[ 12 March 1935 ] On 12 March 1935, William Crozier, the editor of Britain’s most progressive mainstream newspaper, the Manchester Guardian, reprimanded Robert Dell, the paper’s Geneva correspondent, for allowing his heartfelt distaste for the Nazi regime in Germany to influence his reporting. ‘It simply won’t do, in my opinion,’ he warned the journalist, ‘to…
5 December 1935 On 5 December 1935, the German Embassy complained to Sir George Crichton, the Lord Chamberlain, about a play at the Garrick Theatre in London’s West End. Sir George immediately instructed Dodson Noon, the theatre’s manager, to remove some lines in the play which had been deemed to be insulting to Hitler. He had…
3 December 1963 On 3 December 1963, just nine days prior to Kenya being granted independence, hundreds of files of documents were packed into four large wooden packing crates and loaded onto a British United Airways flight to London’s Gatwick Airport. They related to the administration of the colony during the brutal crushing of the…
19 October 1988 Today in 1988, Douglas Hurd, the Home Secretary, issued a banning order preventing Gerry Adams and other members of Sinn Fein from broadcasting their opinions on the airwaves. Although technically the ban included eleven loyalist and Republican organisations, its prime goal was to silence Sinn Fein, the largest political party campaigning against…
19 April 1936 At 9 pm on 19 April 1936, Sir Arthur Wauchope, the British High Commissioner in Palestine, proclaimed a series of what he termed ‘precautionary measures,’ which gave Britain’s security forces enormous powers. This followed two days of rioting, triggered by sectarian violence between the Jewish and Arab communities, as well as Arab…
5 March 1956 On the evening of 5 March 1956, Britain began to jam Radio Athens’ broadcasts to Cyrpus, in order to silence the station which had championed the cause of anti-British insurgents calling for political union with Greece, a demand which was strongly supported by the vast majority of the island’s Greek population.1 Two…
24 February 1991 [ 24 February 1991 ] On 24 February 1991, during the First Gulf War, Colonel John King of the Media Response Unit, informed embedded British journalists, who had been summoned to a tent in the desert near the border of Iraq occupied Kuwait, that there were to be severe constraints on what…
PUNITIVE EXPEDITION AGAINST INDONESIAN TOWN BURNS DOWN 1000 HOMES [ 13 December 1945 ] On 13 December 1935, Indian troops led by British officers, acting under the orders of Major General Douglas Hawthorn, burned down the town of Bekassi on the Indonesian island of Java. BRITISH BAN CYPRIOT COMMUNIST PARTY [ 13 December 1955 ]…
HUNDREDS OF GREEK CYPRIOTS DETAINED WITHOUT TRIAL [ 22 July 1958 ] At 1 am on 22 July 1958, Operation Matchbox commenced. The British Army’s orders were to detain anyone suspected of having any affiliation with the Greek Cypriot EOKA movement, an organisation which demanded the end of rule from London and for the island…
BAPTIST DEACON SAMUEL SHARPE HUNG FOR LEADING JAMAICAN SLAVE STRIKE [ 23 May 1832 ] Today in 1832, the Jamaican Baptist deacon Samuel Sharpe was hung by the British for leading a slave strike. He was the last of 326 slaves to be executed. Their crime was refusing to follow orders by refusing to return…
