Marston Tickell

Major-General Marston Tickell (1923-2009) was a British Army officer.

Background

Tickell came from a family with a longstanding military engineering tradition. His father was Major-General Sir Eustace Tickell, who like his son, served as Engineer-in-Chief of the British Army.

He was educated at Wellington School.

Military Career

Tickell enlisted in April 1942 and was commissioned two years later. He served as a Royal Engineer, with his company building the first bridge across the Rhine.

After the War, Tickell studied at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, gaining a first.

His subsequent career included posts as an instructor at the Royal School of Military Engineering, Adjutant of the 11th Armoured Division, a period at the Army Staff College at Camberley, and an appointment at the Military Operations department in the Ministry of Defence.

In 1957 Tickell took command of 23 Field Squadron in Libya and accompanied it to Cyprus and Jordan.

Tickell took the US Command and Staff Course at Norfolk, Virginia, in 1959 before returning to Camberley as a instructor. He subsequently commanded one of the three divisions of the Staff College as a colonel and attended the Indian National Defence College in Delhi.

He served on the Joint Planning Staff in London before commanding 4th Division Engineer Regiment in Germany and then 12 Engineer Brigade in England.

Northern Ireland

Tickell served as Chief of Staff at Headquarters Northern Ireland from early 1971 to the end of 1972, a period which included the first death of a British soldier at the hands of the IRA, the introduction of internment, Bloody Sunday and Operation Motorman.

P.R. Role

Keith McDowall, the director of Information to Northern Ireland Secretary William Whitelaw, described Tickell as a " a rarity among army officers. He grasped that press and communications work meant much more than getting a regiment’s name in print and trying to tell journalists what to think." McDowall recalled:

Later, when the IRA set off a series of bombs in Belfast designed to generate many casualties and mass panic, Tickell rang and suggested naming the outrage Bloody Friday.

I instructed the press office to issue just the one line: “It looks like Bloody Friday.” That was the headline that went round the world. Tickell and I felt somewhat we had avenged the anti-British propaganda coup the IRA had achieved with the naming of Bloody Sunday.

Later years

Tickell was promoted to major-general in 1973 to become Engineer-in-Chief.

From 1975 until his retirement from the Army in 1978 he served as Commandant of the Royal Military College of Science at Shrivenham.

External Resources

• Major General (Retired) Marston Tickell Statement of Evidence to the Bloody Sunday Inquiry
• Day 244, Transcript of Oral Testimony to the Bloody Sunday Inquiry.