“Creating a ‘Suspect Community’: Monitoring and Controlling the Cypriot Community in Inter-War London”

In January 1933, Michael Kyriakides, a Cypriot chef in Soho, was charged with unlawfully possessing a firearm. The magistrate, R.E. Dummett, keen to convict and deport Kyriakides, who had a prior conviction for assault, asked: 'There is no means by which we can get these men [Cypriots] out of the country?' When the detective-sergeant responsible for the case replied that they were British subjects, Dummett retorted: 'The British Colonies do not hesitate to send back anyone they do not want to this country. This is the tragedy. They are doing no good to themselves, and they are a perpetual menace and a nuisance'. The detective-sergeant replied that the many Cypriot-owned coffee-houses behind Tottenham Court Road were the centre of the trouble.1