About a month after Roger Casement’s arrest in April 1916, extracts of diaries purporting to be composed by Roger Casement were circulated.  Two key people were involved in this campaign:  Reginald Hall, the head of Naval Intelligence;  and Basil Thomson, the Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and Head of the CID.

There is some confusion about what was actually distributed.  There were certainly typescripts, but there is no evidence that the actual diaries that emerged in 1959 were shown in 1916.  Indeed, there is plenty of evidence that only typescripts were shown.

Firstly, Ernley Blackwell, the chief legal advisor to the British Cabinet, described the diaries as “covering many pages of closely typed matter” in a memo to Cabinet dated 18/7/1916.  This, of course, was not what eventually emerged in 1959, when the handwritten diaries were allowed restricted access.

Secondly, as indicated in last month’s Irish Political Review, the British Home Office set up a working party in 1959 to decide how the handwritten Black diaries would be released.  A memo from the working party indicated that only typescripts were shown in 1916.

A subsequent Cabinet draft memo from the [Conservative] Home Secretary R.A. Butler explained that the Ambassador in the US “was given photographs of two passages from the typescripts”.  In the actual memo the compromising words “from the typescripts” were deleted!

This is a common theme in the Black Diaries controversy.  ‘ Errors’ are   ‘corrected’, but the question arises as to why the error occurred in the first place and why it was necessary to correct it! 

In this case there was no error!  There is no evidence that anything other than typescripts was shown to anyone in 1916.  The attempt to ‘correct’ the “error” points to a weakness in the foundations of the Black Diaries edifice:  the absence of evidence that the handwritten diaries existed in 1916.

Finally, there is no evidence of the existence of the handwritten diaries in the prosecution case against Casement (see article by Jack Lane, Irish Political Review, April, 2026).

In the six volume prosecution file, there are only 24 carbon copy pages of police typescripts describing homosexual activity by Casement, submitted to the DPP on the 5th May, 1916.

The trial of Casement was one of the trials of the century and yet there is no copy of even one page of the handwritten Black Diaries in the prosecution file!

The Prosecution Counsel, F. E. Smith (later to be Lord Birkenhead), gave Artemis Jones, the junior Counsel for Casement, typescripts.  He passed them on to A.M. Sullivan, Casement’s Senior Counsel.  Sullivan returned the typescripts to Smith with contempt, since they had no evidential value! 

Smith, who was not known for his modesty, was prepared to accept this humiliation from a legal nonentity like Sullivan (who had a nervous breakdown during the trial).

Rather hilariously, Brian Inglis, in his biography of Casement, says that F.E. Smith thought it was “ghoulish” to show the actual diaries (p359, Penguin edition, 2002).  What a joke!

The obvious response to Sullivan would have been to show him a photographic copy of some pages of the handwritten diaries.  But Smith didn’t do so:  which suggests that the diaries did not exist in 1916.

The typescripts disappeared in the aftermath of Casement’s execution.  So, rumours had been disseminated by the authorities, but the defenders of Casement had no way of testing their veracity by examining the typescripts— still less the diaries themselves.

However, in 1922, typescripts were released to journalist Peter Singleton Gates by an “authoritative source”.  It is widely believed that this source was Basil Thomson who had recently resigned from the Metropolitan Police.

The security services successfully prevented publication, but were unable to destroy the documents.  We cannot say for certain that these were the same typescripts that were shown in 1916, but the existence of these typescripts was taken very seriously by the British State.

Indeed the publication of these typescripts in France in 1959 was what prompted the British Government to allow the restricted release of the handwritten diaries in the same year.

The content of the typescripts is almost identical to the handwritten diaries.  One is a copy of the other.  The forgery deniers claim that the handwritten diaries preceded the typescripts published by Peter Singleton Gates;  and that the typescripts are copies of the original handwritten diaries.  

But what if the typescripts preceded the handwritten diaries?  That is at least considered a possibility by the foremost forgery denier, Jeffrey Dudgeon.

Of course, it need hardly be said that, if the typescripts preceded the handwritten diaries, those diaries are forgeries!  (Casement hardly transcribed the typescripts typed up by the Metropolitan police into his handwritten diaries!)

But what is the evidence that the typescripts preceded the handwritten diaries?

Earlier I have said that the typescripts are almost identical to the handwritten diaries.  But in at least two passages there are significant differences.

In this article I would like to focus on one of the passages.  This relates to a lunar rainbow which Casement witnessed on Sunday 6th November, 1910.  We know that Casement witnessed the rainbow illuminated by moonlight on that date because he mentions it in an authentic diary for this period.  It made quite an impression on him.

However in the typescript the date is wrong. It says the event occurred on Monday the 7th.  The handwritten ‘black’ diary also has the incorrect date but, unlike the typescript, there is an attempt to correct it!

In the handwritten ‘black diary’ there are two entries for Tuesday the 8th of November.

The first entry for Tuesday the 8th reads:

“Lovely morning at 8.00am.  Reading Lt Maw again about the Indians & Putumayo in 1827.  Hope “Liberal” comes today.  They are trying to put the “Alvaringa” on barge “Putumayo” into the river today—the high waves are awash of her”.

The second entry for Tuesday the 8th of November says:

“made a mistake of a day since Saturday!”

It then says:

“River dropped since y’day evening, best part of a foot up to noon today. O’Donnell arrived from E. Rios by Veloz, bringing letter from Crichlow asking me to recall him.  ‘Huascar’ arrd with O’D – & smiled on me with big left erection”. etc etc.

There are two observations to be made about these entries.

Firstly, the diarist is asking us to believe that he had confused, not only the dates of his entries, but also the days of the week!  So, the first entry should have read Monday the 7th of November.

Secondly, and much more interestingly, the first entry for Tuesday the 8th of November (which should have read Monday the 7th of November) is not recorded in the typescripts!

Why was this entry not included in the typescripts but was in the handwritten Black Diary?

The answer is that, at the time the typescripts were prepared, there wasn’t an awareness of the incorrect dates!  It was only afterwards that the error was discovered.  

The “solution” was to shunt the dates back one day in the handwritten diaries.  But doing this creates as many problems as it solves!

If the entry for Monday the 7th (the lunar rainbow entry) is shunted back to Sunday the 6th, the lunar rainbow entry has now the correct date, but there is now an empty space for Monday the 7th!

The forger of the black diaries solved this problem by inserting the entry beginning “lovely morning…”. in the space for Monday the 7th.  This was not done for the typescript because the error in the date of the lunar rainbow was not considered a problem that needed to be solved at the time the typescripts were done.  

But the problem was tackled in the handwritten diary.

The corrections in the handwritten diaries which are not in the typescripts suggest that the typescripts were an earlier version of the content of the forged diaries.  They preceded the handwritten diaries. This leaves the theory that the Black Diaries are authentic in tatters.

John Martin

About a month after Roger Casement’s arrest in April 1916, extracts of diaries purporting to be composed by Roger Casement were circulated.  Two key people were involved in this campaign:  Reginald Hall, the head of Naval Intelligence;  and Basil Thomson, the Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and Head of the CID.

There is some confusion about what was actually distributed.  There were certainly typescripts, but there is no evidence that the actual diaries that emerged in 1959 were shown in 1916.  Indeed, there is plenty of evidence that only typescripts were shown.

Firstly, Ernley Blackwell, the chief legal advisor to the British Cabinet, described the diaries as “covering many pages of closely typed matter” in a memo to Cabinet dated 18/7/1916.  This, of course, was not what eventually emerged in 1959, when the handwritten diaries were allowed restricted access.

Secondly, as indicated in last month’s Irish Political Review, the British Home Office set up a working party in 1959 to decide how the handwritten Black diaries would be released.  A memo from the working party indicated that only typescripts were shown in 1916.

A subsequent Cabinet draft memo from the [Conservative] Home Secretary R.A. Butler explained that the Ambassador in the US “was given photographs of two passages from the typescripts”.  In the actual memo the compromising words “from the typescripts” were deleted!

This is a common theme in the Black Diaries controversy.  ‘ Errors’ are   ‘corrected’, but the question arises as to why the error occurred in the first place and why it was necessary to correct it! 

In this case there was no error!  There is no evidence that anything other than typescripts was shown to anyone in 1916.  The attempt to ‘correct’ the “error” points to a weakness in the foundations of the Black Diaries edifice:  the absence of evidence that the handwritten diaries existed in 1916.

Finally, there is no evidence of the existence of the handwritten diaries in the prosecution case against Casement (see article by Jack Lane, Irish Political Review, April, 2026).

In the six volume prosecution file, there are only 24 carbon copy pages of police typescripts describing homosexual activity by Casement, submitted to the DPP on the 5th May, 1916.

The trial of Casement was one of the trials of the century and yet there is no copy of even one page of the handwritten Black Diaries in the prosecution file!

The Prosecution Counsel, F. E. Smith (later to be Lord Birkenhead), gave Artemis Jones, the junior Counsel for Casement, typescripts.  He passed them on to A.M. Sullivan, Casement’s Senior Counsel.  Sullivan returned the typescripts to Smith with contempt, since they had no evidential value! 

Smith, who was not known for his modesty, was prepared to accept this humiliation from a legal nonentity like Sullivan (who had a nervous breakdown during the trial).

Rather hilariously, Brian Inglis, in his biography of Casement, says that F.E. Smith thought it was “ghoulish” to show the actual diaries (p359, Penguin edition, 2002).  What a joke!

The obvious response to Sullivan would have been to show him a photographic copy of some pages of the handwritten diaries.  But Smith didn’t do so:  which suggests that the diaries did not exist in 1916.

The typescripts disappeared in the aftermath of Casement’s execution.  So, rumours had been disseminated by the authorities, but the defenders of Casement had no way of testing their veracity by examining the typescripts— still less the diaries themselves.

However, in 1922, typescripts were released to journalist Peter Singleton Gates by an “authoritative source”.  It is widely believed that this source was Basil Thomson who had recently resigned from the Metropolitan Police.

The security services successfully prevented publication, but were unable to destroy the documents.  We cannot say for certain that these were the same typescripts that were shown in 1916, but the existence of these typescripts was taken very seriously by the British State.

Indeed the publication of these typescripts in France in 1959 was what prompted the British Government to allow the restricted release of the handwritten diaries in the same year.

The content of the typescripts is almost identical to the handwritten diaries.  One is a copy of the other.  The forgery deniers claim that the handwritten diaries preceded the typescripts published by Peter Singleton Gates;  and that the typescripts are copies of the original handwritten diaries.  

But what if the typescripts preceded the handwritten diaries?  That is at least considered a possibility by the foremost forgery denier, Jeffrey Dudgeon.

Of course, it need hardly be said that, if the typescripts preceded the handwritten diaries, those diaries are forgeries!  (Casement hardly transcribed the typescripts typed up by the Metropolitan police into his handwritten diaries!)

But what is the evidence that the typescripts preceded the handwritten diaries?

Earlier I have said that the typescripts are almost identical to the handwritten diaries.  But in at least two passages there are significant differences.

In this article I would like to focus on one of the passages.  This relates to a lunar rainbow which Casement witnessed on Sunday 6th November, 1910.  We know that Casement witnessed the rainbow illuminated by moonlight on that date because he mentions it in an authentic diary for this period.  It made quite an impression on him.

However in the typescript the date is wrong. It says the event occurred on Monday the 7th.  The handwritten ‘black’ diary also has the incorrect date but, unlike the typescript, there is an attempt to correct it!

In the handwritten ‘black diary’ there are two entries for Tuesday the 8th of November.

The first entry for Tuesday the 8th reads:

“Lovely morning at 8.00am.  Reading Lt Maw again about the Indians & Putumayo in 1827.  Hope “Liberal” comes today.  They are trying to put the “Alvaringa” on barge “Putumayo” into the river today—the high waves are awash of her”.

The second entry for Tuesday the 8th of November says:

“made a mistake of a day since Saturday!”

It then says:

“River dropped since y’day evening, best part of a foot up to noon today. O’Donnell arrived from E. Rios by Veloz, bringing letter from Crichlow asking me to recall him.  ‘Huascar’ arrd with O’D – & smiled on me with big left erection”. etc etc.

There are two observations to be made about these entries.

Firstly, the diarist is asking us to believe that he had confused, not only the dates of his entries, but also the days of the week!  So, the first entry should have read Monday the 7th of November.

Secondly, and much more interestingly, the first entry for Tuesday the 8th of November (which should have read Monday the 7th of November) is not recorded in the typescripts!

Why was this entry not included in the typescripts but was in the handwritten Black Diary?

The answer is that, at the time the typescripts were prepared, there wasn’t an awareness of the incorrect dates!  It was only afterwards that the error was discovered.  

The “solution” was to shunt the dates back one day in the handwritten diaries.  But doing this creates as many problems as it solves!

If the entry for Monday the 7th (the lunar rainbow entry) is shunted back to Sunday the 6th, the lunar rainbow entry has now the correct date, but there is now an empty space for Monday the 7th!

The forger of the black diaries solved this problem by inserting the entry beginning “lovely morning…”. in the space for Monday the 7th.  This was not done for the typescript because the error in the date of the lunar rainbow was not considered a problem that needed to be solved at the time the typescripts were done.  

But the problem was tackled in the handwritten diary.

The corrections in the handwritten diaries which are not in the typescripts suggest that the typescripts were an earlier version of the content of the forged diaries.  They preceded the handwritten diaries. This leaves the theory that the Black Diaries are authentic in tatters.

John Martin