Sidney Street Seige
The Siege of Sidney Street - 1911
Mike Waldren QPM
The Siege of Sidney Street justifies its place in the history of armed policing for a number of reasons. In terms of scale it far exceeded any armed operation that had gone before it and it was the first time that military aid had to be called for by the police to help deal with an armed incident. It was the first to be attended by a Home Secretary in person and was the first to be recorded by newsreel cameras. Although it attracted considerable national and international criticism of the police it provided the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934 and it was (supposedly) turned into a film in 1960.
On Friday 16 December 1910 at about 11.30 in the evening five unarmed City of London police officers were shot when they interrupted a burglary by a group of Latvian revolutionaries at a jeweller’s shop in Houndsditch. Sergeants Robert Bentley and Charles Tucker, together with Constable Walter Choate, died of their wounds and Sergeant Bryant and Constable Ernest Woodhams were seriously injured. During the confusion of the gang’s escape its leader, George Gardstein (just one of the many names by which he was known), was shot by one of the other burglars.
The next morning Detective Inspector Thompson from the City got in touch with Divisional Detective Inspector Frederick Wensley at Leman Street Police Station in the Met to say that he had just received some information and needed to go to an address in the Met’s area. Together the two detectives went to the surgery of a Doctor Scanlon at 55 Commercial Road in East London where they were told that in the early hours of that morning Scanlon had been called to 59 Grove Street. There he found a man suffering from a gunshot wound in his back. This was Gardstein and he had told the doctor that he had been accidentally shot by a friend. He would not take the doctor’s advice that he needed to go to hospital and so Scanlon arranged for the collection of some pain-killing medication from his surgery and he then left promising to return at midday.
When Scanlon had his attention drawn to the newspapers, which were giving massive coverage to the murders in Houndsditch, it was only then that he contacted the City Police. Wensley and Thompson arranged for Scanlon to return to 59 Grove Street as he had promised and, without arousing suspicion, to take note of the surroundings. Under no circumstances was he to communicate with anyone else before reporting back to them. Wensley later reported that: ‘We then arranged to meet at the surgery about 12-30 p.m, which we did. Dr Scanlon informed us that the man was lying dead on the bed, and to our astonishment added that he had communicated with the Coroner’s Officer: this made it imperative that we should go at once which we did and had only been there a few minutes when a large number of newspaper reporters assembled in the street, undoubtedly due to information supplied them either by the Doctors or the Coroner’s Officer’.
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Since the crime had been committed in the City, and most of the enquiries were taking place in the Met, Wensley continued to act as liaison officer and during the morning of 2 January 1911 he was asked to go to Old Jewry Police Station in the City. There he met the Commissioner of the City Police, Sir William Nott-Bower, together with Detective Superintendent John Ottaway and Superintendent John Stark. A person had come forward with information on the location of two associates of Gardstein, Fritz Svaars and William Sokoloff (known to the police at the time only as ‘Joseph’). It was thought that the two would be moving that evening and they asked Wensley ‘to come over if you can to assist to mature plans for their arrest’. Wensley agreed and left.
At about 6.30 that evening Wensley was back at Old Jewry to be told that the two suspects were believed to be at 100 Sidney Street and that they intended to move in a couple of hours time to a house in Nelson Street. Wensley ‘agreed to go with large numbers of plain clothes officers in closed vans to the neighbourhood of Sidney Street, the officers being armed with revolvers’. The two men did not come out and when the informant was contacted again he said that they had changed their minds. They would be moving the next evening instead. All the police withdrew and Wensley returned to Leman Street.
Shortly before midnight he got another telephone call from Ottaway this time saying that they did not like the look of things because the informant ‘was not all that can be desired and seems shifty’. There was no guarantee that the suspects would wait until the next night to move and he proposed that they take action straight away rather than risk losing them. Wensley agreed but when he heard that Ottaway was not just bringing detectives with him into the Met, he was bringing 100 City uniformed officers as well, he had second thoughts. Police officers from one force area, especially uniformed ones, did not operate in another force’s area without senior officers in that police area knowing about it and so he suggested a meeting of interested parties at Arbour Square Police Station before matters were taken any further. In one of the wisest moves of his long and distinguished career (he retired as Chief Constable of the Met’s CID in 1929) he then sent Detective Sergeant Ben Leeson to explain what was being proposed to the Superintendent of the local Division, who was at his home not far away in Commercial Road. His name was John Mulvaney and he had been in charge of ‘H’ Division since at least 1902 when he had been awarded the silver Edward VII Coronation Medal. He was about to start a day that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
At just after midnight on Tuesday 3 January 1911 Mulvaney had a meeting with Wensley, Stark and Ottaway, at Arbour Square. According to Mulvaney: ‘It was known that they were desperate men and would not be taken alive’ and so it was decided to ‘establish a blockade of the house ... where they were believed to be, rather than sacrifice valuable lives in attempting their capture by rushing the place. ... Consequently 200 men of the City and Metropolitan Forces established cordons and every avenue of escape from front or rear was guarded by armed police. Armed Constables were also placed in the front room of No. 111 Sidney Street ... immediately opposite 100 Sidney Street. Armed Constables were also placed in the doorways of houses where practicable in Sidney Street’.
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Wensley was rather more circumspect about the reliability of the information. He later said that: ‘We were not of course sure that they [the suspects being sought] were located, or that they were the right men’.
The weapons available to the Met were Webley .450 calibre gate-load revolvers that had first been supplied in 1884 (see Armed Burglars – The 1880s). By 1911 there were two revolvers kept at each police station although a report in 1910 had suggested that they were no longer fit for purpose and recommended that they should be replaced by a more modern self-loading pistol (see The Tottenham Outrage – 1909). It was therefore a mixed blessing that Mulvaney managed to get nine old revolvers for his men by drawing them from store. Some City officers also had revolvers and in addition a few had ‘Morris tube rifles’, carried by what The Daily Mirror bizarrely referred to the next day as ‘marksman from the police rifle brigade’. The original Morris tube was a rifle barrel that could be fitted inside the barrel of a .577/450 calibre Martini-Henry rifle so that it could fire Morris .297/230 calibre training ammunition. Its main advantages were that a full-bore rifle range was not needed for target practice (an indoor 25-yard small-bore range would suffice) and the ammunition was much cheaper. However, reducing the calibre also significantly reduced the distance at which it was accurate, to say nothing of the greatly reduced stopping power of the bullet. It was not intended for use other than as a training aid.
Once everyone was in position Mulvaney agreed that Wensley should rouse the occupants of No. 102 to see if they could assist with exactly who the occupants of No. 100 were. Wensley later said that: ‘We had a Jew named Wagner with us as interpreter. I saw the landlady of No 102 and soon ascertained from her that she was on very bad terms with Mrs Fleischman, the landlady of No 100, and was not inclined to render any assistance. But I got from her the fact that apart from this Mrs Fleischman was a respectable woman and Mrs Blumstein the landlady of No 102 agreed to allow us to use the lower portion of her house for any purpose we wished. I also ascertained that Mrs Fleischman and her husband slept in the front room on the ground floor. We then got Wagner to knock on the front room shutters and a woman’s voice answered. Wagner spoke to her in Yiddish’.
Mr. Fleischman, after being shown a truncheon (and a revolver as well according to his spouse) to prove that the police were who they said they were, came out of the house with his wife and they were taken into No. 102 where they explained that they had four children in the house. There was also an elderly man and woman by the name of Clements on the ground floor, Mr. and Mrs. Scheinmann and their four children on the first floor and a woman by the name of Girshon in the front room on the second floor. Wensley later said that he then told Mrs. Fleischman that the police believed that there were two men in the room with Mrs. Girshon and, being a respectable woman, she would not tolerate such a thing. He suggested that she go upstairs and see for herself and if they were there she should turn them out. Mrs. Fleischman refused (both Mr. and Mrs. Fleischman later said that the police asked the husband to do it and it was he who refused) but then Mr. Fleischman began coughing badly and Wensley suggested she go upstairs and ‘ask Mrs Girshon to come down as your husband has been taken very bad and you want her to help you. This she agreed to do and went up to the 2nd floor to call Mrs Girshon and brought her down’. Although Mrs Fleischman had knocked on the second floor front room door she had received no answer and Mrs Girshon had appeared from a back room, making the excuse that she was not feeling very well.
At first Mrs. Girshon indignantly denied any knowledge of two men but when Wensley said that he was going to look for himself, and that if he got killed she would certainly hang, she reluctantly admitted that they were there. She claimed that they had arrived the previous evening and had refused to leave. There was some doubt that this was true because Mrs. Fleischman remembered smelling cigarette smoke the previous Saturday and she knew that no one in the house smoked. Nevertheless, Mrs. Girshon insisted on her story and added that to make sure that she couldn’t tell anyone about them they had made her remove her skirt and boots.
Wensley decided that the next step was to remove the other occupants and so Mrs. Fleischman was persuaded to bring out her children. She then did the same with Mr. and Mrs. Scheinmann and their children. Mr. Fleischman went in to rouse Mrs. Clements who left of her own accord but Mr. Clements posed more of a problem. He refused to move and Wagner was sent in to help carry him out. By 4.45 in the morning the house was empty apart from the two suspected men and one of the City Superintendents was overheard by Wensley to remark that: ‘If this turns out that these are not the right men we shall be a laughing stock’.
At about 7.30 in the morning Wensley suggested to Mulvaney, who was with Ottaway and Stark almost opposite No. 100 in a large alleyway leading to a yard at the back of a shop at No. 109 Sidney Street, that ‘it was daybreak and our difficulties would increase when people began to come out and if a resistance took place people may be shot’. Mulvaney agreed and so Wensley picked up some pebbles, which he also distributed to several other officers who were in the yard, and the little group then went out into Sidney Street. They threw the pebbles at the second floor front window and then returned to the alleyway. Wensley was no more than a few paces back into the alleyway when six shots were fired in rapid succession from a first floor window of No. 100. One of the bullets hit Leeson ‘entering his chest on the left side and passing out at the right’.
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There is an inconsistency between the accounts surrounding the attempt to wake up the two suspects. Wensley later claimed that at about 7.20 in the morning Sergeant George Weston had walked across the road and knocked on the still open front door of No. 100. ‘I heard him knock and saw him do it’, he said. Weston on the other hand claimed that he ‘rushed across the road and knocked at the door’ while ‘some of the men were in the act of throwing stones’ at 7.30. Mulvaney said that: ‘Before the gravel was thrown I know that an officer had knocked on the door. It was I think P.S. Weston’. Sergeant Albert Boreham also thought that: ‘Someone knocked at the door before – but I couldn’t say who’. Wensley’s version is undoubtedly the correct one and some deviation between accounts is only to be expected but in this instance there may be more to it than that. It is possible that Weston felt indirectly responsible for the shooting of Leeson when he realised later that his unauthorised action may have prematurely alerted the suspects. In his account he therefore tried to blend his knocking on the front door and Wensley’s pebble throwing into one concurrent event when in reality they were ten minutes apart.
Leeson was carried into a back room of 109 Sidney Street and Louis Levy, who kept his coffee stall in the yard, was sent over the roofs of several outhouses at the back of the shops to fetch Doctor Nelson Johnstone who had to use much the same route in reverse to get to his patient. The doctor dressed Leeson’s wounds and gave him some brandy which Boreham had managed to fetch from the nearby Rising Sun Public House. Leeson gave his revolver to Johnstone, telling him to give it to Wensley, and the doctor put it in his hip pocket. He then conferred with Wensley as to how to get Leeson to hospital. Wensley had already climbed to the top of one of the walls surrounding the yard and managed to attract the attention of several men working at the Mann & Crossman brewery which backed onto the yard. He asked them to fetch the brewery’s ambulance and when it arrived it was lifted over the wall into the yard.
The word ‘ambulance’ did not have the same meaning in 1911 as it does today. The London Ambulance Service was not formed until 1915 and the conveyance of persons to hospital at the time was generally a police responsibility. The City of London police had been using an electrically-driven ambulance since 1907 but in the Met reliance was still placed on a hand-operated three-wheeled cart with a detachable stretcher about nine feet long with a small oilcloth cover and hood, although large companies like Mann & Crossman sometimes kept one for their own use in case of accidents.
Wensley thought that: ‘It was impossible to take Sergt Leeson out on the ambulance into Sidney Street without considerable personal risk to all concerned, and after surveying the place I concluded that the only way would be by getting him on the ambulance and over into the brewery yard. To do this we pushed a van within four feet of a wall of a stable, some twelve feet high, then placed a ladder in a slanting direction from the van to the wall. The ambulance [Boreham uses the word ‘stretcher’ at this point and this makes more sense to the modern reader] bearing Sergt Leeson was lifted onto the van and then on to the ladder. We had nearly got him on to the wall when a City constable, who was in uniform, mounted a ladder from the brewery yard and evidently attracted the attention of the two suspects, who immediately commenced to fire upon us, many bullets passing close to our heads, this continued for nearly ten minutes, during the whole time we were endeavouring to get Leeson into the brewery yard. It was bitterly cold and a blinding sleet was falling at the time. Leeson who was evidently suffering the effects of the weather as well as the wounds, seeing our difficulties, rolled off the ambulance and was assisted down the ladder into the brewery yard, when he was again placed on the ambulance and taken to London Hospital by Sergt Boreham’.
After seeing Leeson on his way Wensley found that he couldn’t get back to the ground because of the ‘rapid and well directed fire’ from No. 100. He was forced to remain in a gutter (getting increasingly cold and wet) for about half an hour until the attention of the suspects was directed elsewhere. He then went home to change into dry clothing before returning to Sidney Street. Doctor Johnstone remained in the yard until mid-afternoon in case his services were needed again. Presumably he handed over Leeson’s revolver before he went home.
Meanwhile Mulvaney and Stark had discussed the situation and they came to the conclusion that: ‘It was palpable that these men dominated the situation, there was no approach to the house but by the front door ... [which] would have resulted in a great sacrifice of life. Their weapons were far superior to our revolvers, of which at this time we only had a few. It was therefore decided that Military aid be sought as more effective weapons were required’. The weapons they were up against were two 1896 model (C96) ‘Broomhandle’ Mauser pistols and a 7.65mm Browning pistol. The Mausers fired 7.63mm ammunition and had 10-round fixed magazines fed by stripper clips. They also had adjustable rear-sights graduated for distances of 50-1000 yards.
Mulvaney and Stark made the precarious exit from the yard behind No. 109 over the outhouse roofs and, leaving Stark in temporary charge, Mulvaney then went to Arbour Square. The Commissioner of the Met, Sir Edward Henry, was away at the time and so he spoke on the telephone (private telephone lines were installed between Divisions and Scotland Yard in 1903) to an Assistant Commissioner, Major (later Sir) Frederick Wodehouse. After speaking to the Home Office which in turn had consulted the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, Wodehouse gave authority to call on the army. Whilst at Arbour Square Mulvaney also telephoned the Superintendents of the neighbouring Divisions to ask them to send to Sidney Street any revolvers with ammunition that they had together with men trained in their use. Word must have spread around the whole of the Met because by midday about sixty more officers with revolvers had turned up.
Mulvaney went personally to the Tower of London where: ‘I saw the officer in command of the [1st Battalion] Scots Guards there and made my request for help telling him the facts and said I had Commissioners authority to make my request. He then consulted other officers and telephoned the [General Officer Commanding] and obtained his authority’. Mulvaney returned to Sidney Street with Lieutenant Ross, two NCOs and seventeen men who were equipped with Short Magazine Lee-Enfield (SMLE) .303 calibre rifles. These were fitted with webbing slings that had been blancoed white (no doubt large quantities of ‘Brasso, Blanco and Bull’ had been expended on the uniforms as well) since their only use at the Tower would have been for ceremonial duties. Never-the-less, the weapons would have been perfectly functional and the men were ‘placed in positions of vantage and replied to the fire of the men in the house’.
At some point after the arrival of the army Mr. Sidney Holland (later Lord Knutsford) arrived in a hackney carriage with some shotguns and cartridges. Mulvaney had these distributed to men who had been in the armed forces and who, he assumed, would therefore know how to use them.
Mulvaney had a string of visitors during the morning including Major Wodehouse and Sir William Nott-Bower together with the head of the Met’s Criminal Investigation Department Sir Melville Macnaghten and the head of Special Branch Superintendent (later Sir) Patrick Quinn. At about 12 noon he was told that Winston Churchill had arrived. Despite later claims in the media (which persist to this day) that Churchill ‘took charge’, as far as Mulvaney was concerned: ‘I explained to him the position of affairs. He gave us no instructions beyond suggesting that the cordon at the Mile End Road and Sidney Street should be placed further back – which was done’. Churchill later wrote that: ‘I thought it my duty to see what was going on myself, and my advisers concurred in the propriety of such a step. I must, however, admit that convictions of duty were supported by a strong sense of curiosity which perhaps it would have been well to keep in check. ... I should have done much better to have remained quietly in my office. On the other hand, it was impossible to get into one's car and drive away while matters stood in such great uncertainty, and moreover were extremely interesting’.
One anecdote that frequently appears in accounts of the siege is that a gunman’s bullet passed through Churchill’s top hat, coming within inches of killing him. This is not supported by official documents although both Mulvaney and Wensley made a point of recording that a bullet passed through the brim of the hat being worn by Inspector Allam from the City early in the siege. In Churchill’s own colourful (and in places highly inaccurate) account he makes no mention of his supposed brush with death. The ‘bullet through Churchill’s hat’ is a myth.
The presence of Churchill provided a magnificent photo opportunity, as did the arrival, to Mulvaney’s astonishment, of Captain Wickham with more Scots Guards and a Maxim machine-gun. He was even more astonished at the arrival of the Royal Horse Artillery with two ‘Quick Firing’ 13-pounder field guns but by then the siege was more or less over and they got no further than the Whitechapel end of Sidney Street. Even two weeks after the event Mulvaney still had no idea of who sent for them although he suggested that it could have been Major Wodehouse. It could be significant that Wodehouse was the son of a former Royal Artillery Colonel and he himself had also served in the Royal Artillery as a Lieutenant and as a Captain before being promoted to the rank of Major while serving with the Suffolk Artillery Militia.
At about 1 o’clock in the afternoon smoke was seen rising from the upper floors of the house and Mulvaney thought that ‘the men inside caused it, possibly with the idea that means of escape might be afforded by the smoke and confusion attendant on a fire’. The Fire Brigade was sent for and according to Mulvaney he ‘awaited their arrival at the Mile End [Road] end of Sidney Street and explained to the officer in charge what was happening and told him the object was to prevent the fire spreading to the other buildings but it was not safe for his men to proceed then as firing was still in progress from the ground floor of No. 100. The officer agreed and made his preparations to use his pipes alone when opportunity offered’.
Mulvaney may have been tactfully trying to distance the Home Secretary from any direct involvement in events in Sidney Street in his account because Churchill later wrote: ‘The inspector of police [Mulvaney] forbade further progress, and the fire brigade officer declared it his duty to advance. A fire was raging, and he was bound to extinguish it. Anarchists, automatic pistols, danger-zones, nothing of this sort was mentioned in the Regulations of the London Fire Brigade. When the police officer pointed out that his men would be shot down, he replied simply that orders were orders and that he had no alternative. I now intervened to settle this dispute, at one moment quite heated. I told the fire-brigade officer on my authority as Home Secretary that the house was to be allowed to burn down and that he was to stand by in readiness to prevent the conflagration from spreading’.
By 2.30 in the afternoon the firing from No. 100 had stopped and the ending of the siege was well reported by the Guardian: ‘The next thing that happened was curious. From the group round Mr. Winston Churchill a little man in dark clothes was seen stealing along the side of the building. He stuck close to the wall, a revolver in his hand. He was a detective officer, and he was the first man to approach the blazing house. When he got to the door he put out his arm and pushed it gingerly. Then he quickly retreated. Other men with revolvers were seen to creep round from the other side and go to the side exit from the buildings. They were there ready to meet a possible rushing out of the murderers. Another interval, and then suddenly all the watchers seemed to take courage’.
The Guardian continued: ‘We saw the Guards who had been firing into the house all day come out on the pavement and stand in a line pointing their rifles at the house. Then they moved the fire engine a bit nearer, and half a dozen firemen brought up a tall red ladder and placed it against the top window. Just about this time the roof fell in, and the street was strewn with burning timbers. A plucky fireman walked up to the gaping ground floor window and turned a stream of water into it. We half expected to see him drop, but as he did not everybody at last felt that there was no more danger, and people began to move up opposite the house. But Mr. Churchill came near before anyone felt sure whether the murderers were dead or alive. Firemen broke down the door and went in, but it was too hot to stay in long. Others mounted the ladder and played into the bedrooms’.
This was not quite the end. While the firemen were inside trying to extinguish the flames another section of the building collapsed burying five of them. District Officer Pearson had his spine fractured and was pinned to the ground. He clung to life for six painful months before he died. Two charred and unrecognisable bodies were found in the house. Although about 100 Met and 100 City officers were employed on the initial police cordon, another 300 Met officers had to be drafted in, some of them mounted, to control the enormous crowds ‘that assembled over a large area of the locality in the neighbourhood’ once news of the siege started to spread.
At the time it was by no means certain what part the two men in Sidney Street played in the Houndsditch murders – or indeed that they were involved at all for that matter (modern research has suggested that although they were part of the gang and involved in the burglary they were not present at the murders) – and information on possible suspects continued to flood in from all over the world. However, one letter to Scotland Yard from Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency must have been particularly galling. Giving details of three burglars who had jumped bail in the US it said that: ‘We are sending you this for what it is worth, as we think that the men may be identical with the men who were concerned in the Houndsditch attempted burglary and murder’.
Unfortunately there was a lot more to the letter than this apparent demonstration of inter-agency cooperation. It went on to say that: ‘The raid of the Sydney Street [sic] house received considerable mention here, and I am enclosing you a copy of an article which appeared in the New York Sun, under date of January 5th, this to give you an idea of the publicity the matter received in this country’. Under the heading: ‘May Be War In London’, readers were told that: ‘The inquest on the bodies of the two men who stood off 1,700 policemen and soldiers in their fortress on Sydney Street [sic], Stepney yesterday will open today. ... John Bull seems to be beginning to believe that his martial anti-burglar campaign in Stepney had made him look ridiculous. Many of his newspapers tell him so ... if Stepney had been New York a small contingent of Pinkerton men would have managed the business quietly and without disaster’. What the Commissioner thought of this hypocritical poke in the eye with a sharp Pinkerton stick is not recorded but it was the least of his worries.
One newspaper sarcastically suggested that if any more suspects were cornered then ‘an opportunity might be given to the Navy to share in the credit of the extermination of the Houndsditch murderers’. A ‘torpedo boat destroyer’ should be anchored at the nearest point in the Thames and it could then bombard the desperadoes’ lair. In another, the President of the Berlin Police was quoted as describing the procedure used in Sidney Street as ‘shooting sparrows with cannons. ... No circumstances could have led Berlin to make such an exhibition, but then the Berlin police are all trained soldiers, who know how to act in the moment of danger. They would have considered it their first duty to catch the criminals alive, not mow them down with machine guns’.
Sir Edward Henry found himself under considerable pressure for answers but it was 16 January, nearly two weeks after the siege, before he directed that ‘Mr. [Chief Constable Frederick] Bullock should arrange ... to take at Leman Street statements from the various persons who have knowledge of the facts. ... When all this has been done we shall have a mass of information from which we can get all the materials needed for answering questions and justifying police action’. It was far too late. The damage had already been done but the result provides a fascinating contemporary account from the perspective of individual participants.
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Another enduring myth of the siege concerns Peter Piatkow (sometimes spelt Piaktow), also known as ‘Peter the Painter’. He was a decorator, not an artist, although referring to him as being the latter has endowed him with a romantic appeal that his occupation would not otherwise merit, and he and Svaars shared the rooms in which Gardstein was found after he had been shot. He was known to be on friendly terms with those concerned (as were other people but none had such a memorable soubriquet) but he was not in Houndsditch when the murders took place and he was not in 100 Sidney Street before or during the siege. Even if he had been arrested at the time there was little or no evidence upon which he could have been convicted of anything but over the years he has been transformed into the mastermind behind the gang’s activities. Much of the responsibility for this rests with Churchill who later wrote: ‘It was ascertained in the days that followed [the Houndsditch murders] that the murderers belonged to a small colony of about twenty Letts from Baltic Russia, who, under the leadership of an Anarchist known as “Peter the Painter” had ensconced themselves in the heart of London. It was in fact, in the language of later years, a “germ cell” of murder, anarchy and revolution’.
However, it was the film, ‘The Siege of Sidney Street’, in 1960 that really created ‘Peter the Painter’. Piatkow was portrayed as the idealistic planner behind the robberies carried out by the gang (to provide funds for the cause and which, just for good measure, included the robbery at the Schnurmann rubber factory two years earlier; see The Tottenham Outrage – 1909) who escaped from 100 Sidney Street by digging a hole (which no one discovered later) through into the attic of No. 102. After starting the fire as a diversion, and apparently unnoticed by the police, the residents and the evacuees from No. 100, he used the stairs of No. 102 to reach the ground floor. Still unnoticed, he then slipped quietly out of the front door into the crowds surrounding the building and was never seen again.
In the film’s opening sequence the audience was told that: ‘The main characters and incidents in this film are true. The producers acknowledge with thanks the help of the City of London Police in the preparation of the screenplay’. This was by Alexander Baron, a prolific writer of television dramas, and Jimmy Sangster, one of the creative forces behind the horror films turned out by Hammer Studios. The good name of the City of London Police was used under seriously false pretences because there was no hint of any attempt at historical accuracy. The film was almost complete fiction from start to finish. Even the guns were wrong. Leaving aside the ‘police shotguns’, which were apparently distributed in large numbers before the siege had even started, the police were armed with Webley ‘top-break’ revolvers that would not be on general issue in the Met for another 45 years.
Given the fraudulent claims made at the start of the film it is not surprising that film-goers were left believing (and many people still believe) that Piatkow had not only been present but that his audacious escape had actually happened as well. So much so that in 2006 Tower Hamlets Community Housing Trust named two buildings, now called ‘Peter House’ and ‘Painter House’, after what it described as ‘the antihero of the nearby Sidney Street Siege in 1911’. The Chief Executive of the Trust was quoted in the Daily Mail as saying that: ‘There is no evidence that Peter the Painter killed three policemen, so we knew we were not naming a block after a murderer. There is some doubt as to whether he existed, but [his] is the name that East Enders associate with the siege of Sidney Street’. He could have added that this was due in large measure to the literary talents of Baron and Sangster.
The obvious deficiencies in the weaponry available to the police resulted in media speculation on what guns would now be bought for police use.
There was a lot of truth in what was being reported because on 12 January 1911 fourteen modern pistols had been tested at the small-bore rifle range of the 24th (County of London) Territorial Battalion at Kennington. Among those present were Winston Churchill, Sir Edward Henry and the gunsmith Robert Churchill. The weapon chosen to be the new Met handgun was the .32 Webley & Scott self-loading pistol (to become known as the ‘M.P.’ model), with 100 of the .22 single-shot version being ordered for training purposes.
By August they had still not been delivered and the Home Secretary, who retained his personal interest in seeing to it that the police had a modern firearm available, wrote on the Home Office file: ‘This matter has dragged interminably. Please report when the police are actually to be armed with the pistol’. During the last two months of 1911 a total of 920 Webley & Scott pistols were distributed to all Divisions in London. In later years the company would try to benefit from the notoriety of the siege, and thereby introduce yet more historical confusion as a result, by erroneously claiming that the pistol ‘became the official weapon of the Metropolitan Police, after proving its worth in the Sidney Street Siege in 1911’.
Early in 1912 all the old Webley .450 gate-load revolvers (including those that certainly hadn’t proved their worth at the siege) were collected and put into storage so that they could be sold, or at least that was the plan!
One final development probably attributable to the siege is the delivery to Liverpool City Police of two ballistic shields in 1929. The Chief Constable, Mr. Lionel Decimus Longcroft Everett, may have read Churchill’s account of the siege, which was first published in 1924, in which he described how, shortly after his arrival in Sidney Street, he believed the siege could be resolved: ‘My own instincts turned at once to a direct advance up the staircase behind a steel plate or shield, and a search was made in foundries of the neighbourhood for one of suitable size’. This is the only reference to such a search being made and whether it is true or not is a matter for conjecture but Everett evidently decided that his force should be in a better position than the Met had been to deal with a similar siege.
According to Police Review: ‘Mr Robert Gladstone [has designed] at the special request of the Chief Constable of Liverpool, a shield which is devised to protect the Police against pistol fire. ... The truck shields, which are intended to be used in pairs, are in the form of folding steel screens, mounted on a handy truck with two rubber-tyred wheels, and fitted with narrow eye slits and an aperture (with cover) through which a revolver can be fired, if necessary [Liverpool City Police had .32 Webley & Scott self-loading pistols in 1929]. A removable box for tear-gas bombs – if permitted – or for spare handcuffs, batons etc., is provided. The truck also carries a portable hand-shield of convenient size, which can be used when entering a house, or in places where the truck cannot be wheeled. Two men go with the truck, one wheeling and the other close behind him. The truck also carries two powerful crowbars and a sledge-hammer and axe combined. ... Shields which have been tested [,] successfully withstood the Webley Service revolver (.455), the Webley “M.P.” automatic pistol (.32) and the well known Mauser pistol (.30) at practically point-blank range, namely five yards’. However, the manufacturers, Messrs. Fawcett, Preston and Co., Ltd., of Liverpool, were keen to stress that although great care was taken in their manufacture, ‘the sale of them must not be understood to imply any kind of guarantee’.
Note:
A well researched account of the participants in the burglary and their subsequent fate can be found in The Houndsditch Murders and the Siege of Sidney Street by Donald Rumbelow, a former City of London police officer, first published in 1973 and reprinted by The History Press (2009).
According to ‘The British Police’ by Martin Stallion and David Wall published by The Police History Society (1999) there were 174 forces in England, 19 in Wales and 63 in Scotland in 1911. Were there any developments to do with police firearms in your force/area or its predecessors during this period of history? If so please contact mike.policehistory@yahoo.com.
© Mike Waldren