Clennell Wilsden Wickham (21 September 1895 – 6 October 1938) was a radical West Indian journalist, editor of Barbadian newspaper The Herald and champion of black, working-class causes against the white planter oligarchy in colonial Barbados during the inter-war period, leading to the social unrest that triggered the Riots of 26 July 1937. Biography Born in St Michael, Barbados, Wickham served in Palestine in the British West Indies Regiment of World War I. After his return to Barbados, he joined The Herald newspaper, edited by Clement A. Inniss, in 1919 and wrote for universal adult suffrage in a column under the title "Audax" (the listener). Wickham became sole editor of the newspaper following Inniss's early death. In 1921, Wickham summarized attitudes of members of the Barbadian House of Assembly in the first years of the 20th century as follows: "There is no sense of duty to the individual of the island as a whole. There is no sense of responsibility for broad and reasonable treatment. There is merely a sense of class." By the late 1920s, he developed a reputation for being one of the foremost critics of the plantocracy and brought into the open that, although patterned after British common law, Barbadian law in 1900 was in a sense an objective code of rules whose ethical validity transcended the interests and attitudes of several classes on the island. In May 1924, Charles Duncan O'Neal (1879–1936) led a delegation, comprising Wickham, John Beckles, J. A. Martineau and J. T. C. Ramsay, that called on the Barbados governor and requested him to take steps to ensure that the Education Board exercised its powers under the Education Act to ban child labour. Appeals of this sort directed to the governor and to the Legislature were made at regular intervals over the next twelve years to little or no avail. During the 1930s economic and social conditions across the West Indies finally brought the explosions that had been simmering for decades. Wickham was a prescient journalist whose writings in the Barbados Herald newspaper were a major catalyst for change. He had his finger more closely than most on the pulse of the people and had warned that "an inarticulate majority brooding over unrepressed wrongs and unventilated grievances is a serious menace". Barbados had a restricted voting system based on franchise and reinforced this system by allocating electoral worth only to those of a