Edward Wickham

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Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Thomas Ruscombe Wickham MVO (4 May 1890 – 25 August 1957) was a British Conservative politician who served as the Member of Parliament for Taunton from 1935 to 1945. Before entering Parliament, he spent 1910 to 1935 in the British Indian Army and the Indian Political Department. He acted as officer in attendance for the Shah of Persia during his European tour (1919–1921), for which he received the Order of the Lion and the Sun, 3rd Class. In 1928 he was made a Member of the Royal Victorian Order (MVO) and served as officer in attendance for the King of Afghanistan. He held various overseas roles, including assistant financial adviser to Persia, counsellor at the British embassy in Kabul, and secretary to the Baluchistan chief commissioner, later becoming Deputy Foreign Secretary to the Government of India. He retired from the Army in January 1935 as a lieutenant colonel.

As an MP, Wickham spoke on foreign policy in the House of Commons and was appointed a Parliamentary Private Secretary to Florence Horsbrugh in the Ministry of Health in July 1939, then to the Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha, in November 1939. After Hore-Belisha’s resignation, Wickham left that post, but in June 1940 became PPS to Victor Warrender, and a few months later to the Secretary of State for War, David Margesson. In 1944 he led a parliamentary delegation to Australia and New Zealand and, in 1945, visited the Buchenwald concentration camp. In the 1945 general election he lost Taunton to Labour’s Victor Collins. His last Commons speech was in May 1945 on air services to Australia and India.

After leaving Parliament, Wickham was vice-chairman of the British Van Heusen Company and a director of its subsidiary J. & J. Ashton Ltd. He died on 25 August 1957 in Liss, Hampshire, aged 67.