An Incident in Hyde Park: Basil Thomson, Roger Casement, and Wakean Coincidence

This essay unearths a potential historical source for the mysterious crime at the center of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. On 12 December 1925, Sir Basil Thomson—writer, intelligence officer, and former Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard—was arrested in Hyde Park on suspicion of "committing an act in violation of public decency" with a certain Thelma de Lava. Although he insisted he was merely researching a book on London vice, he was ultimately found guilty, fined, and forced to suffer public embarrassment. The incident, which made headlines from London to New York, has an undeniably Earwickerian quality—a crime in the park involving "a lustsleuth nosing for trouble in a boobytrap"—but whether or not Joyce was aware of the officer and his indiscretions, there are other ways in which Thomson's life and career have a bearing on the novel. During the World War I, as head of the CID, he had a hand in a number of affairs, including the interrogation of Mata Hari and the dissemination of the controversial "Black Diaries" used to discredit the Irish revolutionary, Sir Roger Casement, who was executed for treason in August 1916. Drawing upon the officer's eccentric 1922 memoir, Queer People, as well as contemporary newspapers and other archival materials, this essay investigates the rise and fall of a figure who exists in the margins of Joyce's masterwork, and whose curious career represents a conjunction of authority and transgression.