Angela Clifford, writing in January’s Irish Political Review, focused attention on the remarkable man who was Roger Casement’s main interrogator.  Sir Basil Thomson is well worth looking at closely.  He can never be entirely ignored by anyone telling the Casement story, but he may be—and normally is—marginalised.  He always seems to get less notice than he deserves.

   It has been said that he was an attention-seeker—inappropriately so, for a head of Scotland Yard and afterwards overall head of British Intelligence.  The claim is repeated by Casement’s latest biographer, Roland Philipps:  Thomson was “a flamboyant self-publicist”.  If so, then he has been more than sufficiently punished ever since, by being kept in unmerited obscurity.

This many-sided man has never had a book-length biography.  In the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography there is a meagre sketch of his life by Noel Rutherford, an account which is totally inadequate.  It is interesting that the ODNB gave this task, not to an experienced writer on crime, or police, or Intelligence matters, but to an expert on the history of the South Pacific and specifically, Tonga!

   Not that this is irrelevant to Thomson’s story.  For several years he was a British colonial administrator in Fiji, and he served briefly as Assistant Prime Minister in Tonga.  But Rutherford treats even the Pacific period skimpily;  one of the few significant details he gives is that, right from the start of his Fijian stay, the young official “began assiduously learning the Fijian language”.

When dealing with Thomson’s career in England, Rutherford writes as if he had someone looking over his shoulder, and he skates over issues of controversy.  

As for Roland Philipps, his mode of procedure is such that I can only call it “inoculating the reader”. First of all, some bare indication is given of the truly formidable breadth of Thomson’s experience;  then a couple of stinging gibes are thrown in, to suggest that this fellow was not half as interesting as he tried to make himself, or indeed as the reader might suppose him to be at first glance!

When he met Casement, Philipps says—

“Assistant Commissioner Basil Thomson had been head of the Metropolitan Police’s Criminal Investigation Department for three years.  Born in 1861 in Oxford where his father was the Provost of Queen’s College (he was later Archbishop of York), he spent the 1880s as a colonial administrator, even at one stage becoming Prime Minister of Tonga;  he went on to publish some long-forgotten novels, including The Diversions of a Prime Minister and The Indiscretions of Lady Asenath, then read for the London bar and became Governor of Dartmoor Prison before joining the Met [Metropolitan Police Force].  As spy mania swept the country with the advent of war, the flamboyant self-publicist set himself up in direct competition with the more retiring Vernon Kell of MI5(g) to earn the enduring enmity of the new organisation” (Broken Archangel, p254).

Thomson’s First Jobs

A few things need to be added here.  First of all, Thomson completed his secondary schooling in Eton.  He therefore had the essential British ruling class formation.  Afterwards he began a course at Oxford but dropped out early, because of depression.  Understanding that he needed a drastic change of scenery, for a year he tried farming in the American Mid-West. 

   By his own account he was doing OK, but he returned to England when he learned that his intended bride was thinking of marrying someone else.  The woman and her family agreed to have him, provided that he made something of himself in a British context.  It was then that he found a job as a colonial administrator in Fiji, which transformed his life. 

   The Diversions Of A Prime Minister and The Indiscretions Of Lady Asenath are not novels.  They are memoirs.  They are Thomson’s immature writings from the 1890s, his least impressive books. 

The Diversions Of A Prime Minister is about his experience in Tonga. “Lady Asenath” was an aristocratic native Fijian who gave evidence to a Commission enquiring into the causes of decline of the Fijian population.  She spoke with breath-taking freedom about gynaecology, midwifery, marriage, and sexual practices—leaving the Commission members, who were Victorian gentlemen, stunned:  “Half of what she told us should be recorded in Latin!”, one member exclaimed afterwards. “In Sanskrit!”suggested a doctor—who had got some additional spicy details in one-to-one consultations. 

Basil Thomson found this pagan freedom of speech wonderful, exhilarating, mind-blowing.  But he didn’t yet have the intellectual depth or the registers to communicate it.  The “Indiscretions” in his book are tedious—not much more than long-drawn-out schoolboy sniggering.  We only ever get scraps of what Lady Asenath had to say. 

   But that wasn’t Thomson’s last word on the subject.  In the following decade he produced a much more substantial book, The Fijians: A Study In The Decline Of Custom (1908).  This work is not ‘long-forgotten’:  in fact it’s been reprinted several times in the third millennium.  And not surprisingly: The Fijians is a hugely ambitious ethnographic survey that is actually readable.  In fact, it is written with great gusto.  Among other things, Lady Asenath finally gets her say, though for a few of her most outrageous revelations Thomson still—in the year 1908!—finds it necessary to write in Latin!! But more about this later. 

As for his prison experience:  over a 12-year period Thomson did stints as Governor of several prisons—not just Dartmoor.  (Wormwood Scrubs was among the others.) 

But the main literary fruit of this phase of his life was the riveting Story Of Dartmoor Prison (1907), which would surely sell well if anyone reprinted it now.  Among the amazing things I have learned from it, I must highlight the one below.

French Cearrbhaigh In England

   In a recently published pamphlet of mine (The Poets Of Daniel O’Connell’s Time, AHS 2025), I quote a verse from a 17th century poem about the Irish professional gamblers called cearrbhaigh, who would often even gamble away their clothes, leaving themselves naked: 

“Bands of determined big-talking gamblers / who insist they’re just temporary losers, declaring / that they have money and it’s not right to stop, / and next morning they’re wearing nothing but a belt.”

 If anyone had told me that there was a community of some hundreds of cearrbhaigh functioning somewhere in England in the early 19th century, I’d have found that hard to believe.  But there was, in Dartmoor!

   “It was by caprice that Fate chose fifteen acres in the heart of the Dartmoor highlands for one of her strangest experiments”, Thomson says (The Story Of Dartmoor Prison, v.).  That is to say, Dartmoor Prison began in 1809 as a prisoner-of-war camp for French soldiers captured in England’s early 19th century wars.  These captives produced a new kind of social order.  It was by no means anarchy:  it was a structured society (though without women or children) with laws, schools, factories, artists’ workshops, and markets of its own.

   Distinct classes developed in this new social entity.  They were based on rank, usefulness and self-discipline.  The lowest class of all numbered about five hundred.  These were called Les Romains, “The Romans”, because they resided in “the Capitol”, meaning that they lived together in the cocklofts of the various buildings, directly under the roof.  

Thomson writes:

   “The evolution of the Romans was natural enough.  The gambling fever seized upon the entire prison, and the losers having nothing but their clothes and bedding to stake, turned these into money and lost them.  Unable to obtain other garments, and feeling themselves shunned by their former companions, they betook themselves to the society of men as unfortunate as themselves, and went to live in the cockloft because no one who lived in the more desirable floors cared to have them as neighbours.  As they grew in numbers they began to feel a pride in their isolation and to persuade themselves that they had come to it by their own choice…” (p46).

So they elected a General and made rules.  One rule was that, if any individual possessed a useful article—like clothing or bedding—he must hand it over to be sold and the proceeds spent on tobacco, which would then be shared among all.  This was the case universally:

“Among the whole five hundred there was no kind of private property, except a few filthy rags donned as a concession to social prejudice.  A few old blankets held in common, with a hole in the middle for a head like a poncho, were used by those whose business took them out into the yards. In the Capitole itself everyone lived in a state of nudity and slept naked on the concrete floor…”  (p47).  

“From morning till night groups of Romans were to be seen raking the garbage heaps for scraps of offal, potato peelings, rotten turnips, and fish heads, for though they drew their ration of soup at midday, they were always famishing, partly because they exchanged their rations with the infamous provision-buyers for tobacco with which they gambled” (p48). 

True cearrbhaigh!  

There were some Romans who used to take frequent breaks from Romanism.  These were “young men of good family” who regularly received remittances, sent by their friends in France.  When the remittances came, they would first pay a stipulated tax to their General, for tobacco for the community. Then they would buy clothes “and settle down in one of the other floors as a civilised being”, until such time as they had gambled away everything again, and had to go back to the cockloft!

   Thomson tells an amusing story of an officer who was travelling in rural France, about fifteen years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars.  The officer got talking to a local curé.  After a while he realised that this priest had strangely familiar mannerisms, and that he’d seen him somewhere before . . .  And then he realised:  it had been in Dartmoor . . .  and the man had been rooting for offal in a rubbish heap!  It was also said that a leading merchant and a high Government official had once been Romans.

Favourite Books In Dartmoor

Thomson was fascinated by the Romans, but only as a horrible example of how low some human beings could sink in unfavourable circumstances.  He did not represent them as typical of prisoners in general.  Both the early 19th century prisoners-of-war and the regular prisoners whom he governed a century later maintained a higher level of civilisation.

   He figured out the unofficial prison code that was operative in Dartmoor in his own time, the ‘Eight Commandments’ that had to be obeyed.  Here are some of them:

Commandment No. 4, When tobacco has been entrusted to thee to distribute divide it equally; 

No. 6, When thou hast induced a warder to favour thee thou shalt not betray him to his superiors; 

No. 8, Thou shalt be kind to animals, tender and unselfish to the sick, stoical in endurance of pain(p279). 

This law-breakers’ moral law impressed him, and he thought it gave reason for optimism: 

“The code breathes a spirit of courage, and when a net has been dragged through England with meshes so fine that none but the worst thousand have been landed within these walls, and this thousand frames such a code, who shall say that mankind can be wholly depraved?” (p280). 

   Dartmoor, the prisoner-of-war camp, became the more familiar kind of prison later on. Actually, the modern British prison system is surprisingly recent:  “Though prisons have existed ever since the Plantagenets, it was not until the reign of George IV that they were used as places of detention” (p205), or in other words, it was only about 1850 that they became places to serve a sentence.  Prior to that, criminals were dealt with by hanging some, transporting others, and ignoring small offences.  (There was a time when one could be hanged for stealing a loaf of bread, but by the 19th century that did not happen any longer.) 

   However, the Australian colonial authorities were at their wits’ end because of the effects of large-scale transportation. They sent sustained protests to England, pointing out that there were powerful criminal influences in Australian society and it would be impossible to keep any order at all if more English criminals were sent out.  Eventually in the late 1840s the British Government gave in, restricting the practice of transportation, and creating a modern prison system.

   Thomson had limitless curiosity about the people who came to places like Dartmoor, and while he was Governor he did not miss many opportunities for research.  For example, he studied prisoners’ tastes in reading, as evidenced by borrowing from the Prison Library and comments made variously.  It seems that Samuel Lever, Wilkie Collins, Trollope, and Hardy were very well regarded by the inmates.  Women writers generally were disliked, except for George Eliot and a couple of others.  Foreign authors also were unpopular, the two great exceptions being Dumas and Victor Hugo, whose works borrowers could never get enough of!  Scott and Dickens had gone out of fashion for a while, but they were coming back strongly. 

   The prisoners had the good taste to dislike Rudyard Kipling.  Nor did they like the sci-fi novels of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne.  Writers such as these three were condemned as “liars” (p269).

Thomson On The Art Of Forgery

Some notable people passed through Dartmoor in the second half of the 19th century.  Michael Davitt made a particularly strong impression (p253). 

But I must now draw attention to one specific interest of Thomson’s, which is exemplified several times in The Story Of Dartmoor Prison (and is highlighted in his later books also).  I mean his fascination with, and appreciation of, the ancient art of forgery.

   Actually, down to the reign of Elizabeth “forgery was only a misdemeanour” (p205).  Later on, of course, it was punished very severely.  Nevertheless, it could never be eradicated, and once the Industrial Revolution got going the art was flourishing. “From forty to fifty private mints were always at work” in early 19th century England (p206).

   The forgers, needless to say, often ended up in prisons.  In places like Dartmoor they were part of the aristocracy:

“As in the great world, talent of any kind commands respect in a convict prison;  the skilled carpenter who keeps the chapel organ in repair, the cunning worker in metal who may turn his ingenuity to coining when he is at liberty, the baritone, once a singer in a famous minstrel group and now the soloist in the Roman Catholic choir, are the real aristocracy of the prison” (p275).

   Within the modern prison it would not normally be practicable to keep a forger’s workshop.  But in the original prisoner-of-war camps, which were much less closely supervised, opportunities did exist: 

“The War prison was an overcrowded city without women; with its own laws, its schools, its manufacturers and art, its workshops where coin could be counterfeited and Bank of England notes forged” (v.). 

The officer-elite of the camps had fairly free access to town markets;  even ordinary prisoners might have daily opportunities to buy things.  Coiners were in demand in these circumstances, and they found ways of getting sufficient supplies of metal.  The authorities, of course, made raids to try to catch them.  Thomson tells a story of one audacious American prisoner-of-war, a professional forger in Plymouth, who surmounted a great risk by sheer nerve:

   “There was one man who with lead stripped from the roof of No. 6 prison, with a secret alloy of his own to harden it and make it ring, used to make English coins that passed readily in the market.  He had often been cautioned about the danger he ran, and on several occasions when an unusual quantity of base coin had been passing in the market the Committee had been told that means would be taken to ferret out the coiner, and also the man who was damaging patches of the roof, if he were not one and the same.  One day word was hastily conveyed to him that the Agent was making a tour of inspection through every prison, but his metal was on the fire, and being a noted wag, he chose to carry it off by sheer impudence.  As the agent came by he actually offered to his staff pieces for sale as he turned them out hot from the mould, and did it with so much possession that they passed on with a laugh, saying that they did not deal in medals” (pp141-2).

Thomson On Casement

Roland Philipps makes no mention of either The Fijians or The Story of Dartmoor Prison.  Much more important, however, is his neglect of another book which he never refers to in his narrative text—though he sometimes quotes from it and at other times visibly draws from it without acknowledgement!  

I am thinking of Queer People, Thomson’s account of his WWI  Police and Intelligence work, a book which contains a chapter on Casement.

Fresh from reading Philipps’s biography, I came to what Thomson had written in 1922.  A very strong similarity struck me immediately.  Several reviewers cited in Philipps’s blurbs refer to his work as “sympathetic” and “sensitive”.  If these judgments have any validity, I do not see why the same claims cannot be made for Thomson (and more emphatically because of when he wrote). 

Thomson was an odd policeman.  1920s Europe, to be sure, was full of weird policemen!  But I think it would be difficult to find any other top cop who had a writing style similar to his.  Thomson didn’t do black-and-white, he scorned stereotypes, he despised hatchet-jobs.  Whether he was describing Mata Hari, Carl Lody, or Roger Casement, he always tried to produce a convincing flesh-and-blood picture of a complex man or woman.  (Granted, he helped to hang two of the above three, but that is a different matter.)  

   In Queer People we find the following statements about Casement:

   “I have read many of his early letters.  They are full of high ideals that ring quite true, and his sympathy with the down-trodden and his indignation against injustice were instinctive…” (p91).

   “He was excellent company, and his colleagues were always glad to see him…” (p93).

   “He was a good pioneer, a great walker, indifferent of his appearance and of his dress, and to the hardships he underwent when on duty.” (ib.)

   “He was a clear and forcible writer and was quite indifferent to money, though he kept his private accounts meticulously.” (ib.)

21st century biographers make these points also, of course, though some are not so ungrudging!

         Set against all this, there was the fact that Casement had conspired with Germany, a state with which Great Britain was at war, to raise rebellion in Ireland.  Casement did not deny having done so, though he was anxious to clarify his intentions and motivations.  Thomson could expect that all except “the Sinn Feiners” would reject such conduct.  What Casement had done was high treason.

   However, there was still the need to produce a psychological profile which would include the positive human qualities described above, while explaining how such a man could have ended up at war with Great Britain.  After all, “I do not believe that any disloyal thought had entered into Casement’s head before the war” (p91).  Angela Clifford has pointed out that this is a strange opinion, because surely Thomson had seen the geopolitical essays written by Casement, where there is no shortage of well-reasoned disloyalty.

   But the CID chief had an aristocratic disdain for Irish nationalist thinking, refusing to take it seriously.  Besides, he knew how even a gun-runner like Erskine Childers had rallied to the flag at the moment of truth.  Why didn’t Casement do the same?  Here the fastidious Thomson, for whom hatchets were infra dig, showed he could wield the stiletto:

   “Casement struck me as one of those men who are born with a strong strain of the feminine in their character.  He was greedy for approbation, and he had the quick intuition of a woman as to the effect he was making on the people around him…

   “…like a woman he was guided by instinct and not by reason, and where his sympathies were strongly moved it is very doubtful whether any reliance could be placed upon his accuracy.  I have often wondered since how much exaggeration there was in his revelations about the Congo and Putamayo” (p91).

   Thomson knew that this would immediately evoke associations of homosexuality and would connect with the Black Diaries—which the British press had long ago made notorious.  He needed only to mention the Diaries briefly, ostentatiously holding his nose and avoiding details. “It is enough to say of the diaries that they could not be printed in any age or in any language” (p91).

   The CID chief, ethnographer, and historian was proud of his abilities as a researcher.  He wanted the assure the reader that this brief chapter of his wartime memoirs had a great deal of study behind it.  Already I have quoted him saying he had read many of Casement’s early letters.  He also claimed to have studied Casement’s later thinking, though it is not clear how. 

   In fact, nothing is clear in the two sentences I am about to quote, but they are crucial.  They’re the crowning touch, perfecting his picture of Casement.

“I have made special inquiry with a view to ascertaining how long Casement had been under the obsessions disclosed in the pages of his diary, and I feel certain that they were of comparatively recent growth, probably not much before the year 1910.  This would seem to show that some mental degeneration had set in, though it was not sufficient to impair his judgment or his knowledge of right and wrong” (p92).

The Formula

   What are the “obsessions”?  Does he mean homosexuality or Irish nationalism, or both?  Whatever he means, it seems to involve him in time difficulties.  The only diary he has mentioned is one for the year 1903 (p90);  taken together with a cash ledger for the same year, this may justify his reference to “the diaries” three sentences later. 

But which diary is it that contains obsessions of the year 1910 or after, and how was such a diary discovered, and what were these obsessions?  All these matters are left in obscurity!  Knowing how well Thomson can write, I assume that this is deliberate.

   With this final touch, the job has been done.  What we have here is a sophisticated formula, fit to be used by future Black-Diary biographers.  This is the recommended Casement:  a warm humanitarian, with a hatred of injustice and a sympathy for the down-trodden that was totally sincere;  a man who was not self-seeking and was capable of great self-sacrifice;  a clear and forcible writer;  but a man who was disabled by his homosexuality, and who, above all, was driven by emotion rather than reason, and as time went on became more and more lost intellectually and morally, ending in tragedy, though he never became insane.

   This is Basil Thomson’s formula. In essentials, it is Roland Philipps’s formula.  From the clear account of Brian Inglis’s biography given by John Martin in last month’s Irish Political Review, I gather that it was Inglis’s formula also, in essentials. (I have just now seen the first of the Black-Diary biographies, by Peter Singleton-Gates (1959), and in essentials that too is according to Thomson’s formula. Singleton-Gates was liberally supplied with documentation, including Black Diary transcripts, and warmly encouraged, by none other than Thomson himself. He had a Casement biography on these lines ready for publication as early as 1925, but the Home Secretary prevented its publication.)    

   Needless to say, the later biographers do have to elaborate, they need to tweak a few things.  Thomson’s male chauvinism, Thomson’s homophobia, cannot be reproduced in our times.  These features need to be deleted from the picture, but it is surprisingly easy to do so! 

On the other hand, Thomson’s core idea—of a man who was guided by emotion and not by reason—can be and is retained.  And while gay promiscuity may not now be denounced, homosexuality can be and is seen as disabling, because in Casement’s time it was persecuted and could only be furtively expressed. 

   When Thomson suggests that Casement, swept away by emotion, may have exaggerated his accounts of atrocities in the Congo and Putamayo, Roland Philipps pretends to deplore this (Broken Archangel, pp278-9).  In fact, the very same thought is suggested more than once in his own book, although this is never done directly, only with subtle hints.  He tries here and there to condescend to “the policeman”(eg, p279), but he is merely being ungrateful!  The cop is his intellectual guide and director, the one who has given him his template.

   The moral of the story is that Basil Thomson’s literary skills must be taken very seriously.  He was an able, resourceful and captivating writer.  In the story of Roger Casement he has exerted a peculiarly powerful influence, so much so that it feels like enchantment, or like a Dan Brown story. 

A century ago Thomson wrote the basic Black-Diary biography in miniature;  just two years ago it was reproduced, reworked and elaborated once again, and I understand that more of the same is imminent.  We should pay more attention to the old master.    

John Minahane