Word: casement
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...house in Beverly Hills, Calif., is gabled brick, inset with casement windows. To its door last week paraded a steady file of visitors, intent on paying their respects to the erect, shock-haired old man who lives there in semiseclusion. At 83, Berlin-born Conductor Bruno Walter had achieved one of the triumphs of a memorable career: his second complete recording of the nine Beethoven symphonies. At various times, mostly in the 1940s and '50s, Walter had made other recordings of the nine. But Columbia decided on a repeat performance with latest recording techniques, including stereo...
Dublin-born Roger Casement, knighted in 1911 for services to His Majesty's consular service, had been caught after being put ashore on a wild stretch of the Irish coast by a German U-boat on Good Friday, 1916, when an Irish rebellion was in the making. What seemed to the British government a clear case of treason was to many an Irishman patriotism...
Many Englishmen, including G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy and the Webbs, pleaded in vain that Casement's life be spared. When he was hanged, a storm of anti-British feeling rose among the Irish in the U.S. just at a time when the British were eager to get the U.S. into World War I on their side. Something had to be done and quickly, the British government decided, to discredit the name of Roger Casement. Soon prominent figures on both sides of the Atlantic began to hear strange tales about Casement's scandalous "black diaries...
...Home Office's legal adviser told the Cabinet that Casement had "completed the full cycle of sexual degeneracy," and he urged that the government, "by judicious means, use these diaries to prevent Casement from attaining martyrdom." His advice was followed. The diaries were shown to King George V, who was shocked at their degeneracy; so was the Archbishop of Canterbury. More to the point, they were shown to U.S. Ambassador Walter Hines Page with the casual remark by Prime Minister Asquith that he "need not be particular" about whom he might in turn show them to. Gradually...
...from the Home Office came the abrupt reply that was to be the policy of every government, Labor or Tory, since: "It was decided long ago not to make any official statement as to the existence or nonexistence of these diaries." In time another theory gained wide currency: that Casement had merely copied detailed descriptions of homosexual practices from the writings of a cruel employer in Peru whose exposure had helped win Casement his knighthood. According to this theory, Scotland Yard had forged Casement's handwriting in places, so that his copied descriptions would appear to be autobiographical...