Madam, - Roger Sawyer, in his article marking the 90th anniversary of Roger Casement's execution (Opinion and Analysis, August 3rd), wisely writes that historians "must be sure without a doubt that their primary sources are genuine".
However, he gives two oft-repeated but inaccurate details about his parents that are inaccurate. Casement's father, rather than being a "landed Irish gentleman", was the son of a bankrupt Belfast shipping merchant. A former army officer and political radical, Capt Casement ended his days in Ballymena reliant on the charity of relatives.
The origins of Casement's "well-bred Roman Catholic mother", Annie Jephson, remain a mystery, possibly one of her own making. She had no connection to the well-known Anglo-Irish family of that name in Mallow, a fact Casement ruefully discovered. What evidence there is suggests she had a Dublin Protestant background. Stories of grand yet cruel Irish families, heard from his parents during a London upbringing in a series of rented rooms, probably started to make Casement the romantic separatist he became.
Tim O'Sullivan, in his letter of August 14th, takes a different view of primary sources, effectively saying no uncorroborated British intelligence document can add any weight to anything being "put out by the most secretive and conspiratorial forces within British officialdom". He makes this assertion when questioning Dr Sawyer's statement that Casement's companion, Adler Christensen, offered to betray him at the British Legation in Norway in 1914.
In my researches in the National Library of Ireland and at Kew, I discovered that the evidence of Christensen's many betrayals is overwhelming. He was a sociopath who could not stop deceiving. Casement, however, reveals in one draft note that the pair had actually met when Christensen was a teenager, some years before their supposed first encounter in New York in 1914. This earlier meeting occurred in South America, a detail corroborated by Christensen, when he presented himself at the British consulate in Philadelphia in 1916 offering to give evidence against Casement for $700.
In Casement's own later words, Christensen was a "regular scoundrel" whom he foolishly trusted and a "ruffian". These epithets were written when details of Christensen's thieving, blackmail and bigamy in the US were provided by John Devoy and Joe McGarrity, neither of whom were British agents. Last heard of in prison in 1922, Adler Christensen's ultimate fate is another mystery. - Yours, etc,
JEFFREY DUDGEON, (Author of Roger Casement: The Black Diaries - With a Study of his Background, Sexuality, and Irish Political Life), Mount Prospect Park, Belfast 9.