Remembering The Siege of Sidney Street of 1911

 

 

The famous Siege of Sidney Street took place on this day 3 January, 1911 when a small group of Latvian revolutionaries  took on Winston Churchill and the British Army, in a pitched gun battle which has since entered into East London folklore.

The Siege of Sidney Street, or the “Battle of Stepney” was preceded by the Houndsditch murders. On 16^th December 1910 a gang of Latvarian anarchists attempted to rob a jewellers shop at 119 Houndsditch. It was one of a series of “expropriations” to raise funds for propaganda and help their fellow activists in Russia and Latvia.

The revolutionaries had planned this carefully: renting rooms in the building which backed onto the rear of the shop. They even had bought a 60 foot length of India rubber gas hose so they could use gas from their own building to burn through the jeweller’s safe.

There was just one flaw in their plan, they had picked Friday night for the robbery, in a largely Jewish neighbourhood. The unexpected noise on the Jewish Sabbath disturbed residents who promptly called the police.

Two sergeants, Bentley and Bryant, tried the door of 11 Exchange Buildings, which was answered by a man who did not appear to understand English. He went inside, apparently to summon assistance. The officers waited, then followed him in, and exchanged a few words with a man standing at the top of the stairs inside. In the dark, with no electricity, they could only see his feet.

The officers decided to go further on into the house, but had hardly taken another step when a gunman burst out of the back room and opened fire. The man on the stairs also started shooting. Both sergeants were hit, but managed to stagger into the street, where a constable named Woodmans ran to help Bentley, and was shot in the thigh. He fainted.

There were two detectives in the line of fire, but the burglars were not frightened of men in plain clothes. They were only interesting in picking off the men in uniform. Two bullets hit Sergeant Charles Tucker, who was killed outright. PC Arthur Strongman, not knowing the sergeant was dead, carried him to safety, followed by one of the gunmen, who kept firing, but missed. In doing so, he stepped under a street light, which meant that the constable was the only one to see any of the killers’ faces. The others saw only shadows, and the flashes as guns went off.

The gang fired on the unarmed officers. Three were killed,Sgt Charles Tucker (47) – Sgt Robert Bentley (37) and Constable Walter Choat (34). and two injured and it remains the single worst incident for British police in peacetime.There was enormous public outcry at the death and injury of the policemen,most of the public would not have been greatly interested in their affiliations and what drove them to such desperate actions. Their war was not with the British authorities per se, but rather with Tsarist Russia. They (and there were a dozen or so associated with Houndsditch and Sidney Street) were refugees in Britain, from Latvia, where the 1905 revolution was put down with exceptional violence.

For the popular press they were all anarchists, but most had Social Revolutionary or Marxist affiliations, and had fought in terrible encounters with Tsarist forces, some of them undergoing savage beatings and torture. They believed they would receive similar brutality from the British police should they be caught, which helps explain some of their actions.

 Most were Jewish, and were part of the wave of refugees driven out of Russia by the pogroms of the late 1800s and the savage reprisals that followed the failed 1905 revolution. Britain had a reputation as a haven for such refugees, though most ended up in the sweatshops of the East End, desperately poor and roundly despised by the rest of society as ‘aliens’.

After an  intense search that  followed. the police had their first lead when a local GP reported being called to a house to treat a man who had been shot and had refused to go to hospital. They found him dead and a considerable amount of guns and ammunition, including the gun used to shoot the three policemen. The dead man was George Gardstein, an anarchist from Latvia. Three others had fled the scene. Rewards were offered,, up to £500 – a huge sum of money in 1910. The police were soon looking for an unidentified woman, Fritz Svaars and a Russian called Peter Piatkov, also known as Peter the Painter as that was his trade.Several of the gang members, associates, revolutionaries, and Latvarian anarchists were arrested in the following days.

As well as the official investigation, the murders sparked a severe social backlash against Eastern European people, particularly political refugees who lived in the East End, as they were lumped together with the anarchists as “foreign malefactors”.By 1914, over 100,000 immigrants had arrived from Eastern Europe. The majority were Russian Jews fleeing the programs but they also included other Eastern Europeans. Most settled into their new lives in London, in some cases populating entire streets in the East End. There was inevitably some negative public reaction. The immigrants were linked in the press to a rise in crime and to violent crime in particular. There were calls to amend the Aliens Act of 1905, which had introduced immigration controls for the first time in Britain and also required the registrations of new arrivals.Emotive statements were regularly published in the daily papers , often targeting immigrants with comments such as “some of the worst alien anarchists and criminals who seek our too hospitable shores” – and overviews such as “the constant mollycoddling attitude towards criminals by the government, and certain so-called humanitarian sections of the general public” (these are actual extracts from The Times newspaper at those times). The Daily Mail newspaper ran a headline that read “Who are these fiends in human shape?” This is very unsurprising given the Daily Mail’s historic support of government authority and reactionary politics. On 15^th January 1934 the paper even openly supported the fascist Oswald Mosley by publishing an article entitled “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!”

 A fortnight after the shootings the police received information from a Mrs Gershon that two or three members of the gang, and possibly Peter the Painter, were hiding at 100 Sidney Street. The men inside, sensing they had been betrayed, seized the landlady and deprived her of her skirt and boots, assuming that no respectable Jewish woman would leave the house in her underclothes. But Mrs Gershon was made of sterner stuff, and slid out whilst the men were not watching.

Expecting heavy resistance, and not wanting anyone to escape, 200 armed police officers cordoned off the area after evacuating the other residents of the building, and on the morning of 3^rd January 1911, the battle began.As dawn broke, people started to gather around the police cordon, trying to find out what was happening. The police threw stones at the second-floor window where they believed the two men were hiding. Nothing happened. Then someone threw a brick and smashed a window pane. From the floor below shots fired out and a policeman was hit. A hail of bullets followed as they tried to move the wounded man.

The two holed up were heavily outnumbered, but possessed far superior firepower and had great stores of ammunition (during the 7 hours, over 400 rounds had come from the house). The German Mauser automatic pistols proved to be far superior to the weaponary than the Metropolitan police had available, and so a detachment of Scots Guards armed with rifles were sent to help. The Liberal government’s Home Secretary  of the day Winston Churchill got word of the siege, and sensing a chance for self-promotion, rushed along to take personal command. Finding the police equipped only with out-of-date firearms he authorised the deployment of 74 members of the Scots Guards stationed at the Tower of London – 35 members of the Royal Artillery plus 15 Royal Engineers – the first time the military had ever been called upon to support the constabulary..

Churchill headed down to observe it himself. Dressed in his fur coat and top hat, he proceeded to give shooting advice to the police officers. A stray bullet even passed through his top hat. To add to his preposterous appearance, Churchill had commissioned a field artillery canon to shell the building, but a fire had broken out before he had a chance to use it. This move is nowhere near excessive for a man who has put tanks on the streets of Britain before.

After 6 hours of continual shooting, a small cloud of smoke could be seen from one of the upstairs windows and very soon 100 Sidney Street was in flames.However, the soldiers showed no mercy and kept up their bombardment..

The media were in attendance; in fact it was apparently one of the first cases of live news coverage, filmed by Pathé News. and the first films were showing in West End cinemas that same evening. Eventually the police force swelled to at least 1,500, with a crowd of maybe twice that gathering to watch from the street and rooftops.

 

 

 

Once the fire brigade arrived, Churchill prevented them from putting out the fire until the firing had stopped, or in other words until the anarchists had been burnt alive. Sure enough no one emerged from the building, and the remains of 2 bodies.Fritz Svaars and William Sokolow (both were also known by numerous aliases), were later discovered inside the building. A firefighter was also killed by falling debris from the destroyed building. Churchill’s role in this affair proved to be highly controversial. The man was known for his love of spectacle, and desire to be at the frontline of events. He even informed his secretary that the siege was “such fun!”

Nobody was ever convicted of killing the officers. One of the assailants arrested before the siege was Svaars’ cousin, Jacob Peters. No one knows who fired the fatal shots, but Donald Rumbelow, an ex-police officer, argued it was Peters. However unlike the others, Peters willingly allowed himself to be arrested, and put his faith in the British legal system. Peters was a member of the Bolshevik Party, not an anarchist, and the distinction is very significant. Given his membership of the disciplined Marxist organisation, it is incredibly unlikely for Peters to have been involved in such anarchist escapades. The initial counts of murder were less than dubious, and after 128 days Peters was acquitted by the court and returned to Russia, where after the 1917 revolution, he became a leading figure in Lenin’s secret police, the Cheka, but was eventually purged by Stalin in the 1930s.

Peter the Painter was never found, and there is little of evidence of him even being present at the siege. In recent years, a British Anarchist historian, Phil Ruff, has concluded that the most likely candidate for ‘Peter the Painter’ is Janis Zhaklis, a leading member of Latvia’s revolutionary Social Democratic movement who reportedly took part in armed attacks on the Tsarist regime’s prison and secret police department in Riga in 1905-6 before being forced into exile. Zhaklis’ commitment to armed struggle over political struggle apparently led him to split from the Social Democrats and move in a more anarchistic direction. In exile his political group, like others, raised funds for their struggle against autocratic oppressors through ‘expropriations’ – aka robbing the rich. The young Stalin was a noted bank robber for the Bolsheviks, arguably his most useful contribution to the revolutionary struggle. (Zhaklis is also said to have given Lenin some of the funds from an ‘expropriated’ Helsinki bank.) Before the abortive raid on the Houndsditch jewellers, Peter the Painter’s group of Latvians had staged another failed robbery in north London in January 1909, this time of a factory’s wages. The ‘Tottenham Outrage’ as it became known culminated in a six-mile armed police chase across the Lea Valley that left two dead and two dozen injured. Peter the Painter eventually became somewhat of a folk anti-hero in the East End and beyond. The Mauser C96 pistols he and the anarchists used were reportedly referred to as “Peter the Painters” in the Irish war of independence against the British Empire.Tower Hamlets Borough Council, in 2006 named two of the their community housing tower blocks Peter House and Painter House, much to the annoyance of the Metropolitan Police.

The two deceased in the siege were known to have at one time frequented the Jubilee Street Anarchist Club, just around the corner from Sidney Street. At that time there were at least 3 anarchist clubs in London. The one at 165 Jubilee Street was opened under the guise of a Jewish Friendly Society and catered mainly for Jewish émigrés fleeing persecution from Tsarist Russia. It served more as a refuge and it was described as peaceful and friendly with a library and reading room, a kids’ Sunday school, lectures, dances, recitals and no alcohol. The police would often point homeless East European refugees in the direction of the Anarchist Club knowing they would get looked after. You can read more about London’s Anarchist Clubs here.

Over a hundred years on the blazing gun battle that was fought at 100 Sidney Street paints a picture of a bygone age of revolution and social and political radicalism, but also of the willingness of the British state to crush any form of revolutionary upsurge, even in a distorted anarchist form. The siege proved to be the impetus for the modernisation and militarisation of the British police force. There were also calls for tough new policies on immigration, and a general backlash against, and attempt to discredit, any kind of socialist politics. Not the Liberals though, who were in government. Josiah Wedgwood MP wrote to Churchill, just two days after the siege, urging him to oppose draconian measures: “It is fatally easy to justify them but they lower the whole character of the nation.“You know as well as I do that human life does not matter a rap in comparison with the death of ideas and the betrayal of English traditions.”

Churchill did not change the laws. 

However In today’s age of increasing police violence and increase in right-wing and reactionary politics, we can look to incidents like the Siege of Sidney Street to remind us what the true nature of the state apparatus is, an armed body of men in protection of private property and capitalism, willing to use whatever force it deems necessary to do so.

The building at 100 Sidney Street no longer exists but there is a red plaque on a block of flats that remembers Charles Pearson, a fireman who died at Sidney Street when part of the building collapsed on him, and there is also a memorial to the three police officers who were murdered at Houndsditch.

 For further information on the Sidney Street siege, there is one essential source. Donald Rumbelow’s The Houndsditch Murders and the Siege of Sidney Street (1973, revised 1988) is the classic account, outstanding in the dramatic detail and in its understanding of both police procedure and the revolutionaries’ motivations.

The siege was the inspiration for the final scene in Alfred Hitchcock;s original 1934 version pf The Man Who knew Too Much, and the story was heavily fictionalised in the rather awful l960 film The Siege of Sidney Street, starring Donald Sinden .

The siege was also the inspiration for two novels, The Siege of Sidney Street (1960) by F Oughton and A Death Out of Season (1973) by Emanuel Livinoff.

 The causes that drove the revolutionaries of 1911 have faded into history, even if terrorism on British shores inspired by overseas conflict and a different set of beliefs has not. But the films remain, and the press reports, and the photographs, and the many picture postcards that were produced, as tragedy was turned into commerce. The films not only show extraordinarily exciting things happening on the streets of London, but they show us an area of London never before visited by the motion picture camera..

Three of the five newsreels made of the Sidney Street siege exist at the BFI National Archive, with further copies of these at British Pathé and ITN Source. Each runs for two to three minutes in length. Versions of all three can be found online.

 The Siege of Sidney Street