Abstract
Lieutenant Colonel George Grivas, a retired Cypriot officer who had served in the Greek Army during both the First and Second World Wars, could not have been more pleased with his handiwork. At just after one o’clock in the morning on April 1, 1955, his organization—the Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston (EOKA, the National Organization of Cypriot Fighters)—detonated a series of bombs in government buildings in Nicosia, Limassol, and Larnaca, causing damage to the exteriors of each and completely destroying the new transmitters of the Cyprus Broadcasting Service. Following the explosions, Grivas and his men distributed pamphlets in the vicinity of the attacks, calling on the Greek-Cypriot people to rise in support of Enosis. Each of the pamphlets was signed with the initials EOKA and Grivas’s nom de guerre, Dighenis. Before sunrise that morning, Grivas also dropped pamphlets in Turkish-Cypriot neighborhoods, assuring their residents that EOKA wished the Turks no harm but warning them against supporting the “British colonialists” in the coming struggle.1 Seemingly without warning, insurgency had come to Cyprus.
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Notes
See David Carlton, Anthony Eden: A Biography (London: Allen Lane, 1981), chapters 1–9.
Ibid., 369–370.
Victor Rothwell, Anthony Eden: A Political Biography, 1931–57 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 166.
Stella Soulioti, Fettered Independence: Cyprus, 1878–1964: Volume One: The Narrative (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota Mediterranean and East European Monographs, Modern Greek Studies, University of Minnesota, 2006), 29–32.
Harvey Sicherman, Aden and British Strategy, 1839–1968 (Philadelphia, PA: Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1972), 1–17.
Ibid., 28.
Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 288–289.
David Hunt, “Harding, John, first Baron Harding of Petherton (1896–1989),” in Matthew and Harrison, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
For more on policing reforms in Cyprus, see David M. Anderson, “Policing and Communal Conflict: the Cyprus Emergency, 1954–60,” in David M. Anderson and David Killingray, eds. Policing and Decolonisation: Politics, Nationalism and the Police, 1917–65 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 187–217.
“Extracts from a Speech by Colonel Nasser of 26 July 1956 announcing the Nationalization of the Suez Canal Company,” in D. C. Watt, ed., Documents on the Suez Crisis, 26 July to 6 November 1956 (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1957), 44–49.
Telegram from Anthony Eden, Prime Minister, to Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the United States, July 27, 1956, in Peter G. Boyle, ed. The Eden-Eisenhower Correspondence, 1955–1957 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 153–154.
Robert Kubicek, “British Expansion, Empire, and Technological Change,” in Andrew Porter, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume III: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 252.
P. J. Cain and A. G Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–2000, 2nd edn (London: Pearson Education Limited, 2002), 312–313.
Richard Aldous, The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 262–263.
Keith Kyle, Suez: Britain’s End of Empire in the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2003), 14–18.
Ibid., 18–21.
See Joel Gordon, Nasser’s Blessed Movement: Egypt’s Free Officers and the July Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Wm. Roger Louis, “The Dissolution of the British Empire,” in Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis, eds. The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume IV: The Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 340–341.
Ibid., 341–342.
For an insider’s accounts from the American perspective on these events, see Chester L. Cooper, The Lion’s Last Roar: Suez, 1956 (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1978), chapter 8.
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© 2011 Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon
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Grob-Fitzgibbon, B. (2011). The Eden Years: April 7, 1955, to January 10, 1957. In: Imperial Endgame. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-30038-5_4
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