Roger Casement: Jeff Dudgeon Responds

In September Irish Political Review there were five Roger Casement articles over ten pages, with fifteen, mostly vituperative, mentions of me.

One item concerned my response to a public challenge by the Group of Four led by Paul Hyde and Jack Lane to eliminate “serious doubts about the authenticity” of the Casement diaries. It was deemed “too long to reproduce at almost 1,100 words”. Nonetheless, my unpublished reply was taken apart by Paul and Jack in nearly 1,000 words, about one page in length.

I feel I have a right of reply but where to start? I know I will have to repeat myself but my critics frequently do, and then distort what I have written.

One such example is when Paul and Jack call in aid Angus Mitchell as a secondary witness to further distort what I wrote. In the ‘Open Letter To President Connolly’ (p12) they declare a Village article by Mitchell:

“confirms stalwart authenticity defender, Jeffrey Dudgeon: ‘concedes that no independent witness to the manuscript diaries in 1916 can be named’.”

I concede no such thing and gave the evidence of the missionary John Harris, an admirer of Casement, as an ‘independent’ witness to seeing a manuscript diary in 1916, something I stated in my Irish Political Review letter of May 2026. I add here what Harris also wrote:

“In the end I was asked to examine the diary and other “exhibits” bearing on it”… Alas, when it was put before me and I had examined certain parts, my confidence was shaken. Then I came upon two or three facts only known in Europe to Casement and myself, and then my hopes were shattered, for I realised that the wretched thing was genuine!”

The ‘exhibits’ were probably the typed diaries with Harris being shown the manuscript 1911 diary in which he featured. He records also that, after leaving the Home Office, he met his friend, H.W. Nevinson, waiting on the Embankment and “unburdened to him the dreadful truth” (Bodleian Library MSS. Brit. Emp. 353).

Nevinson, who organised a reprieve petition for Casement, later wrote in his book Last Changes Last Chances (p114):

“The diary was afterwards exhibited at the Home Office to many curious enquirers, and care was taken that gossip about it should be widely spread amongst leaders of Society—not a difficult task. It is the one form of vice to which I feel no temptation, but all doctors and physiologists now recognise it as a common kind of mental or pathological aberration, to say nothing of its habitual prevalence in many countries.”

The question of course of what is acceptable authenticity evidence will remain insoluble in this dispute. The phrasing changes and is now “no verified independent evidence for the existence of manuscript diaries in 1916”, alongside a variation, “impartial evidence”.

In other words, any document produced by officialdom can never be adduced as evidence, let alone compelling evidence, unless it suggests something other, as with the oft-quoted interpretation of the 1959 synopsis of the diaries’ history prepared for the then Home Secretary.

But Governments, by definition, keep secret—and still do under Freedom of Information law—the process of decision, so nothing of the internal discussions will be made public.

John Martin (p1) repeats the 1994 Eoin O Máille computer analysis of the Casement diaries in an item entitled, The Scientific Proof Of Forgery. The analysis involved a comparison of word frequencies between Casement’s two 1910 manuscripts. One is the ‘Black Diary’ itself, the other the Amazon Journal or ‘White Diary’ published by Angus Mitchell.

They are seriously dissimilar in form and purpose. The latter was in continuous prose and detailed his up-river investigations, while the former recorded a mixture of personal thoughts and emotions alongside observations on each day’s events. Casement wrote of his discursive Amazon Journal, “It is less a diary than a reflection”. It ran substantially for only ten weeks, ending on 6th December 1910, the day he left Iquitos.

John examples the name of the American, Walter Hardenberg, who first exposed the Putumayo atrocities, occurring eighteen times, and Katanere the deceased Indian rebel, sixteen times in the Amazon Journal, yet neither got mentioned in the Black Diary. But these figures were of the past and not around to be recorded as being met in 1910. Many of the other absent diary words are adverbs and those of a formal nature appropriate to an official report.

A lesser error of John’s is when he wrote of an ‘anomaly’ (p5):

“Ó Máille says that the Black Diarist describes taking a boat from Atenas to Lima—which would be an impossibility (requiring the crossing of the Andes mountains).”

But nobody crossed the Andes. Casement actually wrote on 6th September 1910:

“Bishop’s statement today incriminates… Martinegui who went to Lima by last “Liberal” with the plunder of Atenas – leaving the Indians starving.”

John describes a second ‘anomaly’, my unravelling of the matter of who won the 1903 North Fermanagh By-Election as an “incoherent rant”. He declares (p. 5):

“Another error that occurs is that the ‘Black Diarist’, in the 1903 Diary, referred to the election of James Craig in N. Fermanagh. But the diarist has anticipated Craig’s election by three years! He wasn’t elected until 1906”.

The diarist, however does not write that Craig won, rather the opposite:

“North Fermanagh too may give Russellite & then Camborne where Caine has died – his majority was only 108 – so the Tories have a chance there. a/c Seat. N. Fermanagh polled Sat. 21st. Craig (U) Mitchell (I) I.C. seat by Big Majority.”

Edward Mitchell, the Independent Conservative (I.C.) Russellite candidate won, not yet James Craig. This false assertion of diary error was even settled in the pages of the Irish Democrat by a former Editor in 1998.

Finally, it is important to address the remark in my April Irish Political Review letter of which so much is made, given it is now asserted Dudgeon “admits that the Diaries might not be genuine” or as Angus Mitchell put it, has “compelled him to admit the possibility of forgery”.

I wrote, as a kindness to Jack, that his revealing of the police typescript of 5th May detailing homosexual activity by Casement, taken from all four diaries, “does not preclude the typed versions existing before the diary manuscripts”.

In other words, his argument about all the typed diaries preceding the manuscript diaries is not itself refuted by the existence of the 5th May diary extracts.

I reiterate there is zero evidence that the typed versions came first.

I haven’t dealt with the ‘Open Letter to President Connolly’ which smacks of lèse-majesté but have probably reached a point where I can break off and, if given permission, return to it.

Regards

Jeff Dudgeon, Belfast

September 2026

Some Replies

Diaries Real And Faked!

Jeff Dudgeon complains about having to repeat himself and blames his critics. But the reason for this is simply that he does not appreciate how to accept some basic facts, and keeps avoiding them with a plentiful use of sophistry and chicanery.

An example of this is the claim that the missionary, John Harris, saw a diary by Casement. But the fact is that he did not. Ernley Blackwell, Assistant Under-Secretary at the Home Office described the ‘diary’ shown as being “many pages of closely typed matter”.

Casement did not type! What John Harris was shown was obviously the typescripts.

This has been explained a number of times in the Irish Political Review, but Jeff carries on regardless, with numerous red herrings to obscure that basic fact of the matter.

Another example is a basic fact I brought to his attention Six Years ago, of which he had been unaware: the fact that the Metropolitan Police had prepared a 6 volume Book Of Evidence for the DPP in preparing for the Casement Trial, in which it claimed to have diaries of Casement and they included extracts of 24 typescript pages from one alleged diary—that for 1911. But the police did not produce any manuscript diaries for the Trial, i.e. no actual diaries!

Appreciate the context here—for ‘the trial of the century’ of a world-renowned Knight of the Realm charged with the greatest crime known to the Law, High Treason, the police withheld the most potent evidence they had from the Prosecution!

That is simply not credible. The obvious reason for this failure to provide proper evidence is that they simply did not have such diaries.

Jeff has had six years to think about this matter, and to explain it. Indeed, he consulted Michael McDowell SC on the matter.

Now he claims that, as an act of kindness to me, he accepts that the fact that typescripts and not Diaries were submitted in the Trial— “does not preclude the typed versions existing before the diary manuscripts”.

But, in making this concession to me, he is being brutal to common sense! It is impossible to have typed versions of a diary before an actual diary exists! It is therefore self-evident that the manuscript diaries are a later forgery: they were not produced in evidence, because they had not yet been produced!

Another example of denying facts appeared in an earlier exchange with Jeff. I noted the fact that, after a lengthy investigation, the Public Record Office (London) in 1959 presented Rab Butler, the Home Secretary, with a Memorandum of its findings on the whole background to the Black Diaries and, inter alia, explained that the US Ambassador “was given photos of two pages from the typescripts”.

But Butler altered the PRO report to: “The ambassador was given photos of two passages’” (CAB 129/97/3).

Butler knew very well, with his political antennae, that any reference to typescripts would ‘give the game away’. That Government files contained typescripts are not diaries!

And the guilty secret was further hushed up when the Memo itself was destroyed on 5th September 1993, as the Government itself recorded! (see: HO 144/23481).

But Jeff knows better than the PRO. He claims this was destruction just part of a correction of the historical record!

Dear Editor, after six years, I will not write any more on all this. Life is too short to follow and take seriously Jeff’s efforts to deny obvious facts. He has run out of road.

Jack Lane (17.9.2026)

Forgeries!

Jeffrey Dudgeon says that the contested ‘Black’ Diary and the authentic ‘White’ Diary for 1910 are “seriously dissimilar in form and purpose”. It might be thought by most people that that is a reason for thinking that the diaries were not written by the same person: but not Jeffrey! He suggests that the White Diary was akin to an “official report”, unlike the Black Diary.

The suggestion is that this “purpose” explains why the words “actually”, “merely”, “conversation” etc.—which appear frequently in the White Diary—don’t appear at all in the Black Diary!? But those words are hardly ‘official’ words. On the contrary they are ‘conversational’ words.

Jeffrey gives the impression that the names of Hardenberg and Katenere related to the distant past. But Hardenberg’s report of 1909 in the magazine Truth was what prompted the authorities to commission Casement’s South America investigation. And Katenere was hunted down and killed by rubber agents in mid-1910—during the period covered by the Black Diary but before the period covered by the White Diary!

Yet the White Diary mentions the deceased Indian chief sixteen times, while there is no mention of him in the Black Diary! The conclusion must be drawn that the author of the White Diary (Casement) is keenly attuned to his political environment, whereas the Black Diarist is oblivious to it.

The White Diary was not an official report or intended to be an official report. In fact, Casement was extremely reluctant to submit it to the Parliamentary Committee on the Putumayo and said so in a covering note—which was to be misrepresented by Brian Inglis in his Casement biography.

So much for the ‘purpose’ of the White Diary!

But what does Jeffrey think was the “purpose” of the 1910 Black Diary and the other diaries in that collection? There is no doubt that their purpose was to destroy the reputation of Roger Casement. If Casement wrote them—which I don’t believe for a second—they constitute one of the longest suicide notes in history!

If they were purely sexual, they might have had some credibility, but the purpose of including extensive non-sexual material was to authenticate the Diaries—which proved effective in the case of John Harris.

The problem that the forgers had was that they could not destroy the authentic 1910 White Diary because it was in the public domain. So, they were left with the intractable problem of trying to explain why ‘Casement’ was regurgitating much of what he had already written in the White Diary in the 1910 Black Diary.

They also were left with the no less intractable problem of explaining why “Casement” would keep two diaries in a perilous environment at a time when he had a serious eye infection which was making it difficult for him to write!

But I have mentioned these points before, and they have been studiously ignored by Jeffrey.

In his criticism of O’Máille’s report, Jeffrey says: “…nobody crossed the Andes”, which is precisely O’Máille’s point! Jeffrey then rather helpfully quotes from the Black Diary (6.9.1910) as follows:

“Bishop’s statement today incriminates…Martinegui who went to Lima by last ‘Liberal’ with the plunder of Atenas—leaving the Indians starving”.

The “Liberal” was a river steamship. Jeffrey doesn’t explain how this boat crossed the Andes from Atenas (North East Peru) to Lima (West coast of Peru). The only conclusion to be drawn from this error is that the forger’s knowledge of the terrain was poor—for it was not an error that Casement would have made!

Regarding the North Fermanagh By-Election of 1903: I note that Jeffrey doesn’t dispute that the Black Diarist got it wrong regarding the “big majority” or the polling date. But he says the Black Diarist did not claim that Craig was elected in 1903, but “the opposite”. Part of the problem is that in many parts of the Black Diary the meaning is unclear, in contrast to the lucidity of the White Diary.

John Martin,

17.9.2026