Charles Wickham

Charles Wickham   (officer, policeman)
Born	11 September 1879
Died	20 July 1971 (Age 91)
Nationality	UK
Alma mater	Harrow
Interests	• counter-insurgency • Greek Civil War
British counter-insurgency expert organizing murder gangs and torture chambers in Northern Ireland, Greece and around the Empire.  Commander In office 1922 - 1945 Employer Royal Ulster Constabulary

Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Charles George Wickham was a British Army officer, commander of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and counter-insurgency specialist in various colonies around the Empire. During the British-directed Greek "civil war" (1944-49), he organized murder gangs and torture camps staffed by former Nazi-collaborators.

Career

From Yorkshire, Wickham was a military man who served in the Boer War, during which concentration camps in the modern sense were invented by the British. He then fought in Russia, as part of the allied Expeditionary Force sent in 1918 to aid White Russian Czarist forces in opposition to the Bolshevik revolution. After Greece, he moved on in 1948 to Palestine. But his qualification for Greece was this: Sir Charles was the first Inspector General of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, from 1922 to 1945.

The RUC was founded in 1922, following what became known as the Belfast pogroms of 1920-22, when Catholic streets were attacked and burned. It was, writes the historian Tim Pat Coogan, "conceived not as a regular police body, but as a counter-insurgency one… The new force contained many recruits who joined up wishing to be ordinary policemen, but it also contained murder gangs headed by men like a head constable who used bayonets on his victims because it prolonged their agonies....Wickham organised the RUC as the armed wing of Unionism, which is something it remained thereafter," he says.

Sir Charles Wickham had been assigned by Churchill to oversee the new Greek security forces – in effect, to recruit the collaborators.

The head of MI5 reported in 1940 that "in the personality and experience of Sir Charles Wickham, the fighting services have at their elbow a most valuable friend and counsellor". When the intelligence agencies needed to integrate the Greek Security Battalions – the Third Reich’s "Special Constabulary" – into a new police force, they had found their man.

Anthropologist Neni Panourgia describes Wickham as “one of the persons who traversed the empire establishing the infrastructure needed for its survival,” and credits him with the establishment of one of the most vicious camps in which prisoners were tortured and murdered, at Giaros.

Greek academics vary in their views on how directly responsible Wickham was in establishing the camps and staffing them with the torturers. Panourgia finds the camp on Giaros – an island which even the Roman Emperor Tiberius decreed unfit for prisoners – to have been Wickham’s own direct initiative. Gerolymatos, meanwhile, says: "The Greeks didn’t need the British to help them set up camps. It had been done before, under Metaxas." Papers at Kew show British police serving under Wickham to be regularly present in the camps.

Gerolymatos adds: “The British – and that means Wickham – knew who these people were. And that’s what makes it so frightening. They were the people who had been in the torture chambers during occupation, pulling out the fingernails and applying thumbscrews."

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