Sir Brooks Richards

In this newsreel excerpt Sir Brooks Richards presents his credentials to the President of Greece, General Gizikis, in September 1974.

Brooks Richards succeeded Sir Robin Hooper in what was his second and last post as an ambassador. He stayed in Greece until 1978, when he retired from the Foreign Office.

A few months after the fall of the junta, Brooks Richards admitted that Greece had emerged from
the dictatorship ‘in better shape’ than the British had expected.
He also believed the time had come to revise the state of Anglo-Greek relations, and he suggested a series of ‘quite modest developments’, as a sign of British recognition of the change that had taken
place in Greece.

In this video you can watch him talking in Greek, while he presents the prizes (a trip to London) to the winners of a BBC competition.

The 25 November 1973 coup d'etat

35 years ago yesterday another coup d'etat took place in Greece.
In the aftermath of the Athens Polytechnic uprising, head of the military police, Brigadier Dimitrios Ioannidis toppled Papadopoulos and installed Lieutenant General Phaedon Gizikis as President of Greece.
Ioannidis came to be known as the 'invisible dictator' because he was the one pulling the strings during the last period of the Colonels' regime which ended with the Cyprus coup d'etat in July 1974 and the Turkish invasion of the island.

Dimitrios Ioannides (right) toasting with George Papadopoulos (middle) and Phaedon Gizikis (left) Ioannides and Gizikis overthrew Papadopoulos in a later coup.

The communique announcing the overthrow of the Markezinis government accused Papadopoulos of 'straying from the ideals of the 1967 revolution and 'pushing the country towards parliamentary rule too quickly'.

Here you can read BBC's report on these events.

The photos on the right are from an article of the London press on the British recognition of Ioannides' regime.

[You can also read an article (in Greek) on Ioannidis, Kissinger and the USA here.]