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.
Read more about this topic: Roger Casement
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“The conviction that the best way to prepare children for a harsh, rapidly changing world is to introduce formal instruction at an early age is wrong. There is simply no evidence to support it, and considerable evidence against it. Starting children early academically has not worked in the past and is not working now.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“And Manuel embraced his mother and they laughed together: Délira’s laugh sounded surprisingly young; that was because she hadn’t really had the chance to make it heard; life was just not happy enough for that. No, she never had time to use it; she had kept it fresh as can be, like a birdsong in an old nest.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)
“It is hardly surprising that children should enthusiastically start their education at an early age with the Absolute Knowledge of computer science; while they are unable to read, for reading demands making judgments at every line.... Conversation is almost dead, and soon so too will be those who knew how to speak.”
—Guy Debord (b. 1931)