Siege of Sidney Street
The Siege of Sidney Street ( English Siege of Sidney Street and colloquially the Battle of Stepney ) was an armed confrontation between state law enforcement and a group of Baltic anarchists in London's East End in January 1911 . The siege ended with the deaths of most of the anarchists. The affair made a big political stir because of the role of then British Home Secretary Winston Churchill .
prehistory
In the years before the First World War, numerous politically persecuted victims of the Russian tsarist regime ended up in Great Britain. After the failed Russian Revolution of 1905 , anarchists , communists and social revolutionaries in particular tried to evade the access of the authorities. Once in Great Britain, most of the refugees were driven to the world metropolis of London and there especially to the poor areas of the East End . Here, the refugees (bot English refugees ) the possibility, despite their destitution time being a shelter to find. Young Josef Stalin was among these refugees for a few months in the autumn of 1905 .
The "Tottenham Outrage" ("The Tottenham Atrocity")
Under these circumstances, a group of Latvian anarchists had also come to London, presumably under the leadership of a person named Peter Piatkow, also known as Peter the Painter, but whose historicity is not beyond doubt. Since all members of the group used various aliases , it is hardly possible to give exact details about their size. The core members of the group were probably Jacob Fogel (also Jan Sprohe), William Sokolow (also Joseph), Fritz Svaars, Mouremtzoff (also George Gardstein), Nina Vassilleva (Gardstein's lover), Luba Milstein (Svaars' Poussage ), Jacob Peters, Max Smoller (also Joseph Levi) and the alleged Piatkow. In order to finance their livelihood and their revolutionary struggle, they committed various violent robberies in London, which they - led by the class struggle impetus - regarded as the expropriation of the expropriators . The first of these actions was the " Tottenham Outrage" on January 23, 1909. Two of the Latvian anarchists ambushed a money messenger who was collecting wages for a local rubber factory from the bank. In the course of the scuffle, shots were fired, which called the police onto the scene. Officials were finally able to catch up with the two perpetrators after a distance of more than 6 miles in pursuit. 2 people were killed and 27 injured in the chase.
Houndsditch murders
In December 1910, the members of this group wanted to rob a jewelry store in Houndsditch and drove a tunnel through the wall of a neighboring building they rented. A locksmith named Dubof had been brought into the group to open the safes. A local resident who had become suspicious of the "construction noise" notified the police on December 16. When the officers - traditionally not equipped with firearms - arrived on the scene, they caught the Piatkow group at work: One of the policemen (Sergeant Bentley) was shot dead as soon as they entered the house in question, two others (Constable Choate and Sergeant Tucker) in the resulting shootout ( English "Houndsditch murders" ). Most of the members of the group were able to evade arrest by the outnumbered police, but George Gardstein, their original leader, was seriously wounded by the stray bullet of one of his accomplices and succumbed to his injuries after a supposedly successful escape in a gang hideout in the apartment Svaars. Accompanied by a nationwide wave of indignation over the police murders, an intensive manhunt led to the arrest of several gang members in the following weeks. The dead police officers were honored in an official state ceremony in the presence of Interior Minister Winston Churchill and his wife.
The siege
On January 2, 1911, an informant (presumably a certain Charles Perelman, the gang's former landlord) informed the police that two or three members of the gang, possibly including Peter the House painter, were in the building at 100 Sidney Street , Stepney (in the Metropolitan Police District ).
Due to rumors of an allegedly imminent change of hiding place and in anticipation of armed resistance, the police decided on a large-scale operation to arrest the wanted. At two o'clock in the morning on January 3, 1911, around two hundred officers systematically cordoned off the block. Forces armed with light and outdated firearms took up positions in shops and apartments in the immediate vicinity of the hiding place of those wanted.
At daybreak, an extensive exchange of fire began. The armed superiority of the besieged who fired with semi-automatic Mauser pistols soon became apparent, and their large ammunition supply made the situation even worse. The operations management therefore asked the Ministry of the Interior to send military aid. Interior Minister Churchill gave his approval from his private apartment and, after a short detour via the Ministry, went straight to the scene. Churchill later admitted that he acted not only out of a sense of duty, but also out of curiosity and his own thirst for adventure. On site, he did not limit himself to a passive role, but directed parts of the emergency services from a weakly covered position.
Among other things, soldiers from the Scots Guards stationed in the Tower of London armed with modern Lee Enfield repeating rifles were used to fire the building from the street and from a strategically located roof. In the meantime, the operations management planned to storm the building and looked for portable armor plates to protect the advancing forces. The use of a heavy machine gun of the Maxim Gun type, which was now available, was also considered . However, this did not happen again. After about six hours of siege, billows of smoke rose from the upper floors of the house and a fire slowly spread downwards. The arriving fire brigade was refused entry to the building due to the danger of coming under fire from the occupants of the building, and Churchill, adopting the position of the police, instead instructed them to merely spread the fire to prevent the adjacent buildings. Eventually the fire also struck the ground floor of the building, the ceiling of which finally collapsed. With weapons at hand, the security forces expected the trapped to attempt to escape. This did not take place. After the flames were finally extinguished by the fire brigade, the remains of Fritz Svaars and William Sokolow were found inside the building. There was never a trace of Peter the house painter discovered.
Aftermath
Five people were arrested for alleged membership in the Piatkow gang, but all of them were acquitted in the later trial, including Jacob Peters (Jakow Peters), who rose to the position of deputy chief of the Cheka , the Bolshevik secret police, in the course of the Russian Revolution of 1917 .
Churchill's role in the affair was controversial in parliament and in public and cemented his reputation as a minister of scandals, who brought unrest into his environment with an almost “magnetic force”. The then conservative party leader Arthur Balfour accused Churchill in a House of Commons debate of having acted inappropriately and behaving unworthily of a minister through his direct involvement in a "street fight" - which was also filmed by the cameras of the British newsreel. He was also accused of being addicted to publicity and unnecessarily endangering his valuable person for the state. Churchill himself admitted in private that he had made a mistake. The inferiority of the British police in the firefight led to the abolition of the Webley revolver and the introduction of the Webley semi-automatic as the standard weapon of the London police.
filming
The events of the Sidney Street siege were reproduced in the film Criminal Control Center Sidney Street ( The Siege of Sidney Street , GB 1960, directed by Monty Berman ). In the original British film adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much from 1934, the events of the Sidney Street Siege were processed, albeit with artistic freedom. They were not included in the American remake of the film, also directed by Hitchcock in 1956.
literature
- Donald Rumbelow : The Houndsditch murders & the siege of Sidney Street. WH Allen, London 1988, ISBN 0-491-03178-5 .
- Colin Rogers: The Battle of Stepney: the Sidney Street Siege; its causes and consequences. Hale, London 1981, ISBN 0-7091-9146-4 .
