A new BBC Radio Ulster series is set to examine the life of Ballycastle man Roger Casement

Narrated by Kerri Quinn, The Mystery Of: Casement, Rebel Knight is a new four-part series for BBC Sounds and BBC Radio Ulster, examining the life of Irish revolutionary Roger Casement.

Roger Casement became a household name in Britain and Ireland in the early 20th century. However his childhood gave no hint of what was to come.

His early life was a hand to mouth existence. His father was a retired army captain which qualified him to be seen as a ‘gentleman’, but he had little income and the family moved many times to avoid creditors.

Raised in a stable and supportive home in Ballycastle, Casement left school at 15 and was soon working in the office of a shipping line in Liverpool, then as a purser on one of their ships transporting goods to and from the Congo River in West Africa.

He had found a place where he could advance himself and, over the next ten years, moved through a succession of jobs in the region with both commercial companies and missionary groups.

The job involved travel and Casement felt unable to ignore the terrible treatment of local people in the Congo by the Europeans who had come to exploit the rich resources there.

In 1903, he was asked to produce a report into atrocities committed against local people by the rubber industry in a region controlled by the Belgian king, Leopold II. His Congo report broke new ground in giving a voice to those people in the corridors of power in London.

However for Roger Casement, this was just the beginning of his political activism.

The series features interviews with Patrick Casement, great-grandson of Roger’s cousin, who stills lives today in the house Roger grew up in County Antrim; Novelist John Banville, who has been fascinated by Casement, and who wrote a screenplay of his life in the early 2000s.

It also hears from Dr Reuben Loffman, Senior Lecturer in History at St Mary’s University, London, who has lived in Democratic Republic of Congo and heard first hand of the trauma of the ‘red rubber’ era which still resonates today and Liz Gillis, author of a number of books about Ireland in the revolutionary period. She vividly remembers her grandfather talking about Casement’s state funeral in Dublin in 1965.

Others interviewed will include Jeff Dudgeon, the former unionist councillor renowned for his legal case ‘Dudgeon v United Kingdom’ at the European Court of Human Rights which successfully challenged Northern Ireland's laws criminalising sexual acts between men and Laura Izarra, Professor of Literatures in English at the University of São Paulo. She has been to the areas where Roger Casement got the first hand testimony in his report and tells of how highly regarded he is there today.

Each episode of The Mystery Of: Casement, Rebel Knight will be available weekly on BBC Sounds from Saturday, November 30. The series also begins on November 30 on BBC Radio Ulster, broadcast at 1.05pm.