The siege of Sidney Street of January 1911, also known as the Battle of Stepney, was a gunfight in the East End of London between a combined police and army force and two Latvian revolutionaries. The siege was the culmination of a series of events that began in December 1910, with an attempted jewellery robbery at Houndsditch in the City of London by a gang of Latvian immigrants which resulted in the murder of three policemen, the wounding of two others, and the death of George Gardstein, a key member of the Latvian gang.
An investigation by the Metropolitan and City of London Police forces identified Gardstein's accomplices, most of whom were arrested within two weeks. The police were informed that the last two members of the gang were hiding at 100 Sidney Street in Stepney. The police evacuated local residents, and on the morning of 3 January a firefight broke out. Armed with inferior weapons, the police sought assistance from the army. The siege lasted for about six hours. Towards the end of the stand-off, the building caught fire; no single cause has been identified. One of the agitators in the building was shot before the fire spread. While the London Fire Brigade were damping down the ruins—in which they found the two bodies—the building collapsed, killing a fireman.
The siege marked the first time the police had requested military assistance in London to deal with an armed stand-off. It was also the first siege in Britain to be caught on camera, as the events were filmed by Pathé News. Some of the footage included images of the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill. His presence caused a political row over the level of his operational involvement. At the trial in May 1911 of those arrested for the Houndsditch jewellery robbery, all but one of the accused were acquitted; the conviction was overturned on appeal. The events were fictionalised in film—in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and The Siege of Sidney Street (1960)—and novels. On the centenary of the events two tower blocks in Sidney Street were named after Peter the Painter, one of the minor members of the gang who was probably not present at either Houndsditch or Sidney Street. The murdered policemen and the fireman who died are commemorated with memorial plaques.
Background Immigration and demographics in London
In the 19th century, the Russian Empire was home to about five million Jews, the largest Jewish community at the time. Subjected to religious persecution and violent pogroms, many emigrated and between 1875 and 1914 around 120,000 arrived in the United Kingdom, mostly in England. The influx reached its peak in the late 1890s when large numbers of Jewish immigrants—mostly poor and semi-skilled or unskilled—settled in the East End of London. The concentration of Jewish immigrants into some areas was almost 100 per cent of the population, and a study undertaken in 1900 showed that Houndsditch and Whitechapel were both identified as a "well-defined intensely Jewish district".
Some of the expatriates were revolutionaries, many of whom were unable to adapt to life in the politically less oppressive London. The social historian William J. Fishman writes that "the (crazy) Anarchists were almost accepted as part of the East End landscape"; the terms "socialist" and "anarchist" had been conflated in the British press, who used the terms interchangeably to refer to those with revolutionary beliefs. A leading article in The Times described the Whitechapel area as one that "harbours some of the worst alien anarchists and criminals who seek our too hospitable shore. And these are the men who use the pistol and the knife."
From the turn of the century, gang warfare persisted in the Whitechapel and Aldgate areas of London between groups of Bessarabians and refugees from Odessa; various revolutionary factions were active in the area. The Tottenham Outrage of January 1909, by two revolutionary Russians in London—Paul Helfeld and Jacob Lepidus—was an attempt to rob a payroll van, which left two dead and twenty injured. The event used a tactic often employed by revolutionary groups in Russia: the expropriation or theft of private property to fund radical activities.
The influx of émigrés and the increase of violent crime associated with it, led to popular concerns and comments in the press. The government passed the Aliens Act 1905 in an attempt to reduce immigration. The popular press reflected the opinions of many at the time; a leading article in The Manchester Evening Chronicle supported the bill to bar "the dirty, destitute, diseased, verminous and criminal foreigner who dumps himself on our soil". The journalist Robert Winder, in his examination of migration into Britain, opines that the Act "gave official sanction to xenophobic reflexes which might ... have remained dormant".
Latvian émigré gang
By 1910 Russian émigrés met regularly at the Anarchist Club in Jubilee Street, Stepney. Many of its members were not anarchists, and the club became a meeting and social venue for the Russian émigré diaspora, most of whom were Jewish. The small group of Latvians who became involved in the events at Houndsditch and Sidney Street were not all anarchists—although anarchist literature was later found among their possessions. Most members of the group were revolutionaries who had been radicalised by their involvement in the unsuccessful 1905 revolution in Latvia and its violent suppression. All had left-wing political views and believed the expropriation of private property was a valid practice.
A leading figure in the group was George Gardstein, whose real name was probably Hartmanis; he also used the aliases Garstin, Poloski, Poolka, Morountzeff, Mourimitz, Maurivitz, Milowitz, Morintz, Morin and Levi. Gardstein, who probably was an anarchist, had been accused of murder and acts of terrorism in Warsaw in 1905 before his arrival in London. Another member of the group, Jacob (or Yakov) Peters, had been an agitator in Russia while in the army and later as a dockyard worker. He had served a term in prison for his activities and had been tortured by the removal of his fingernails. Yourka Dubof was another Russian agitator who had fled to England after being flogged by Cossacks. Fritz Svaars () was a Latvian who had been arrested by the Russian authorities three times for terrorist offences, but escaped each time. He had travelled through the United States, where he undertook a series of robberies, before arriving in London in June 1910.
Another member was "Peter the Painter", a nickname for a man also known as Peter Piaktow (or Piatkov, Pjatkov or Piaktoff); his real name was Janis Zaklis. The police suggested he was the ringleader of the gang, although there is no evidence that he was present at Houndsditch or Sidney Street. William (or Joseph) Sokoloff (or Sokolow) was a Latvian who had lived in Latvia and had been arrested in Riga in 1905 for murder and robbery before travelling to London. Another of the group's members was Karl Hoffman—whose real name was Alfred Dzircol—who had been involved in revolutionary and criminal activities for several years, including gun-running. In London he had worked as a decorator. John Rosen—real name John Zelin or Tzelin—came to London in 1909 from Riga and worked as a barber, while another member of the gang was Max Smoller, also known as Joe Levi and "Josepf the Jew". He was wanted in his native Crimea for several jewel robberies. Three women members of the gang, or associates of members of the gang, were among those who faced charges arising from the Houndsditch robbery attempt: Nina Vassileva—who was convicted of a minor offence but was cleared on appeal—Luba Milstein and Rosa Trassjonsky.
Policing in the capital
Following the Metropolitan Police Act 1829 and the City of London Police Act 1839, the capital was policed by two forces, the Metropolitan Police, who held sway over most of the capital, and the City of London Police, who were responsible for policing within the historic City boundaries. The events in Houndsditch in December 1910 fell into the purview of the City of London service, and the subsequent actions at Sidney Street in January 1911 were in the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan force. Both services came under the political control of the Home Secretary, who in 1911 was the 36-year-old rising politician Winston Churchill.
While on the beat, or in the course of their normal duties, the officers of the City of London and Metropolitan forces were provided with a short wooden truncheon for protection. When they faced armed opponents—as was the case in Sidney Street—the police were issued with Webley and Bull Dog revolvers, shotguns and small-bore rifles fitted with .22 Morris-tube barrels, the last of which were more commonly used on small indoor shooting galleries.
Houndsditch murders, December 1910
At the beginning of December 1910 Smoller, using the name Joe Levi, visited Exchange Buildings, a small cul-de-sac that backed onto the properties of Houndsditch. He rented No. 11 Exchange Buildings; a week later Svaars rented number 9 for a month, saying he needed it for storage. The gang were unable to rent number 10, which was directly behind their target, 119 Houndsditch, the jeweller's shop owned by Henry Samuel Harris. The safe in the jeweller's was reputed to contain between £20,000 and £30,000 worth of jewellery; Harris's son later stated the total was only around £7,000. Over the next two weeks the gang brought in various pieces of necessary equipment, including a length of India rubber gas hose, a cylinder of compressed gas and a selection of tools, including diamond-tipped drills. Some of this equipment had been obtained from the Italian anarchist exile Errico Malatesta, who had a workshop in Islington; he was not aware it was for use in a robbery.
With the exception of Gardstein, the identities of the gang members present in Houndsditch on the night of 16 December 1910 have never been confirmed. It is likely that as well as Gardstein, Fritz Svaars and William Sokoloff—the two gunmen who died in the Sidney Street siege—were present, along with Max Smoller and Nina Vassileva. Bernard Porter, writing in the Dictionary of National Biography, considers that Peter the Painter was not at the property that night. Donald Rumbelow, a former policeman who wrote a history of the events, takes a different view. He considers that those present consisted of Gardstein, Smoller, Peters and Dubof, with a second group in case the work needed to continue into the following day, which included among their number Sokolow and Svaars. Rumbelow considers a third group on standby, staying at Hoffman's lodgings, to have comprised Hoffman, Rosen and Osip Federoff, an unemployed locksmith. Rumbelow also considers that present at the events—either as lookouts or in unknown capacities—were Peter the Painter and Nina Vassilleva.
On 16 December, working from the small yard behind 11 Exchange Buildings, the gang began to break through the back wall of the shop; number 10 had been unoccupied since 12 December. At around 10:00 that evening, returning to his home at 120 Houndsditch, Max Weil heard curious noises coming from his neighbour's property. Outside his house Weil found Police Constable Piper on his beat and informed him of the noises. Piper checked at 118 and 121 Houndsditch, where he could hear the noise, which he thought was unusual enough to investigate further. At 11:00 he knocked at the door of 11 Exchange Buildings—the only property with a light on in the back. The door was opened in a furtive manner and Piper became suspicious immediately. So as not to rouse the man's concerns, Piper asked him "is the missus in?" The man answered in broken English that she was out, and the policeman said he would return later.