The Tottenham Outrage of 23 January 1909 was an armed robbery in Tottenham, North London, that resulted in a two-hour chase between the police and armed criminals over a distance of , with an estimated 400 rounds of ammunition fired by the thieves. The robbery, of workers' wages from the Schnurmann rubber factory, was carried out by Paul Helfeld and Jacob Lepidus, Jewish Latvian immigrants. Of the twenty-three casualties, two were fatal and several others serious, among them seven policemen. The two thieves killed themselves at the end of the pursuit.
Helfeld and Lepidus were members of a Latvian socialist party responsible for smuggling revolutionary literature into Russia. Both had been living with Lepidus's brother Paul in Paris in 1907 when Paul was killed by the premature detonation of the bomb he was carrying to assassinate the president of France, Armand Fallières. They fled France to north London, where they became members of a small group of Latvian agitators. For some time before the robbery, Helfeld was employed at the Schnurmann factory.
The bravery of the police during the chase led to the creation of the King's Police Medal, which was awarded to several of those involved in the pursuit. A joint funeral for the two victims—Police Constable William Tyler and Ralph Joscelyne, a ten-year-old boy—was attended by a crowd of up to half a million mourners, including 2,000 policemen. The event exacerbated ill feeling towards immigrants in London, and much of the press coverage was antisemitic in nature. This affected public sentiment after another armed robbery by Latvian immigrants in December 1910, which resulted in the murder of three policemen; the events culminated in the siege of Sidney Street.
Background
Immigration and demographics in London
In the 19th century the Russian Empire, then including Latvia, was home to about five million Jews, the largest Jewish community in the world 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 Jews in some areas of London was almost 100 per cent of the population. Because of the influx of Russians into one part of Tottenham in North London, the area gained the nickname Little Russia.
Some of the expatriates were revolutionaries, and many were unable to adapt to life in 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 by the British press to refer generally to those with revolutionary beliefs.
Several revolutionary factions were active in East and North London. One tactic often employed by revolutionaries in Russia was the expropriation of private property to fund radical activities. The influx of émigrés, and the associated rising rates of violent crime, led to widespread concerns and press coverage. As a result, the British government passed the Aliens Act 1905 in an attempt to reduce immigration. The popular press reflected the opinions of many; 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 immigration into Britain, opines that the act "gave official sanction to xenophobic reflexes which might ... have remained dormant".
Criminals
Paul Helfeld (also given as Hefeld), aged 21 in 1909, and Jacob Lepidus (also reported as Lapidus), who was 25 the same year, were Jewish-Latvian immigrants. They had been members of a Latvian socialist party and, although they had not held positions of responsibility, they had smuggled revolutionary literature into Russia for the party. The pair had been living in Paris in 1907, along with Lepidus's brother Vladimir, a revolutionary bomber who went under the ; Jacob was described in The Times as a "member of a notorious Russian revolutionary family". On 1 May 1907 Paul Lepidus was killed when a bomb he was carrying to assassinate Armand Fallières, the President of France, exploded prematurely. Lepidus and Helfeld fled the country and lived in Scotland for a year, before moving to Tottenham.
Both men joined a small group of Latvian agitators living in north London; according to other members of the group, the pair had criminal records and had joined as a cover for the robberies they carried out. Lepidus was employed, briefly, at a furniture factory, while Helfeld took a job at the Schnurmann rubber factory in Tottenham. Helfeld refused to give his name when he joined the company, so he was listed on the time sheets as "Elephant" in reference to his bulk. Situated on the corner of Tottenham High Road and Chesnut Road, the factory sat opposite Tottenham Police Station, which was under the control of the Metropolitan Police.
Special Branch suspected another individual, the Russian revolutionary Christian Salnish, of having organised the robbery. Salnish, who often went under the name Jacob Fogel, had been an active revolutionary since the age of 13. He participated in the 1905 Russian Revolution and afterwards helped to build resistance groups in Saint Petersburg—then the capital of Imperial Russia—and the area now covered by the Baltic states. Special Branch suspected a political element to the crime based on Salnish's involvement, but as both Helfeld and Lepidus died during the chase, the motivation for the crime was never established.
Robbery and chase Wages snatch On 23 January 1909 Helfeld and Lepidus waited outside the Schnurmann factory. At the same time every week Schnurmann's chauffeur, Joseph Wilson, drove to a bank in nearby Hackney with Albert Keyworth, a 17-year-old office boy. They collected the week's wages—on the 23rd it was £80 in gold, silver and coppers—and returned to the factory, arriving at about 10:30 am. The car stopped to allow Keyworth—holding the bag of money—to open the gates; as it started to pull off, Lepidus grabbed the boy and tried to take the bag from him, but Keyworth held him off. Wilson stopped the car and came to Keyworth's assistance. As the trio wrestled, Wilson fell to the ground and Lepidus managed to take the bag. Helfeld joined the fight; he drew his gun—a .32 calibre Browning—and fired several times at Wilson. The shots hit Wilson's coat; one pierced his clothes and cut across his abdomen. The police report stated that it was "in a miraculous and unaccountable way [that] he escaped injury".
Chase
Two police constables (PCs)—Tyler and Newman—at the nearby police station heard the shots, left the station and chased the two men down Chesnut Road. Part way down the road, George Smith, a passer-by, threw Lepidus to the ground. As they wrestled, Helfeld fired at Smith four times; two shots went through his cap—one of which scraped his scalp—another hit him in the collarbone and one missed altogether. As the two gunmen ran down the street, other members of the public joined the chase, as did several off-duty policemen from the station—none carrying firearms—some on foot, but some having commandeered bicycles from passers-by. One policeman was able to return fire with a pistol borrowed from a member of the public. The car from the factory joined in the pursuit, driven by Wilson; he paused and PC Newman boarded the car before they gave chase again. Tyler ran alongside the car.
As the car approached them, the two criminals turned and opened fire. One round broke the car's water pipe, disabling it, and Wilson received a minor wound to the neck; Newman's cheek and ear were damaged by one shot. Members of the public attempted to take cover, but one—Ralph Joscelyne, a ten-year-old boy—was caught by a round to the chest. Someone took him to hospital on a bicycle, but he was pronounced dead on arrival. The gunmen continued their escape, and headed towards Tottenham Marshes. PCs Tyler and Newman took a short cut, and confronted the two men near the site of a rubbish incinerator. Tyler approached the men and, when he was within , was heard to say "Come on; give in, the game's up". Helfeld took aim and shot him; the bullet went through his head. The two criminals took off again, while Tyler was carried to a nearby house and an ambulance summoned. He was taken to Tottenham Hospital, where he died five minutes after arrival.
Helfeld and Lepidus crossed the nearby railway line and followed the west bank of the River Lea until they crossed over; they were able to hold off the crowd from the bridge. Men who had been duck shooting on the marshes used their shotguns to return fire and when the two criminals moved on from the bridge, local footballers joined in the chase. Helfeld and Lepidus ran along the western bank of the Lee Navigation canal; local workmen followed on the opposite bank in an attempt to cut them off, but several were wounded when the two men fired at them. The pair crossed the canal at Stonebridge Lock, then crossed another bridge and again held off the chasing crowd from the bridge's parapet. One policeman, PC Nicod, borrowed a pistol from a bystander and made his way through the scrub until he was close enough to fire, but the gun was faulty; he was seen by Helfeld and Lepidus, who fired on him, wounding him in the calf and thigh.
Helfeld and Lepidus continued their flight along the south side of Banbury Reservoir. As they crossed an area of open land, they sheltered behind a haystack and held off the pursuers, who numbered about 20 at this point. The two ran on until they reached Chingford Road, where they boarded a number 9 tram; many of the passengers escaped, and the driver, who saw the armed men, ran up the front stairs of the vehicle and hid on the top deck. Lepidus threatened the conductor with a pistol and ordered him to drive; although he had never driven a tram before, he managed to get the vehicle moving. Lepidus stayed with his pistol trained on the conductor, while Helfeld shot at the pursuers behind them. One policeman commandeered a pony and cart; he was armed and tried to get close enough to manage an aimed shot, but Helfeld shot the horse and the cart overturned. A tram on the return journey from that of number 9 was commandeered by a policeman; 40 others boarded it and it reversed down the track in pursuit. The conductor, wanting to get rid of the two men, told them that there was a police station around the next corner. The two criminals jumped off the tram near a horse-drawn milk float, shooting the driver and stealing his vehicle. They fled in the direction of Epping Forest.