To the Irish Political Review

Dear Editor,

John Martin, in November’s Irish Political Review article ‘The Black Diary Forgeries’, pinpoints one of the, perhaps, dozen areas of dispute author Paul Hyde has over the authenticity of Casement’s four Black Diaries. I have dealt with most of these contradictions or confusions and made the point that, within nearly 1,000 daily diary entries, there are perhaps 10,000 facts so a few oddities or errors can be expected.

One other general point John has not grasped is that Casement wrote ceaselessly, so in 1910, writing both a discursive account of his Putumayo investigation and a personal diary, and for the year 1911 keeping a personal diary and a Cash Ledger (with non-financial jottings) was unremarkable.

The purchase of a motorbike for Casement’s Belfast boyfriend Millar Gordon in June 1911, probably as a 21st birthday present, given his date of birth of 23rd June 1890, is according to Hyde and John a pivotal matter and “fatal mistake” that, if the entries are proven to be faked or forged, disprove the authenticity of the whole set of diaries.

As John may have missed, there is a connection between the man who owned the motorbike before Millar. He was Cyril Corbally, the brother-in-law of Casement’s friend, Lord ffrench, an Irish Catholic peer. Corbally managed a golf club in Essex. Casement diaried meeting Lord and Lady ffrench twice in London that July although, as John indicates, he may not have known Corbally.

John asserts as far more likely that Millar bought the motorbike from a Belfast dealer, re-registering it in Essex on 10th July 1911. Casement’s diary entries about paying £25 to Corbally for the bike and another sum for its carriage are therefore untrue.

It must be noted that there are twenty-seven, mostly sexual, references to seeing or corresponding with Millar in the 1910 Diary and 1911 Cash Ledger, so these too have to have been faked.  There is also one impliedly sexual inscription by Casement on a letter about seeing him in August 1907 when he was seventeen.

We are asked to believe instead MI5, having discovered within Casement’s huge cache of letters that he knew a young man called Millar Gordon, they decided to set him up by forging sexual diary entries and backing it up through the generous gift of a motorbike—all of this in order to convince Asquith to hang Casement as a pervert and traitor.  Their tortured reasoning is that Millar could become the fall guy, proving the authenticity of Casement’s diaries because he was untraceable and unknowable, his surname Gordon not being mentioned in the diary entries, and thus a clean skin. 

This does not take into account that, if the odious allegations became known, a totally maligned individual would want to defend his reputation and prove them false.  Indulging in dangerous forging that involved a real and local person would be foolhardy.  They already had Casement’s companion, the Norwegian sailor Adler Christensen, at hand although he proved slippery.

Some readers may think this is a harmless disputation between archival detectives but it does call into question the wisdom of forgery theorists undermining their broader case against English Imperialism by hinging it to a prolonged conspiracy theory.  No sympathisers are convinced although some may be neutered.  The greater danger is that Casement gets caught up in current paedophile scandals, leaving his reputation damaged beyond repair.

Jeffrey Dudgeon, Belfast, 9 November 2025