Roger Casement - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Casement was born near Dublin, living in very early childhood at Doyle's Cottage, Lawson Terrace, Sandycove. His Protestant father, Captain Roger Casement of (The King’s Own) Regiment of Light Dragoons, was the son of a bankrupt Belfast shipping merchant (Hugh Casement), who later moved to Australia. Captain Casement had served in the 1842 Afghan campaign and went to fight as a volunteer in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 but arrived after the Surrender at Világos.

Casement's mother, Anne Jephson of Dublin (whose origins are obscure), had him rebaptised secretly as a Catholic when he reached the age of three, in Rhyl. She died in Worthing when her son was nine. According to an 1892 letter, Casement believed that she was descended from the Catholic Jephson family of Mallow, County Cork. However, the Jephson family's historian provides no evidence of this. By the time he was 13 years old, his father was also dead, having ended his days in Ballymena dependent on the charity of relatives. He attended Aravon School, Bray, County Wicklow.

Roger was afterwards raised by Protestant paternal relatives in Ulster, the Youngs of Galgorm Castle in Ballymena and the Casements of Magherintemple, and was educated at the Diocesan School, Ballymena, later the Ballymena Academy. He left school at the age of 16 and took up a clerical job with Elder Dempster, a Liverpool shipping company headed by Alfred Lewis Jones, later an enemy on the Congo issue.