23 December 1954 Duncan McPherson, Assistant Commissioner of Kenya’s colonial police, was a rare exception to the norm of complete British indifference to the suffering of ordinary Kenyans. Britain was then engaged in a brutal campaign to crush the Mau Mau insurgency, which aimed to bring an end to colonial rule. Thousands were detained in…
14 December 1950 On 14 December 1950, Prime Minister Clement Attlee had just returned from a meeting in Washington, DC, with President Truman. Attlee claimed in the House of Commons that he had ‘received assurances’ which he considered to be ‘perfectly satisfactory’ over the use of American military bases in the United Kingdom.1 He had been under…
10 December 1953 On 10 December 1953, in a letter to the War Office, General George Erskine, commanding British forces in Kenya, admitted that he was aware that the police and army in the colony frequently resorted to summary executions and torture against suspect Mau Mau insurgents. ‘There is no doubt’, he confessed to Whitehall…
26 November 1955 During a short radio statement at 17.00 GMT on Saturday 26 November 1955, Field Marshal Sir John Harding, the newly appointed governor of Cyprus, announced draconian emergency laws to crush a growing revolt against British rule. The death penalty could now be applied for the possession of firearms, ammunition or explosives regardless…
26 November 1952 On 26 November 1952, Dr. Cyril Garbett, the Archbishop of York, speaking in the House of Lords, backed the British government’s use of collective punishment against villages and often entire districts deemed to be ‘uncooperative’ with Britain’s counter-insurgency campaign to crush the anti-colonial Mau Mau rebellion. During the next four years the…
25 November 1952 Today in 1952, Sir Evelyn Baring, the governor of Kenya, issued new emergency measures designed to widen the conditions for the imposition of collective punishment in areas considered sympathetic to the anti-British Mau Mau insurgency. The pro-Empire Daily Express reported the same day that ‘Africans in the Thomson’s Falls District, where Commander Jock Meiklejohn…
18 November 1953 On 18 November 1953, the RAF commenced a massive carpet bombing operation against Mau Mau insurgents opposed to British rule in Kenya. Code-named Operation Mushroom, and deploying enormous quad engine Lincoln heavy bombers, the campaign was to see 900 sorties over the next two years dropping six million bombs, weighing 50,000 tons,…
2 November 1956 In the early hours of 2 November 1956, the U.N. General Assembly expressed ‘its grave concern’ that the ‘armed forces of France and the United Kingdom are conducting military operations against Egyptian territory,’ that ‘the armed forces of Israel have penetrated deeply into Egyptian territory’, and that as a consequence the shipping…
1 November 1956 On 1 November 1956, an editorial in the Daily Mail was headlined ‘Britain at War’, however neither Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd nor Minister of Defence Antony Head were able to confirm whether or not the country was actually at war with Egypt. The infuriating lack of clarity fomented consternation among MPs and the speaker…
20 October 1952 Today in 1952, Kenya’s governor, Evelyn Baring, signed a state of emergency. In the early hours of the following morning, in an operation code-named Jock Scott, 106 Kenyan civil rights leaders and individuals suspected of being overly sympathetic to an anti-British rebellion, known as the Mau Mau uprising, were arrested. Most of…
