Roger Casement: 16Lives (16Lives)

by Angus Mitchell

A fascinating examination of the extraordinary life of Roger Casement, executed as part of the 1916 rising, fighting the empire that had previously knighted him.

Roger Casement was a British consul for two decades. However, his investigation into atrocities in the Congo led Casement to anti-Imperialist views. Ultimately, this led him to side with the Irish Republican movement, leading up to the 1916 rising.

Arrested by the British for gun trafficking, he was incarcerated in the Tower of London and then placed in the dock at the Royal Courts of Justice in an internationally-publicised state trial for high treason. He was hanged in Pentonville prison on the 3 August-two years to the day after Britain's declaration of war in 1914.

• ISBN10: 1847172644
• ISBN13: 9781847172648
• Publish Date: 11 November 2013
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: IE
• Imprint: O'Brien Press Ltd
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 432
• Language: English

Reviews

[wyvernfriend]

Roger Casement is a man whose reputation was destroyed by wartime expedience and propaganda. Glossed over in Irish history because of supposed homosexuality. I don't care, and the murk of propaganda has obscured any truth that may be, the facts are that he didn't marry, that he had both female and male friends and that he often stayed with male friends.

Casement gave his health in the service of the crown, he investigated atrocities in both Congo and Brazil. He started asking inconvenient questions about colonialism and when he did this he also had to ask inconvenient questions about Ireland and it's experience and this led to his sympathies with Irish Nationalists.

This doesn't go into much about Casement as a person, though I suspect he was quite driven and probably got very mono-focused when he had something to research. He made friends and then drove them away and was probably quite a complicated man to deal with. Still he has influence and his legacy of talking about fair trade exists to this day.

His trial was a mess, his legal council let him down and the country that held his actions treasonous actually treated him so badly it wasn't funny.

A complex man and this is probably not the last biography to be written about him.