Born in Battersea, London, he went to work on the railways and joined the National Union of Railwaymen in 1919.
Elected to the executive of the Young Communist League in 1926, Wicks attended the International Lenin School in Moscow and the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern.
In 1936, Wicks and several others signed a letter to the Manchester Guardian defending Trotsky's right to asylum and calling for an international inquiry into the Moscow Trials.
However, Wicks and the remnants of the former Marxist League soon left and formed the Socialist Anti-War Front (SAWF); in 1940, this group dissolved and he joined the Independent Labour Party.
Not long before his death he wrote an autobiography, Keeping My Head: The Memoirs of a British Bolshevik, with the help of Logie Barrow.