Dear Editor,
I wrote in May’s Irish Political Review:
“Ruling out official documentation as evidence means accepting that at least 30 named individuals were privy to the research and writing of extensive forgeries and the linked faking of memos,and that the deceit went unrecorded or unmentioned for decades by any of them. This is not credible.”
I have since checked out names and found 25 politicians, policemen, and officials who are recorded in different official documents as being privy to either, or both, the existence of manuscript diaries and the typing of full copies or extracts therefrom.
They are: Sir Basil Thomson, Sir Ernley Blackwell, Frank Hall, Blinker Hall, Superintendent Patrick Quinn, Inspector Edward Parker, Chief Inspector McBrien, Sgt. Charles Gill, Edward Germain, Herbert Asquith, FE Smith, Herbert Samuel, Sir Charles Mathews (DPP), Guy Stephenson (Assistant Director of Public Prosecutions), Sir Edward Grey, Guy Gaunt, Cecil Spring Rice, Alfred Noyes, G.H. Mair, Lord Robert Cecil, Lord Newton, Geoffrey Butler (Foreign Office), Ronald Campbell (ibid), Hugh Montgomery (ibid), and Walter Hines Page (US Ambassador).
John Harris, Henry Massingham, and John Quinn are also recorded as having seen diary manuscripts or photographs of pages thereof.
Paul Hyde and Jack Lane instead rely on one, itself official, document written forty years after the event, which states the US Ambassador “was given photos of two pages from the typescripts”. This statement was corrected at the time by the Home Secretary to read “photos of two passages”.
I can clarify one small point in relation to John Martin’s remark on the confused dating of a lunar rainbow in Casement’s 1910 diary. Martin wrote that I had left out from my book the “faulty” [date, ed.] 7 November 1910.
This statement is true in relation to my 1st and 2nd editions but, since the 3rd (and 4th Kindle) edition, that is no longer the case. I proudly stated in 2019, “The 1910 diary is also now published unabridged”. The disputed entry was thus reproduced. (The 4th edition carries the full text of all the diaries.)
Casement corrected the confusion of days when he over-wrote his 7 November 1910 entry with, “This is Sunday. One day out”. The next day he added, “Made a mistake of a day since Saturday!”
This is precisely the same error of which much has been made around the day in December 1911 he landed in Pará from Iquitos. On 21st December, he corrected himself by writing, “See yesterday’s entry – in error under Wednesday. I only landed today at 8.30 a.m.”
These dating mistakes, duly corrected, to my mind, tell of authenticity not fakery.
Jeff Dudgeon
Belfast
10 May 2026
Two Replies
1. Decoding Dudgeon
In his 10th May letter to the Irish Political Review Editor, Jeff Dudgeon finally admits that he cannot name a single independent witness for the Black Diaries in 1916. Instead he lists some 25 names— mostly Crown employees: cabinet ministers, police and intelligence officers and top legal officials. Two of these were not Government staff: US Ambassador Page and Germain (W.P. not Edward).
Another six are not mentioned in Jeff’s book, so a link to the diaries is doubtful. They were perhaps Foreign Office staff.
In any case, Jeff then admits that he does not know what any of these 25 people knew in 1916; he says they:
“are recorded in different official documents as being privy to either, or both, the existence of manuscript diaries and the typing of full copies or extracts therefrom.”
He does not claim they saw anything, merely that they were “privy to” something. In short, he says they were aware of private or secret matters—which is much the same as being aware of overheard gossip which cannot be verified.
Jeff cannot demonstrate that any of them saw manuscript diaries in 1916 because he cannot produce a statement from any of them to that effect. This is hopelessly vague.
Likewise he tells us:
“John Harris, Henry Massingham and John Quinn are recorded as having seen diary manuscripts or photographs of pages thereof.”
Once again Jeff cannot tell us which—diaries or photos of what? In fact, none of them are recorded as seeing diary manuscripts.
Quinn was in NY and was shown photographs of unidentified handwriting. Harris saw typescripts only and there is no record of what Massingham saw. Both Gaunt in NY and Spring Rice in Washington saw only the same photos shown to Quinn which Thomson had sent to Gaunt.
But all this misses the point. Jeff’s challenge was to produce names of independent witnesses but, after some thirty years’ intensive research, he cannot do so. Crown employees like Blackwell, Hall, Thomson et al were actively dedicated to the criminal defamation of a man accused of treason.
Common sense dictates that this undisputed fact disqualifies them as witnesses.
Jeff tacitly recognises the futility of his predicament by then resorting to familiar chicanery; he unashamedly claims that the deletion of compromising words in a Cabinet memo merely “corrected” a draft memo of 6th March 1959. But the draft memo is an exact copy of text prepared earlier by the Home Office Working Party, and both documents contain the compromising words “from the typescripts” which are enclosed in tell-tale handwritten square brackets which, by editorial convention, advise deletion.
Confirming this advisory is the final memo dated 13th March without those words.
Further confirmation of this manipulation is detected in the official signed record of destruction on 5th November 1993 of a Cabinet document dated 17th March, 1959—the actual date of the official Cabinet meeting. That document was destroyed shortly before the 1994 release of a significant batch of Casement papers: which fact indicates that its release would compromise related documents due for release. The document most at risk was the Cabinet memo of 17th March which concealed deletion of those words.
That photos of typescripts not diaries were given to the US Ambassador had to be concealed for obvious reasons. It follows that the destroyed document was a note or minute by the author of the memo explaining why he advised deletion.
In April this year Jeff published a letter (see May Irish Political Review) confirming that he does not exclude forgery; when that confession is added now to his failure after decades to cite a single independent witness to the diaries in 1916, it is clear he has created the sufficient and necessary conditions for ‘critical mass’. He has effectively decoded himself thereby providing a de facto proof of forgery.
Paul Hyde
Jack Lane
*****
2. Safety In Numbers?
Jeffrey Dudgeon makes the common counter to an allegation of conspiracy: there were so many involved that it would have been impossible to keep it secret.
This is normally quite a cogent argument, but in this case it does not apply. Just because some people were ‘privy’ to documents purporting to be related to Roger Casement’s diaries does not mean that they were aware of the conspiracy, still less collaborators. They may, of course, have been unwitting instruments of the conspiracy. Alfred Noyes, one of the people Jeffrey mentions, came to this conclusion.
Jeffrey proceeds along the same path as all the forgery deniers by eliding the distinction between typescripts and the handwritten diaries.
In this respect it is also important to distinguish between hand-written documents, shown in 1916, and the actual diaries that emerged in 1959. Ben Allen of the Associated Press was shown hand-written documents in 1916 and was given access to the diaries after their restrictive release in 1959. In a letter to The Irish Times he stated:
“I have no doubt at all that these were not the documents shown to me by Captain Hall as the original Casement Diaries” (The Irish Times, 4/8/1960, cited by Angus Mitchell
in his book Casement, page 251).
A particularly memorable event (a rainbow illuminated by moonlight) is entered on 6/11/1910 in the authentic diary, but somehow the author of the black diary managed to write that this occurred on the 7/11/1910! And, almost as extraordinary, is that Jeffrey forgets to mention this incident in the first and second editions of his book.
I think Jeffrey has found in the author of the black diaries a kindred spirit! Both find the need to correct errors or omissions that have occurred. But what they don’t appear to grasp is that the corrections draw attention to the error which occurred in the first place!
How could the author of an alleged contemporaneous diary get the date of such a significant event as the illumination of a rainbow by moonlight wrong, especially since an authentic contemporaneous diary got it right?
And why go to such frantic lengths to correct the errors in a private diary not intended to be seen by other people?
The only plausible explanation is that the ‘black diary’ was not written contemporaneously. The forger only realised his mistake in arrears and felt the need to correct the error to give the forgery an appearance of authenticity.
There are no such errors or corrections in the authentic diary covering the same period.
And no one has ever been able to explain why Casement, working in a hostile environment, would keep two diaries covering the same period, containing the same information in both!
I am happy to acknowledge that Jeffrey included the lunar rainbow incident in the third edition of his book. But I wonder why it was not included in the first and second editions!
An unkind person might suggest that this omission had meanwhile been brought to the attention of the public by another writer—and that its continued absence from Jeffrey’s book was no longer sustainable!
I note that Jeffrey does not deal with my point about the typescripts preceding the handwritten diaries. This will be discussed at a future date.
John Martin
Casement – Life & Times
Second edition
Paperback (26 Mar 2026)
Reply to Jeffrey Dudgeon
Jeffrey Dudgeon makes the common counter to an allegation of conspiracy: there were so many involved that it would have been impossible to keep it secret.
It is normally quite a cogent argument, but in this case it does not apply. Just because some people were ‘privy’ to documents purporting to be related to Roger Casement’s diaries does not mean that they were aware of the conspiracy, still less collaborators. They may, of course, have been unwitting instruments of the conspiracy. Alfred Noyes, one of the people Jeffrey mentions, came to this conclusion.
Jeffrey proceeds along the same path as all the forgery deniers by eliding the distinction between typescripts and the handwritten diaries.
In this respect it is also important to distinguish between hand-written documents shown in 1916 and the actual diaries that emerged in 1959. Ben Allen of the Associated Press was shown hand-written documents in 1916 and was given access to the diaries after their restrictive release in 1959. In a letter to The Irish Times he stated:
“I have no doubt at all that these were not the documents shown to me by Captain Hall as the original Casement Diaries” (The Irish Times, 4/8/1960, cited by Angus Mitchell in his book Casement, page 251).
A particularly memorable event (a rainbow illuminated by moonlight) is entered on 6/11/1910 in the authentic diary, but somehow the author of the black diary managed to write that this occurred on the 7/11/1910. And almost as extraordinary is that Jeffrey forgets to mention this incident in the first and second editions of his book.
I think Jeffrey has found in the author of the black diaries a kindred spirit! Both find the need to correct errors or omissions that have occurred. But what they don’t appear to grasp is that the corrections draw attention to the error which occurred in the first place!
How could the author of an alleged contemporaneous diary get the date of such a significant event wrong, especially since an authentic contemporaneous diary got it right?
And why go to such frantic lengths to correct the errors in a private diary not intended to be seen by other people?
The only plausible explanation is that the ‘black diary’ was not written contemporaneously. The forger only realised his mistake after the event, and felt the need to correct it in order to maintain the appearance of authenticity in the forgery.
There are no such errors or corrections in the authentic diary covering the same period.
And no one has ever been able to explain why Casement, working in a hostile environment, would keep two diaries covering the same period, containing the same information in both.
I am happy to acknowledge that Jeffrey included the lunar rainbow incident in the third edition of his book. But I wonder why it was not included in the first and second editions!
An unkind person might suggest that this omission had meanwhile been brought to the attention of the public by another writer—and that its continued absence from Jeffrey’s book was no longer sustainable!
I note that Jeffrey does not deal with my point about the typescripts preceding the handwritten diaries. This will be discussed at a future date.
John Martin
Irish Political Review 