 |
|
|
THE LATEST PROGRAMME |
|
|
|
|
Jonathan Freedland looks for the past behind the present. Each week, The Long View, recorded on location throughout the British Isles, takes an issue from the current affairs agenda and finds a parallel in our past.
Have you got a good subject for a future programme? Click here to make your suggestion. |
|
|
Sidney Street siege and more recent police operations.
|
Extracts from which programme readings are taken :
The Houndsditch Robbery
From The Battle with the London Anarchists - special commemorative press publication:
"Sounds of hammering and sawing were heard by night, and some of the neighbours began to feel suspicious….
Just before 11.30 five police officers approached the mysterious house in Exchange Buildings. Sgt Bentley, who was at their head, knocked at No11 and called on the people to come down and open the door
This must have been enough to warn the people that the game was up. Desperate at the idea of being cornered, they were all too well prepared for an emergency and in another moment there was a report, the crash of glass and Sgt Bentley fell shot by a man behind a window…In another moment the other 4 officers lay wounded and before the terrified neighbours, roused by the shots, could rush to their doors, the fugitives had made off. It is certain they were anarchists and it is equally beyond doubt that they belonged to a gang of expert foreign burglars with the most modern, scientific equipment for their evil trade and with a very close and secret organisation in London."
Daily Mail:
"Even the most sentimental will feel that the time has come to stop the abuse of this country's hospitality by the foreign malefactors."
Churchill's Memoirs:
"We were clearly in the presence of a class of crime and a type of criminal which for generations had no counterpart in England. The ruthless ferocity of the criminals, their intelligence, their unerring marksmanship their modern weapons and equipment, all disclosed the characteristic of the Russian Anarchist"
Political Revolutionaries in Whitechapel
Sir Philip Gibbs in the Weekly Graphic:
"I spent some hours with the anarchists of Whitechapel. I felt rather heroic and also rather nervous when I set forth upon this perilous journey…nothing happned to me. I could laugh now at my fears. These alien anarchists were as tame as rabbits. I am convinced that they had not a revolver among them. Yet, remembering the words I heard, I am sure that this intellectual anarchy, this philosophy of revolution, is more dangerous than pistols and nitro-glycerine. For out of the anarchist club in the East End come ideas."
Leading Anarchist Rudolf Rocker on fallout of Houndsditch shooting:
"The way the newspapers linked the Houndsditch murderers with the foreign revolutionaries made us fear the affair would be used to work up agitation for withdrawing the right of asylum in Great Britain. It was the only country where political refugees really enjoyed the right of asylum, where they did not live with the constant dread of expulsion hanging over their heads as in France, Belgium or Switzerland. If the press campaign resulted in public opinion demanding the withdrawal of the right of asylum many refugees would be left without protection. We were aware of that danger and we were apprehensive for the future."
The Siege of Sidney Street
Diary of the Fight from The Battle with the London Anarchists:
"Monday Evening - Police informed that Fritz Svarrs and Peter the Painter were hiding in 100 Sidney Street.
Monday 10pm - Two pantechnicon vans containing detectives who desired to gain admission to the house passed through Sidney Street. Attempt unsuccessful
Midnight - Police surround the house
7.30 - am Detective concealed in gateway opposite threw pebbles at the upper window to induce the men to come down to the door. The reply was a fusillade of shots. Detective Sgt Leeson seriously wounded
10.30am - 1st Scots guards arrive from the Tower. Some took up positions in Sidney St and others in brewery overlooking the hosuse
10.45am - Guardsman open fire, piercing all the windows. Murderes replied with a volley
2.15pm - Mr Winston Churchill arrived by motor car
12.50pm - smoke began to issue from the house in great volumes
2.10 - Mr Churchill and the police confer and come to the conclusion that the assasins must have perished
3.0pm - Discovery of two bodies supposed to be Fritz and Peter the Painter
Manchester Guardian Wednesday January 4, 1911,
From our own correspondent :
It was nearly noon when I pierced the police barrier at the end of one of the dingy little streets leading into Sidney-street. The little street was almost empty. Some women were hanging out of the open upper windows listening with dull faces to the sound of firing and looking towards it. As I went along there was a sharp cracking of revolver shots. …Not a soul was to be seen along Sidney-street. At all the openings was an impassive line of police, and behind them a glimpse of scared faces. Nor was there at first anything to show where the duel was going on.
Looking down the line of buildings I saw the tall, newish block of brick houses with the surgery at the corner, and next to the surgery the windows of the assassins' fortress. As I watched there was a report, and a puff of smoke blew away from the first floor window, and then at once came a furious volley from the other side of the street. The duel was in full swing, and the policemen round me heard it and grinned - "That's a pretty one," they said.
The burning of the trap
Close on one o'clock an especially sharp fusillade rattled like a growl of exasperation. In a few minutes some sharp-eyed watcher on our roof saw a little feather of smoke curling out of the window below the point of attack. We thought at first it was gun smoke, and then with a thrill we saw that the house was on fire. The smoke grew, and soon it was rolling thick out of the windows. "Now they are done for," we said; "this is the beginning of the end." But the soldiers had no mercy. They showered their lead into the smoke.
It was a strange sensation to be standing there and watching the fire eat up the house. A youth of the neighbourhood chuckled in unholy exultation. "They'll be fried like rats in an oven," he said. It was awful, but there was in that moment no thought of pity for the wretches about to give up their lives between the rifle muzzles and the flame. Suddenly a long tongue of flame licked out from the second storey window, and then we knew, indeed, that all was up. "
Trial of gang members accused of involvement in the Houndsditch Robbery at the Old Bailey.
Mr Justic Grantham in Daily Mail Jan 6th (Grantham would be trial judge in May):
"The men who died in Sidney St were socialists of the very worse type, men who did not acknowledge God or anything; he hoped the siege would be a warning to people not to disregard religion."
Daily Mail 1912 Following collapse of the case:
"Thus 5 months have passed since 16 December, when three constables of the City Police were murdered by a gang of armed alien burglars and two more policeman seriously wounded. Not a single one of their assassins have been punished by the law. ..It is certain that the persons
implicated were numerous. It is no pleasant or satisfactory reflection that several principals in the crime and many of their associates have escaped and are still at large.
The police can hardly be congratulated upon their success in dealing with this formidable conspiracy; but, in excuse, it must be remembered that in the vast alien population of East London it is a matter of peculiar difficulty to obtain evidence or run down the offender."
The content of this page is based on information suppled by the Metropolitan Police and City of London Police websites: see Related Links below.
Contributors
Donald Rumbelow – Historian
Bill Fishman – Historian
Chiwetel Ejiofor – Actor
Anthony Browne – Environment Editor of ‘The Times’
John Wadham – Director of Liberty
David Claridge - security advisor
FURTHER READING
The Houndsditch Murders and the Siege of Sidney Street, by Donald Rumbelow.
|
|
|
RELATED LINKS
City of London Police website
Metropolitan Police website
Please note the BBC cannot be held responsible for the content of external websites.
|
|
|
|
|
