, asleep against the inside of the bank, at one in the afternoon, by Mary Gorman, a farmer's daughter of the local townland, who has come up to the rath looking for a missing cow. She runs back to her father's farm and tells him a strange man is in the fort. The father walks to the village and tells the parish priest, who tells the Royal Irish Constabulary sergeant at Ardfert. The RIC sergeant comes up to the fort at half past three in the afternoon with two constables. Casement, by his own deposition the next morning, gives the name of Richard Morten and the back-story of a writer on holiday. The deception lasts twenty minutes. The sergeant identifies him by the cipher of a German train-ticket in his coat pocket. He is held at Ardfert overnight and brought to Tralee gaol on the morning of the twenty-second.
The Rising began on Easter Monday the twenty-fourth of April 1916 without the Aud arms and largely without the support Casement had been negotiating for. The General Post Office was taken at noon (the Pearse-Proclamation moment), the rising lasted six days, the GPO garrison surrendered on the twenty-ninth. Casement was held at Dublin Castle on the twenty-third, taken to London the same day, charged with high treason on the seventeenth of May, tried at the King's Bench Division of the Royal Courts of Justice from the twenty-sixth to the twenty-ninth of June 1916. The defence was led by Serjeant Sullivan KC. The conviction turned on the medieval Treason Act of 1351; the argument of Sullivan's defence was that the Act applied only to treason committed within the realm of England, and that Casement's treason had been committed in Germany; the King's Bench ruled, by a controversial reading of the statute's punctuation, that the Act applied wherever the offence had been committed. The verdict was guilty. He was stripped of his knighthood by the order of the Privy Council on the twenty-ninth of June.
He was hanged at Pentonville Prison on the morning of the third of August 1916. The execution was by John Ellis, the executioner. Casement was attended by the Catholic chaplain Father Carey; he had converted to Catholicism in his last week, on the twenty-eighth of July, before the execution. He was forty-five seconds on the scaffold. He was buried in unconsecrated ground inside the prison wall.
His remains were repatriated by the Harold Wilson British government on the twenty-third of February 1965, lay in state at the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin for two days, and were reinterred at Glasnevin Cemetery with full state honours on the first of March 1965. The pre-trial diaries (the Black Diaries) that the Crown had used at trial to undermine sympathy for him in confidential briefings to the Catholic Church and the Irish-American press, and that record his homosexual experiences in Africa and South America, are now in the British National Archives at Kew. They are, by the modern consensus of the scholars who have authenticated them by forensic comparison, genuine. The Casement memorial at Banna Strand, put up in 1971, is a granite obelisk on the headland above McKenna's Fort. The fort itself is, in the care of the Office of Public Works, a grassy ring-fort still mostly hidden in the dunes.