London’s ‘sensational shootout’ that saw three policemen killed and criminals flee overseas
We speak a to historian Andrew Whitehead about the most ‘sensational shootout’ the capital has ever seen. It includes the robbery of a jewellery store, Winston Churchill, a fire and the death of three policemen.
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00:00The Siege of Sydney Street was the most sensational shootout that London has ever witnessed.
00:04We're talking about the 3rd of January 1911 and two basically Latvian anarchists were
00:11hiding out in a second floor room there and the police came, but they were outgunned.
00:18The Latvians had got really powerful semi-automatic pistols and a huge amount of ammunition.
00:24So the police called on the army.
00:26So army sharpshooters laid prone on the streets of Stepney, a huge crowd developed.
00:32Winston Churchill was then the Home Secretary.
00:35He rushed to the scene, but it took six hours and probably about a thousand bullets fired
00:40on both sides before the siege was ended.
00:45It's one of the most famous cases in the UK and actually one that went cold for many as
00:50a few of the perpetrators escaped London without facing any punishment.
00:54It's a story that involves the death of three policemen, a fire, Winston Churchill as Home
01:00Secretary at just 35 years old, Latvian anarchists and much more.
01:05To tell me about it, I caught up with historian Andrew Whitehead.
01:10But the story really started two or three weeks earlier here, we're just off Houndstitch
01:15in the city of London, because a gang which was mainly of Latvian anarchists tried to
01:20break into a jeweller's shop later in a Friday night.
01:24They burrowed in from the back of the shop.
01:29They'd actually hired an adjoining building.
01:31And a local guy heard the strange tap, tap, tap noise.
01:35They tried to break through the brickwork.
01:38And he was a bit suspicious.
01:39And he called the police.
01:40And eventually the police came in some force and the robbers, or the would-be robbers,
01:45they were cornered.
01:46It was a cul-de-sac.
01:47They came out of the building firing.
01:50And they shot dead three police officers, seriously injured two others.
01:56The most serious incident to this day, single incident in the history of the police in London.
02:02And it was two of the men who were wanted for this triple police murder who were hiding
02:08in Sydney Street in Stepney.
02:11And that burglary that they attempted, it's just down there, isn't it, just behind, where
02:15the building work is now?
02:16Yeah.
02:17And they were Latvian anarchists as well, is that correct?
02:22So Houndstitch is just the other side of that building there.
02:26And Houndstitch is sort of one of the main thoroughfares between the city, the financial
02:30district and the East End.
02:32And the gang hired a building, a very small building, which was basically where that yard
02:40is where the construction work's going on.
02:43And they used that to try and burrow through.
02:45And they got cutting gear in quite a lot.
02:47Who were they?
02:48Well, the shorthand is that they were a group of Latvian anarchists.
02:53They were all East European.
02:56Most of them were political émigrés.
02:59Not all of them were Latvian, but most were.
03:01Not all of them were anarchists, but most had been involved in the anarchist movement.
03:06And I think as far as they were concerned, they saw this as an act of revolutionary expropriation.
03:12It's what they had been doing in the Baltic states, staging robberies and using the money
03:18to help sustain their movement, to help buy weapons, to send back to political prisoners.
03:24Latvia was then part of the Tsarist Russian Empire, and it had gone through a very violent
03:29revolution and counterrevolution in 1905, which is what led several thousand young Latvians
03:35to spread around the world.
03:37And there were groups of Latvian Marxists and anarchists in London and in Paris and
03:43Marseille and Germany and indeed in the United States as well.
03:47And they just continued that mentality in the place where they were?
03:50Was there any particular reason why they were doing that here as well?
03:53Was it just to kind of rebel, as you say?
03:56They had got used to staging armed robberies, wages, heists in the Baltic, partly because
04:05the repression they faced there was very brutal, and lots of leftists in Latvia were
04:12executed, killed without any process, tortured.
04:17And some of them brought that same approach to political activity to their new homes.
04:24It was wildly inappropriate for London.
04:27But nevertheless, they were quite a tight-knit group.
04:30They hardly spoke any English.
04:32They'd have spoken Latvian, Russian, perhaps some German.
04:36Some of them would have spoken Yiddish as well, but not English.
04:39So they were a sort of hermetically sealed group, and they carried on doing this because
04:44in essence, it's what they were used to.
04:47It's the sort of political activity that they had become accustomed to in the Baltic states.
04:52So I'm currently in Sydney Gardens on Sydney Street, and although it's a sunny day today,
04:58Sydney Street itself has a very dark history.
05:01In the early 1900s, a siege took place.
05:06In the siege of Sydney Street, you mentioned Winston Churchill was the Home Secretary,
05:11and I heard you talk about the kind of chain of command when he got down there was then
05:16apparently a little confused, and he said that he wasn't giving instructions, but apparently
05:21he was.
05:22Could you just talk about that?
05:24Winston Churchill, he was 35 at this time.
05:26He was already Home Secretary, so one of the big officers of state, but in a liberal government.
05:31He wasn't a conservative at this time, and when he heard that there was a shootout going
05:35in Stepney, he felt impelled to go to the scene.
05:39He'd served in the army.
05:41He'd been a war reporter in the Boer War in South Africa.
05:45He had fired pistols, including the same sort of pistols that these gunmen were using.
05:50He'd actually killed with these pistols in Sudan.
05:53So he couldn't resist the temptation, so he went to the spot while the shootout was
05:58underway.
05:59It was rather more conspicuous than perhaps caution would have dictated, and although
06:04he said he wasn't there to direct, he was there to support.
06:08Journalists who were within earshot said all the time he was saying, go forward, go forward,
06:12come back, come back.
06:13So he clearly was in one sense directing the operation, and of course you already had two
06:19police forces involved there, the city force and the metropolitan force, and Scots Guards
06:24from the army, so it was already a fairly confused situation about who was in charge,
06:29and having their political boss there as well made it even more confusing.
06:33So really, to be honest, nobody was quite sure who was running the show.
06:37And he liked to get quite close as well, is that right?
06:40Yeah, he just saw himself as a man of action, and he was a bit of a desperado early in his
06:48life, and he enjoyed that reputation.
06:52So he came there wearing a silk hat, looking wildly out of place in a back street in Stepney,
06:59and there are photographs, and indeed a little bit of moving film because Newsreel had just
07:03started, which show him peering out from vantage points, but really clearly vantage points
07:08which were probably within 100 yards of where the gunmen were, and if they'd wanted to make
07:14a target of him, he would have been a target.
07:17He was certainly within the range of gunfire.
07:19So this happened in 1910, 1911 then was the siege, and in modern day Britain and London
07:26there can be quite a lot of tension between the police and maybe ethnic minorities.
07:31Do you pin any of this event as maybe like the start of that almost?
07:36Policing has always been a tricky business, especially in a rapidly growing capital city,
07:42and some areas of London didn't really feel very comfortable with the police.
07:48In the east end of London, which was then overwhelmingly Jewish, there was a very active
07:53anarchist movement.
07:54There was a big anarchist club, there was an anarchist weekly paper, but those anarchists,
07:59that style of anarchism, did not approve of the use of violence.
08:04And actually quite a few people in that anarchist movement got on well with the police.
08:08They said that when penniless migrants fleeing political oppression from Russia arrived here,
08:16not speaking any English, it was the police who would guide them to the anarchist club
08:21because they knew the people there would help them to find lodgings and would help them
08:26acclimatise and stuff like that.
08:28So relations weren't too bad, and the crowd that gathered around Sydney Street, again,
08:34almost all Jewish eastenders as the shootout was happening, their sympathies were quite clear.
08:40They were very much against the gunmen.
08:42They were on the side of the brave police and soldiers.
08:46And of course soldiers marching, rifles on shoulders, to take up positions in the east end
08:51through the streets of the east end was just a sensation.
08:55There were tens of thousands of people who gathered, and there were many more police
08:59deployed on 3 January 1911 in keeping the crowd in check than actually in winkling out the two gunmen.
09:09Do you see any similarities between the kind of refugees and the relationships between them
09:16to what we're experiencing at the moment as well, with also Ukrainian refugees coming from a similar area,
09:22but also in the Middle East as well?
09:25I think there are some general similarities.
09:28I don't think it would be right to make a close comparison.
09:32But you do have people who are coming from a different culture, with different languages,
09:38with different political understandings, who engaged in political violence in this country.
09:44Briefly, the siege of Sydney Street was really the last big armed crime in which anarchists from Eastern Europe were involved.
09:54But I think the greater resonance is that following the siege of Sydney Street,
09:59even though quite a lot of the gang were not Jewish, they were seen as coming from the Jewish east end,
10:04which is where they lived, there was a lot of anti-Semitism, and there was a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment.
10:11There were demands for tighter legislation to restrict immigration, to water down the right of asylum.
10:19And that does have similarities with what we've seen in recent years, with the rise in Islamophobia,
10:27and great pressure to restrict immigration, questions about should those people really be here.
10:34So that sort of language did also find an echo 110 or more years ago.
10:41The reaction from people in the UK has been similar rather than the events themselves.
10:46I think that's right, and it's quite shocking really.
10:49If you look in the popular papers, the mainstream daily papers and Sunday papers,
10:54immediately after Sydney Street, some of the down-market ones are desperately xenophobic, desperately anti-Semitic,
11:01cartoons which were really horrible, and the People, which was then a mainstream Sunday paper,
11:08actually printed a doggerel poem which said that every single Jew should be expelled from this country
11:15because of the perceived acts of Jewish anarchists in killing London policemen.
11:21I mean, it was outrageous.
11:23But I have to say, Churchill and his colleagues in the government didn't give in to that pressure.
11:28There was a lot of demand for tougher legislation, but actually no new legislation was introduced to the statute book.
11:36So it's obvious that an incident like this caused anti-immigration protests even back in 1911.
11:42And over 100 years later, we're seeing similar protests today.
11:46So now we know about the burglary and who the perpetrators were.
11:50But what happened to the anarchists?
11:52Were the shooters found?
11:54Did it become a cold case?
11:56And what does Sydney Street look like today?
12:00So after the burglary took place in Houndsditch at a jewellery store that was, if successful, worth around £1 million today,
12:08the Latvian anarchists were held up in a building in Sydney Street and is where the siege took place.
12:16There were soldiers in the streets, different police forces, and now we know, thanks to Andrew,
12:21that Winston Churchill, who back then was 35 years old, a spring chicken, and Home Secretary,
12:28was also down at the scene, potentially barking instructions to officers.
12:33So what happened next? Did the Latvian anarchists escape?
12:36We know they shot and killed three policemen.
12:39But how did it end for them?
12:41And why do some people still consider it a partially cold case?
12:46What happened to the anarchists?
12:49During the siege, there was a shootout.
12:51And what happened? What was the end result?
12:54So the two gunmen who were trapped in 100 Sydney Street
13:00and who kept up exchange of fire for six hours,
13:04they both died.
13:06The building caught fire.
13:09We don't quite know exactly how it did catch fire.
13:12Churchill personally stopped the fire brigade from trying to douse down the flames,
13:18so the building was basically gutted by the blaze.
13:22And two very burnt-out bodies were found in the ruins of the building.
13:28One had died from a bullet wound, the other had died from smoke inhalation.
13:33So that's two of the gang.
13:34They were almost certainly implicated in the police murders here.
13:40Of the others, quite a few simply managed to get out.
13:43So one guy probably left to France within hours of the shooting.
13:51Another got over to Antwerp.
13:54Another one, Peter the Painter, who wasn't here,
13:57but was probably certainly seen as the ringleader of the gang,
14:01he got out probably to the Netherlands by sea,
14:05and they were never brought to justice.
14:09There was a trial, and four people were tried,
14:14not out of the siege of Sydney Street,
14:16and not even actually for the murders,
14:18but for complicity in the attempt to break into the jewellers' shop.
14:23Of those, only one was convicted, a woman, Nina Vasiljeva,
14:26who was a Latvian anarchist.
14:29But actually she was cleared on appeal a few weeks later,
14:32so actually nobody had an enduring conviction
14:35out of the shootings and the murders of the policemen,
14:38or the siege of Sydney Street.
14:40But the judge who presided over the trial at the Old Bailey
14:43made the point that most of those
14:46who were responsible for the police murders were dead.
14:50So two of them died in Sydney Street,
14:52and one of the gang was shot and died accidentally by his fellow gang members.
14:57And the ones that left the UK, did we ever hear of them again,
14:59or were they kind of lost in, was that it?
15:04The trail goes cold.
15:06So Peter the Painter, who was the one that,
15:08and this was his alliterative nickname,
15:10which made him sound like something of an anti-hero,
15:13that resonance that's similar to Jack the Ripper.
15:18Peter the Painter got across the North Sea, almost certainly,
15:23and then went to ground.
15:25And there were dozens of reports later
15:27that he'd been seen in Germany or in Australia,
15:32bizarre reports that perhaps he was the guy
15:36that had turned up as a preacher somewhere in the United States,
15:40or was he the guy that was taking a passage to India.
15:44But he went to ground very successfully.
15:47There were some suggestions he went to the States
15:49and died there a few years later,
15:51other quite reliable suggestions that he made a new life in Australia.
15:54That's the most likely, but in essence, we don't know.
16:00So I'm currently in Sydney Gardens on Sydney Street.
16:04Now, the siege itself took place here on Sydney Street,
16:07and it's pretty easy to spot where siege house.
16:11Now, these days, the building looks very different
16:13to how it would have done in 1911.
16:16It's a social housing block these days,
16:19but I'm told that on the north of Sydney Street,
16:21this red block of houses that goes around the street
16:24is pretty identical to how a siege house would have looked back in 1911.
16:36These days, news is missing so much on social media,
16:41and it's difficult to tell what's true and what's not true,
16:46because it's been verified.
16:48Would you say that it was almost more accurate back then than it is now,
16:54even though we have more footage and stuff like that at the moment?
17:02My career's been in journalism, so that's quite a tricky one.
17:10I suppose I'd say you've got some really bad reporting
17:14and you've got some really over-the-top sensational headlines
17:19and you've got some fairly awful opinions expressed,
17:22but actually, broadly, they got the facts right.
17:26This was just as the tabloid press was really taking off,
17:30and action photography as well.
17:32So the Daily Mirror, the day after the siege of Sydney Street,
17:35had 20 photographs from or about Sydney Street on the paper,
17:40and the whole of the front page the next day was a photograph from Sydney Street.
17:44And indeed, newsreel films were just starting.
17:50And the thing about Sydney Street, it lasted for six hours,
17:54it was only three miles away from the centre of London,
17:57so quite unusually, Fleet Street journalists
18:00could get there in time to see a bit of the action.
18:02So they all piled into...
18:04They persuaded a publican on Sydney Street,
18:06who'd got a sort of terrace on the top,
18:09to let them in, and he charged them a sovereign, that's a pound each,
18:13to get onto his terrace.
18:16There was about 20, I think, up there.
18:18So he would have made the equivalent of £2,000 today
18:21simply from allowing press and a camera guy up onto the roof of his pub.
18:28So they got good vantage points.
18:30Some of the reporting was fairly awful.
18:32Some was quite impressive.
18:34So one or two journalists went undercover in the Jewish East End
18:39in weeks after the siege of Sydney Street
18:41to give an account of what was it like living in the East End,
18:45and they went to political meetings and gave account of that.
18:48They went to some of the Russian cafes and restaurants
18:52that the gang was believed to have habituated.
18:55So there was some journalism which I, as a historian,
18:58as well as a journalist, have found really very valuable.
19:02In comparing that to today, how would you feel?
19:05Well, I think most journalists try and do a good job.
19:07I think the problem is a lot of social media,
19:10that's open to anybody, and that's opinion,
19:14that's people who've got an agenda,
19:17people who are being alarmist, people who want clickbait,
19:20and social media is deeply unreliable.
19:23But if you see something on social media
19:26and you go to a curated site to check out whether it's true or not,
19:32I still think basically the professional journalists
19:36are doing their job and telling it as best as they can, like it is.
19:42London has had incidents of gun crime since then.
19:45Sporadically over the years,
19:47Londoners might remember a shooting in East London recently
19:50in a gang-related incident where an innocent bystander was the victim.
19:55However, shootouts with the police are uncommon.
19:58In fact, a shootout between citizens and the police or army
20:02has not happened since the siege of Sydney Street,
20:05especially following such an ambitious heist attempt as well.
20:09Is this the most hostile crime in London's history,
20:13especially towards the police?
20:19Finally, how would you rank this, the siege of Sydney Street,
20:23what happened before and the siege itself in terms of crime in London?
20:29It was hugely untypical.
20:31Armed crime was very rare at that time.
20:33Some criminals had guns, but they didn't use them in shootouts of this sort.
20:37Like most big crime incidents, it's the fact that it stands out
20:42which makes it remarkable, a bit like the Great Train Robbery,
20:46which is still remembered many decades later.
20:49Because it was so unusual and so deeply violent
20:52and so many people tragically lost their lives, it did capture attention.
20:57And it led to a sort of sense of unease and panic.
21:01What's happening? Who are these people?
21:03And in that, it bore an echo of the Jack the Ripper murders,
21:07not very far away in the East End in the late 1880s,
21:11simply because that also made people feel uneasy,
21:15feel that they didn't know what was happening in their country and in their city,
21:19feel that there was something happening there that really needed to be tackled.
21:24Actually, Jack the Ripper murders led to a lot of emphasis on social reform,
21:29clearing slums, making the East End feel it was more connected to the rest of the nation.
21:37I don't think that quite happened in the same way after the siege of Sydney Street.
21:42But it certainly led to a great, crude explosion in antisemitism,
21:48which settled down, but which was for many people deeply, deeply threatening and uncomfortable.
21:56And then lastly, you've written a book about this as well. Just tell us a little bit about that.
22:01So I've written a book, it's called A Devilish Kind of Courage.
22:05That was the words of one of the journalists describing the two men
22:09who were trapped in and died in Sydney Street in the siege.
22:13And I've used police records particularly, but also some oral history I did many decades ago
22:19with people who had memories of those times and newspapers, including political press
22:26and indeed the Yiddish language press, which was very vibrant in the East End at that time,
22:31to look at the whole story. So what happened? Who were the people involved?
22:36And what were the consequences? And it's a rich story.
22:39And I've tried to give a lot of, not simply a desiccated crime story,
22:44but to tell the story of the individuals involved.
22:47And not in any way to extenuate what they did, which was absolutely unforgivable,
22:53but to try and explain why it happened, how it happened and what it led to.
23:01So there we have it, the siege of Sydney Street.
23:03One of the most famous cases in the history of London.
23:06And some may see it as a cold case. Some of the perpetrators did escape,
23:10potentially going to Belgium or Australia or even the United States.
23:18It's crazy to think this is just a normal street in London,
23:21that me, myself and so many other people would walk up and down,
23:25not knowing the history of the siege of Sydney Street.
23:30So there we have it, the siege of Sydney Street.
23:34Latvian anarchists stole from a jewellery store an attempted heist
23:39that led to a shootout in East London, resulting in the death of three policemen.
23:45Historian Andrew Whitehead describes it as the most sensational shootout
23:49the capital has ever seen. And although two perpetrators died at the scene,
23:54others linked to the anarchists escaped the country unpunished.