Last month I began a brief investigation of Basil Thomson, head of Scotland Yard and Roger Casement’s main interrogator in 1916, and a man who is closely connected with the Diaries. 

   Thomson was anything but a narrow-focussed policeman.  He was an agent of the British Empire with years of service in exotic South Seas territories, where he tackled the local languages with gusto.  Even beyond that, he had a remarkable breadth of experience, ranging from farming in the American mid-West to governing British prisons and writing ambitious books.

   Thomson had thought a good deal about the position and the prospects of the Empire that he served.  He was a believer in Progress.  The spirit of progress was spreading all over the world, and it was causing decay in the great traditional systems of customary law.  Hundreds of millions of people who had lived coherently under customary law would no longer be able to do so. 

   Traditional peoples, if and when their own systems collapsed, would be worse off, not better, Thomson pointed out.  One should have no illusions on this score.  Socially, economically, culturally, their conditions, on the whole, would be worse for the foreseeable future.  However, in the long run every people was capable of capitalism, and “there is no reason to despair of the ultimate arrival of the Fijians at some degree of physical and moral prosperity. Our own forefathers at the time of Cicero seemed to the Romans no less unpromising…” (Thomson, The Fijians: A Study In The Decay Of Custom (London 1908), p390).    

   Thomson wrote with plenty of intellectual confidence.  I will first of all consider the book that he wrote about Tonga.  This was based on a year spent there as Assistant Prime Minister—or, by his own account, as an omni-competent repairman of government and sorter-out of chaos.

‘England Does Not Want Tonga… and yet…’  

   Tonga was a group of Polynesian islands with a population of about 20,000.  In the 1880s its status was that of an independent kingdom, and the Tongans were proud of the fact.  Cultural independence, however, had been surrendered:  British missionaries had brought in Methodism, and it was now the official Tongan religion.

   Much of the content of Thomson’s book is about Tongan Christianity, which was still less than a hundred years old.  In fact, politically effective Christianity dated only from the 1820s and 30s.  Its Constantine was the man Thomson knew and served under as ‘King George’, who accepted the full undiluted Christian message and set about destroying the old religion.

The original Methodist missionaries were not prudent and calculating men. “They were homely men of slight attainments, burning with a zeal that drove out all considerations of policy and caution” (Thomson, The Diversions Of A Prime Minister (London 1894), p204).  This blinkered narrowness was a merit, Thomson insists, when they were laying the foundations of the new religion.  No compromise with false gods:  well and good, that’s as it ought to be! 

   Unfortunately, the zealous missionaries didn’t know where to stop.  They soon began interfering in politics, wanting to introduce constitutional government.

   “The king, to his credit, be it said, long resisted, objecting that his people were not ready for such reforms;  that though in Sydney it might be well to curtail the power of the chiefs, the Tongans would use their new liberty for the indulgence of their natural idleness”.

 But in the year 1862 he succumbed to persuasion, and–

“a Constitution was granted which swept away the form of government that had taken centuries to elaborate and substituted executive machinery on the English plan.  A system evolved from centuries of experiment to suit the needs of Anglo-Saxons was forced in a single day upon ignorant Orientals, with whose inborn convictions it was in complete antagonism”(p365).    

   Following this, on the one hand, the native Tongans began treating the new Constitution as a fetish;  on the other, the missionary community underwent a mutation.  Zealous pioneers were replaced by men who had less enthusiasm but a lot more knowledge of the world.  The outstanding representative of this latter type was one Rev. Shirley Baker, who managed to turn the new machinery of government in Tonga into a means for him and his family to live a life of luxury.

   To achieve this, however, he had to show some real leadership ability.  The Methodist authorities in New Zealand were unwilling to concede autonomy to their new province in Tonga.  Baker whipped up Tongan patriotic sentiment and led a breakaway Church that won the support of the king and the majority in the country.  (It was strictly a political church:  there were no religious issues in the secession.) 

   Having gained the key position of Prime Minister, Baker then, for example, wrote a Code of Laws, which was published in English and Tongan. (The English was ludicrous, Thomson says, and the Tongan was incomprehensible.)  It seems that Baker—“altered the Constitution four times, .. and drafted and passed laws and ordinances whenever the fit took him” (pp.223-4).

   Baker’s doings were eventually becoming intolerable.  Anything might have happened;  one possibility was that the Tongans might have opted for a new hybrid (semi-pagan) form of Christianity.  But the British Empire, not far way and keeping a watchful eye, pre-empted this undesired development!  The regional High Commissioner found means to expel Shirley Baker from the South Seas.  And, by agreement with the Tongan King and his nobility, Basil Thomson—who had been serving the Empire proper in Fiji—was brought in to replace this unsuitable manager of government.

   Thomson describes how he found a governing apparatus like from a comic novel.  A huge number of unnecessary law courts had been created—but no prisons!  There was, however, some kind of police force, but it had been turned into a morality police.  The fact is, Christianity had led to a collapse of sexual morals in Tonga, and no one had any idea of what to do, except to use the newly-created force for repressing crime. 

   Under the old religion, sexual passions had been disciplined by a system of taboos that threatened real and immediate and tangible misfortune.  Christianity had swept these away and replaced them by a threat of punishment in some vague future life—which did not inhibit anyone. 

    The missionaries, not understanding what was happening, panicked, and the police were instructed to forget about theft or whatever and concentrate exclusively on rooting out courting couples!

   As for the Government proper, there were Ministers who turned up every day in their offices and would gladly have done something, if only someone were there who could tell them what to do.  The Minister for Finance, however, lived in a wretched shack and was terrified of starving, so he preferred not to squander energy by coming to work;  he declared that, if his food supply could be guaranteed, he was perfectly willing to turn up daily.  Then again, there were others who were intelligent and able, but they were trapped in an impossible system.

Thomson gives his account of how, in a short time, he turned this system round, as far as anyone could.  One of his key achievements was this:  in his spare time he revised the law code!  He confesses that the task was daunting .  .  .  but Baker’s version wouldn’t do, and it also wouldn’t do to have none.  So, taking as his guide the Indian Code (devised by the Irish Celtic scholar and imperial lawyer, Whitley Stokes), Thomson produced his Tongan Code Of Law.

   He needed, of course, to produce a Tongan-language version of this.  Having learned Fijian well over the years, he was now learning this other language in double-quick time.  But he did still need help so, first of all, with his secretary’s assistance, he produced a basic Tongan version.  The text was then sent to his key political ally, the king’s son, to be turned into stylish literary Tongan fit for printing.

   When translating in the other direction, Thomson felt much more confident.  His book includes a sketch of Tongan history, from the early 16th century onwards.  Most of this, he says, is from a surviving historical poem, in his own translation.

   Thomson had constantly told distrustful Tongans, “No, England does not want to take over Tonga;  Queen Victoria only wants what belongs to her!”  Ending his book, though, he struck another note.  How could he possibly forget that, during Shirley Baker’s time, the Germans had been given the use of a Tongan harbour to set up a coaling station?  He wanted to dissuade the Tongans from playing such political games!

“Even at the risk of hurting the feelings of my good friends in Tonga, I will state my belief in the hope that it may act as a warning.  England does not want Tonga, or New Zealand either, if she knew her own interests;  and yet, even if there were none of those restless spirits that egg on the governments of our well-populated colonies to extend their boundaries and their responsibilities, Tonga must inevitably fall under the flag of England or of Australasia…  We do not want Tonga, and yet we cannot allow any other great power to take our place there.  If Tonga must be taken, it is we who must take her…”  (p287)  

Fiji And The World Of The Future

Thomson spent nearly ten years in Fiji.  In 1908 he produced a wide-ranging description of traditional Fijian life:  The Fijians. A Study In The Decay of Custom.  The Fijians, who were highly conservative but also highly vulnerable when contact with Europeans eventually happened, provided an interesting example of a world-wide process.

“The present population of the globe is believed to be about fifteen hundred millions, of which seven millions are nominally progressive and eight hundred millions are stagnant under the law of custom…

   Under the law of custom, which no man dares to disobey, progress was impossible” (p.vii).

In the case of the Fijians—

“by their isolation, through many centuries no foreign ideas, filtering through neighbouring tribes, had corrupted their customary law before Europeans came among them, and so decay set in with a startling suddenness despite their innate conservatism.  What is true of the Fijians is true, with slight modifications, of any primitive society which is being dragged into the vortex of what we call progress.  The fabric of every complete social system has been built up gradually.  You may raze it to its foundations and erect another in its place, but if you pull out a stone here and there the whole edifice comes tumbling about your ears before you can make your alterations” (p. xii).

   Thomson did not believe in the theory that the peoples currently described as ‘uncivilised’ were doomed to diminish rapidly in numbers and die out.  He thought it probable that the proportions between those now called ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ would not differ greatly in the future.  Ultimately, though, everyone would be ‘civilised’—i.e. capitalist—and inevitably some would do better than others.  Already it could be seen that some traditional peoples excelled in certain fields;  this would be highlighted “when we have struck off their fetters of custom and forced them to compete with us” (p.xv).  

 He was unimpressed by fashionable racialist ideas and argued against them.  Differences between peoples could be explained by climatic, situational, historical and cultural factors.   For that matter, race hatred was a phenomenon that was limited historically and even geographically.  It didn’t happen always and everywhere;  it was not a primitive instinct, whatever impression one might get from the state of affairs in the southern states of America. 

   “It is impossible to believe that a white skin is to be for ever a sort of patent of nobility in the world state of the future…

  Everywhere, “wealth will create a new aristocracy recruited from men of every shade of colour…

   “In one country the majority of labourers will be black or brown;  in another, white;  but white men will work cheek by jowl with black and feel no degradation.  There will be the same feverish pursuit of wealth, but all races will participate in it except for a favoured few.  The world will then be neither so pleasant or so picturesque a place to live in, and by the men of that age the twentieth century will be cherished tenderly as an age of romance, of awakening, and of high adventure…” (pp. xv, xvii, xviii).

There remained the question of how the transition from custom was to be managed.  Custom, or much of it, remained precious even when decadent.  An imperialist needed to understand this.

   Britain had taken over the administration of Fiji in 1874, less than a decade before Thomson arrived there.  The first British Governor, Sir Arthur Gordon, 

“was gifted with a rare sympathy with native modes of thought…  He realised the importance of governing the country through its own strong native government.  To deprive the chiefs of any of their privileges, to deny them all share in the government of their people, would have been to convert, not only them, but their people into enemies.  To accept and improve the native system was at once the most just, the most safe and the most economical policy” (p65).

Thomson thought it remarkable “how admirably adapted many of the old superstitions and taboos were for securing sanitation and moral and physical cleanliness“.  For example, fear of attack by witches caused people to bury offal and excrement.

These taboos might have originated in various ways, but the point was their beneficial functioning. 

“So admirably were they suited to the haphazard and indolent character of the people who obeyed them, that we can scarcely hope that any European system will take their place until the character itself is regenerated” (p388).      

Governor Gordon was condemned by some for permitting the Fijian equivalent of Ireland’s comhar na gcomharsan, a cooperative labour system called lala.  In fact, lala for large personal undertakings, such as building a house, was acknowledged everywhere in Fiji;  lala for public projects like road-building was acknowledged in some parts, though not in others;  where it was traditional, there was no good reason to forbid it.

But Thomson took a different attitude to the custom called kere-kere, which meant that, if your neighbour was richer than you were, you could beg from him, and he would get extra social status from having you as his personal beggar.  How could Capitalism not be choked in a culture like that?

“If native laws are to exist at all under the new order, this native habit of kere-kere must be swept away.  New wants must be developed, wealth must take the place of rank as the factor of social importance, the idle must be made to feel the sting of poverty.  The easy-going native must be made to feel the pangs of auri fames[hunger for gold, JM], the earth must be cursed for him, competition with its unlovely spawn of class hatred, pauperism and vagrancy must be cultivated in a people to whom they are unknown, for at present the Fijians have no spur to the acquisition of money except the desire for some particular luxury” (p83).

Bishop Wesele And Lady Asenath

In an earlier book Thomson had told the story of a man he called Bishop Wesele who, according to him, gave a perfect model demonstration of how to manage the Fijian transition.  This Wesele was not actually a Bishop, since he was a Methodist and Methodists do not believe in having Bishops, yet the title of rank seemed appropriate.  His real name was also not ‘Wesele’, which was a garbling of ‘Wesley’ (he being a Wesleyan), that had stuck to him.  Anyhow, Bishop Wesele he is in the story—which might or might not be true, or might be partly true.  But certainly it represents Thomson’s ideal of how a British Imperial agent ought to behave in Fiji or some other land of custom.

   The story involves an impressive woman of the local aristocracy, whom Thomson calls Lady Asenath.  She died about the age of fifty.  When she became seriously ill, she first summoned a witch-masseuse, but this woman’s therapies only made her worse.  A Government doctor attended and wrote a prescription;  he too failed to improve anything.  A narrow-minded Methodist Minister came to inform her that, within a few days, she would be in the flames of Hell.

   Lady Asenath then summoned an old man, a pagan sage who never went to church, to tell her how their fathers died.  He told how the Shade of the person who has died makes a complicated journey after death to the God-City.  But no one knows how the Shades live after they reach their destination, because no one has ever come back.  (Lady Asenath, however, promised her women friends and waiting maids that she would come back to let them know!)

   Then Bishop Wesele came into the room.  He soon froze out the pagan sage and, in due course, he got rid of the waiting-women also. And he talked to Lady Asenath about Heaven and Hell.

   Yes, Lady Asenath said, Heaven is full of white women playing pianos!  Not wanting to be so boring, the Bishop thought up ‘a splendid heresy’ on the spot and told her that in Heaven each person would have whatever they personally thought of as joy and happiness.  He used all his eloquence, but it was wasted on the dying lady.  “Hers was a careless, gracious, pagan code, and its very simplicity baffled the most skilful efforts at exposing it in its naked indigence” (The Indiscretions Of Lady Asenath (London 1898, p285). 

   Bishop Wesele played his last card—he appealed to their friendship.

   “‘Oh, my friend’, he said, ‘if you care not for your own soul, think of the evil you will do to those, who, seeing their mistress unrepentant, will never listen to us more. Think, too, how you will shame me before my clergy’.”

   Asenath’s heart was touched.  “What would you have me do?”, she murmured.

  ” ‘Tell them that you die believing the truth, and that you would have me read the service at your burial.’  

  ” ‘Wesele, I love you much, and I would that you were better mated, for your wife, I know well, is a shrew.  Let there be agreement between us.  For my part, I will do what you ask;  for your part, you shall lay that whale’s tooth on my breast when I am dead’ ”, referring to a whale’s tooth that was plainly visible on a table in the room.  She explained that she needed to have the whale’s tooth to throw at the Pandanus tree when she passed beyond death, “ ‘lest I be shamed by the other Shades’…”  (On the other hand, if Wesele was right and she was going to the Christian Judgment, she would get rid of the tooth before she faced her Judge!)

   “The bishop groaned, but gave his promise…” (The Indiscretions, pp286-8).

   The Lady then assembled her closest attendants and friends, and she told them to be good, as defined by Bishop Wesele’s rules, and that she repented of her sins.  There were to be no heathen practices at her funeral, and she was to be buried in a grave.  Wesele was to officiate at her service.

   Later that night she died.  When eventually Bishop Wesele was alone in the room with the dead woman, he took the whale’s tooth which he had put into his own garment and thrust it into her shroud, at the breast.

   The moral of the story is this:  Lady Asenath, whose intelligence Thomson constantly praises, had observed how the world was going.  More than thirty years after the rival Christian religion had decisively triumphed in Fiji, it appeared that her own pagan thinking could not properly (meaning proudly) be handed on to new generations.  Graciously she conceded to Wesele’s urgings:  she would sacrifice herself as a public person, as a figure whose example might be followed.  But privately she still needed the most personal symbol, the whale’s tooth, that would confirm her pagan status in the passage beyond death.  And the one who must provide it was the chief priest of the Christians, to whom she herself was giving so much.

   Wesele met the challenge.  He rose above pettiness and pedantry.  In his clear-headed pursuit of the greater goals of power, he was ready to break the rules.  He made his bargain with the lady, the kind of bargain one is honour-bound to keep.  As a human grace to his pagan friend, who was dying as a public Christian, privately he himself became a pagan priest.

   The example of such a man, Thomson felt, “proves that the gulf between the old order and the new is not too wide to span” (The Indiscretions, p. viii). 

Basil Thomson And ‘Exotic Languages’ 

The Fijians covers a very wide range of themes, among them Fijian history, land tenure, warfare, religion, marriage and sexual morality, diseases, trade, tobacco, the special non-intoxicating drink called yankona (“some confirmed drunkards have cured themselves by substituting yankona for spirits“, p349), and much more.

   The book includes quite long passages in English translation of materials which knowledgeable Fijians had provided to Thomson.  (Notable is the account of the arduous journey of the soul or Shade after death, pp120-131, with many verse passages.)  In an earlier section on history, Thomson provides the original Fijian of several verse passages, alongside the English.  He is using these to argue a historical case against the top academic expert of that time.

   One conclusion that can be drawn from all this is obvious.  Basil Thomson handled languages of the kind that were called ‘exotic’ with supreme confidence. 

   The point is important because of a question raised by Séamas Ó Síocháin and echoed by Jeffrey Dudgeon and others.  Would any forger (they confidently demand) have introduced the idiomatic phrases in the Kikongo language, homosexually charged, that we find in the Black Diaries?  The expected answer to this rhetorical question is:  ‘No, of course not: he wouldn’t take all that trouble, and anyway he wouldn’t know how!’ 

   Anyone who reads The Fijians will see how much trouble Thomson was prepared to take on a literary project that mattered to him.  (For example, he questioned cannibals about which persons, and which of their body parts, were tastiest;  he personally did a yankona binge to see what would happen, and so on.) 

A similar question one comes across is this:  would any forger have gone to the trouble of forging four diaries when one would have sufficed?  To which the answer is:  a truly top-class forger might anticipate the rhetorical question you are asking, and might be anxious to enable you to ask it!

   As for Kikongo, the language that Casement picked up on his stays in the Congo:  a forger would only have needed a few phrases, not long passages.  British Baptist missionaries had been active in that region since the late 1870s, and they had produced some language guides.  Our forger, if he were living in London (which might be assumed), could have strolled down to the library of the British Museum to consult H. Grattan Guinness’s Grammar Of The Congo Language (1882) and Henry Craven’s English-Congo And Congo-English Dictionary (1883), and/or several French-Kikongo dictionaries, three of which appeared in 1910, 1911 and 1914, by René Butaye, P. Aug. de Clerq, and Henri Galland respectively. 

   Or, supposing these publications didn’t give him quite what he was looking for, or supposing he scorned this inefficient mode of research, then he could have found expert help.  London was one of the greatest centres of expertise on languages in the world.  If our forger by any chance was . . .  let’s say, in close contact with Basil Thomson, he would have received advice on who to go to.  Thomson, as head of Scotland Yard, might also have given him a letter of recommendation.  Armed with that, in the years 1915-1916 our forger could have expected prompt and willing cooperation from any academic.        

I must leave it to next month to examine another feature of Thomson’s writing.  He had much curiosity about kinds of writing that “could not be published in any age in any language“, as he said about the Black Diary allegedly discovered in Casement’s trunk. 

   Thomson knew when he wrote this that it was nonsense, and that he didn’t mean it.  First of all, there was a language that anything at all could be published in:  Latin.  Editions of Catullus, who goes far beyond anything in the Black Diaries, had been appearing for centuries.  Thomson himself had put Latin on some passages in The Fijians, which he didn’t think he could get away with in English.

   But Thomson, at the very moment he wrote this, was manoeuvring to have the Black Diaries published . . .   and not in Latin!  For various reasons he could not have done this himself, much as he would have liked to.  But unerringly he picked out the right man, a young journalist called Peter Singleton-Gates. 

Thomson pressed upon him copies of Black Diary transcripts and other materials that he had taken with him from police headquarters, after his resignation as Intelligence chief.  He showered encouragement on this protégé of his, telling him he had the basis of a very interesting book.  And Singleton-Gates came within a whisker of getting just such a book into print three years later—if the more cautious Secret Service and Government people had not intervened at the last minute to block it.

   Curious, to say the least, this commitment of Thomson’s to the fame of the Black Diaries!  Almost as if he had a proprietorial interest . . .

John Minahane