Siege of Sidney Street, 1911: Churchill, the Guards and a burning house

The story began with a break-in. On the evening of 16 December 1910, a neighbor heard hammering near a jeweller's shop in Houndsditch, on the edge of the City of London, and called the police. Stanley Smith, writing in the International Churchill Society's journal Finest Hour, explains that a gang had rented the next building and was tunnelling toward the safe.²

The unarmed officers who went in were met with pistol fire. The London Museum records that three of them, Sergeant Bentley, Charles Tucker and Walter Choate, were killed and two more were permanently disabled. One of the robbers, George Gardstein, was hit by a stray bullet and died; the rest escaped.³

The hunt

The men were revolutionaries from Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, who had fled after the failed revolution of 1905. The museum notes that the robbery was meant to raise funds for their cause. Two of the gang, Fritz Svaars and William Sokolow, known as Joseph, would end up at Sidney Street.⁴

London was already nervous. In 1909, in the so-called Tottenham Outrage, two other Latvian revolutionaries had robbed a factory messenger, and the chase that followed left a police officer and a schoolboy dead. After Houndsditch the police offered a reward of £500 and named Svaars and a man called Peter the Painter as suspects.⁵

On New Year's Day 1911 an informant told the police that two of the gang were hiding at 100 Sidney Street in Stepney. Smith writes that by two in the morning of 3 January some two hundred men had cordoned off the block, with armed officers posted in the surrounding buildings.⁶

Outgunned

At about 7:30 a.m., the London Museum records, the two men began firing on the police with their modern Mauser pistols. The police, with older rifles and revolvers, were outgunned and pinned down. A call went out for troops from the Tower of London.⁷

It reached the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, in his bath. He gave permission to use the army and then, unable to resist, went to see for himself. In his own later words, a sense of duty was supported by a strong sense of curiosity which perhaps it would have been well to keep in check.⁸

Scots Guards took positions in the street and in a building behind the house and riddled its upper floors; the museum adds that they even brought a Maxim gun. Crowds packed every entrance to the street and journalists watched from the rooftops. Churchill, in a top hat and fur-collared coat, threw out ideas, from bringing up artillery to advancing up the stairs behind a steel shield.⁹

Fire

Around one o'clock smoke began to drift from the upper windows; how the fire started is unclear. When the fire brigade arrived and demanded to go through, Smith writes, Churchill forbade them to approach the house but told them to stand by in case the flames spread to the buildings next door.¹⁰

The ceiling and then the roof fell in. The charred bodies of Svaars and Joseph were found inside, and as firefighters searched the ruins, one of them was killed by falling rubble.¹¹

Aftermath

The coverage turned quickly to the men's origins. The London Museum notes that sensational reporting dwelt on the gunmen as foreign aliens and painted the East End as a haven for criminals, blaming its large migrant population. Smith records that the crowds at the cordon greeted Churchill's party with cries of "'Oo let 'em in?", a jibe at the Liberal government's immigration policy.¹²

Churchill was jeered for weeks. In Parliament, Arthur Balfour said he understood what the photographer was doing in the danger zone, but asked what the Home Secretary was doing there. Churchill later called the remark not altogether unjust.¹³

Several people were tried for the Houndsditch murders, but none was convicted. Smith notes that Jacob Peters, whom Donald Rumbelow, a City of London policeman and author of a book on the siege, suspects was the real killer, returned to Russia and rose high in the Bolshevik government. The siege was also one of the first big news stories caught on film: the museum records that footage was shown at the Palace Theatre the next night.¹⁴