MEMORIAL


wreaths have been laid at the Police memorial by representatives of UK, Turkish and Greek police as an act of remembrance since 2014. Now, as we approach the 70th


anniversary of the Cyprus Emergency, their stories deserve to be retold. One of the first British policemen to


arrive for duty in Cyprus was also one of the first to die. In March 1956, Gerald Rooney, formerly of Kent constabulary was on patrol on Ledra Street in the capital city of Nicosia, an area nicknamed Murder Mile. Three servicemen had been killed and at least five others wounded around Ledra in the three months since Rooney’s arrival on the Mediterranean island. Rooney, 24, was accompanying a Greek Cypriot policeman. They were at a street crossing when Sten submachine gun fire exploded from around a corner. The police sergeant dropped in the hail of bullets. Rooney’s companion was wounded in the arm and a civilian was also hit. Rooney was dead on impact. Following the attack, while troops and police with dogs searched the streets for the killers, another British police sergeant stood in the middle of the road where his colleague had been murdered. “My best friend,” he said. “We joined the force together.” Cyprus endured centuries of conflict before Britain declared the island a crown colony in 1925. Over subsequent decades Greek Cypriots campaigned for unity with Greece (a concept they called enosis) and Turkish Cypriots fought in opposition. In 1955, The National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters (EOKA), a right-wing Greek Cypriot organisation, was formed to violently oppose British rule, leading Governor General Sir John Harding to declare a state of emergency in November 1955. EOKA, supported by the Greek Cypriot population, targeted local Cypriot police with bombings and threats of execution, which compelled the British government to bolster the police’s ranks with their own law enforcement from home. The first officers, including Gerald Rooney, began arriving in December 1955. All were experienced. Rooney had served with the Royal Ulster Constabulary in his native Northern Ireland before being posted to Kent Constabulary. Officers were assigned the task of leading rural police stations or working from divisional police offices. They were lured by the prospect of extra


pay and promotion: constables became sergeants, for example. However, the volunteers, accustomed to dealing with road traffic accidents or petty crime at home, were suddenly thrust into the middle of a violent insurgency. This was no holiday in the sun. In early March 1956, EOKA’s spiritual leader Archbishop Makarios was exiled to the Seychelles which enraged the paramilitaries. There were 246 attacks in that month alone, including a failed assassination attempt against Harding. Gerald Rooney was one of the first British police victims of this campaign.


MET OFFICER ASSASSINATION A few months later, June 1956, Reginald Tipple (32) pulled his car up outside a photographer’s shop on the main street of Larnaca, a city on the south coast of Cyprus, and went inside to make a purchase. The officer had arrived on the


“One of the first British policemen


to arrive for duty in Cyprus was also one of the first to die.”


island the previous March (the same month Rooney was killed). He had enlisted in the Royal Marines during World War Two and trained in the military police before joining the Metropolitan police. His wife, four-year-old daughter and two- year-old son, were at home in London Tipple emerged from the shop and


sat behind the wheel. Suddenly, a man stepped to the car window, pushed a pistol against Tipple’s head and pulled the trigger. “The only reason for his murder,” a reporter for the Edmonton Journal later wrote, “was the fact that he was British.” Hussein, a young Turkish Cypriot who owned a coffee shop, was sitting on his bicycle not far from the sergeant’s car when he heard the shot fired and saw a man in shorts and bare feet running toward him, pushing a gun into his belt. Hussein flung his bike into the path of the running man. The man tripped but made his escape around a corner into a side street. Later in the day, the man was


apprehended and Hussein picked him out from an identification parade of 20 suspects. Nicos Tsartellis, a 22-year-old Greek Cypriot, was tried later that year at a six-day hearing. Judge S.S. John delivered a guilty verdict and decreed that Tsartellis should be hanged. Tsartellis was led from the court shouting: “I did


not shoot him. I am completely innocent”.


HOSPITAL AMBUSH In August 1956, Alfred Demmon (23) and Maurice Eden (25), both of the Metropolitan Police, were escorting Polycarpos Giorkatzis, a high ranking EOKA prisoner, to the general hospital in Nicosia where he was to undergo X-Ray treatment. Demmon and Eden were taking their prisoner down the hospital stairs when they were ambushed by three terrorists. Sergeant Demmon fell wounded to the floor but continued to fire his gun from the ground, drawing the EOKA men’s fire away from his companion. Eden, who until a couple of months before now had pounded a beat in the Victoria Division of London, fired at one of the EOKA fighters with his pistol until the man collapsed. “I kept shooting at him until he stopped moving,” he later told reporters. He then chased a second terrorist out of the main entrance of the hospital. Realising he was out of ammunition, he hit the man over the head repeatedly with his empty gun until he was dead. Alongside Sergeant Demmon and the two EOKA members, a hospital steward was killed and two members of the hospital staff were injured in the gun battle. A month later, three British police officers were browsing the shops in Ledra Street. Cyril Thorogood (29) from Woodford Bridge in Essex had served three and a half years in the Metropolitan Police before spending another five and a half in the Leicestershire and Rutland constabulary where he was chauffeur-driver to the Leicestershire Chief Constable. In August 1956, he arrived in Cyprus. Hugh Carter (25) was a native of Lyonshall, near Kington, Herefordshire, where he served with the local constabulary. Carter was no stranger to conflict, having seen service with the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry in Korea. With them was Sgt William Webb (30), a Worcestershire police officer. Webb was looking forward to his leave when he was to join his wife and son in Greece. Thorogood, Carter and Webb, all dressed in plain clothes, were pausing to look in a shop window when they were hit by a hail of bullets. Three EOKA members had fired the shots into their backs. Thorogood and Carter were killed immediately. Webb, despite being struck five times, survived the attack. The following year, Nicos Sampson, a young Greek Cypriot journalist was


27 | POLICE | OCTOBER | 2025


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