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

It was not a battle, but for six hours it looked like one: soldiers firing from the windows of a brewery, a machine gun and field guns brought into a London street, crowds packed behind the cordons and the Home Secretary in a top hat in the line of fire. Sidney Street became one of the first great news stories caught in photographs and on film, and one that followed Churchill for years afterward.²

Who won the Siege of Sidney Street and why?

The police and the army, though it brought them little credit. The two gunmen had better pistols, but they were trapped on the top floor of a sealed block, facing far greater numbers and soldiers' rifles, and when the house caught fire they died inside. No one was ever convicted of the Houndsditch murders.³

Background: from Tottenham to Houndsditch

London was already uneasy about armed revolutionaries. On 23 January 1909, in what the papers called the Tottenham Outrage, two Latvian refugees robbed a messenger carrying the wages of a rubber factory. The chase that followed, partly on a hijacked tram, left a police officer and a schoolboy dead and dozens injured, and both robbers shot themselves rather than be taken. Chris Williams, a historian at the Open University, notes that the police had to borrow guns from the public to chase them.⁴

The men behind both crimes came from the community of Latvian revolutionaries who had fled the Russian Empire after the failed revolution of 1905. In London they kept their cause going with what they called expropriations, robberies to raise funds. On the evening of 16 December 1910 a neighbor heard hammering behind a jeweller's shop in Houndsditch, on the edge of the City of London: a gang had rented the next building and was tunnelling toward the safe.⁵

The unarmed City of London police officers who went in were met with pistol fire. Sergeant Bentley, Sergeant Charles Tucker and Constable Walter Choate were killed, and two more officers were left permanently disabled. One of the robbers, George Gardstein, was hit by a bullet from his own side; the gang carried him to a house nearby, where he died. The rest escaped, and the City and Metropolitan police began a manhunt.⁶

The newspapers called the gang anarchists. The London Museum points out that in this period the word was a catch-all for revolutionaries, used much as terrorist is today, and Smith describes a loose group of refugees from Russian Latvia rather than an organized movement, gathered around a shadowy figure the police knew as Peter the Painter. Houndsditch lay on the edge of the City of London, patrolled by the City's own police force, while Stepney belonged to the Metropolitan Police, so the hunt and the siege drew in both.⁷

The men in the house and the forces outside

The police named Fritz Svaars and a man known as Peter the Painter as suspects and arrested several members of the gang in the following weeks. On New Year's Day 1911 an informer told them that two of the gang were hiding on the top floor of 100 Sidney Street in Stepney: Svaars and William Sokolow, known as Joseph. Each carried a Mauser automatic pistol, a powerful modern weapon; the police had revolvers and, in the City force, small-bore training rifles. Williams describes the Mauser as powerful but inaccurate at range. All agree that the police were outgunned.⁸

The police decided on a large night operation. By two in the morning of 3 January some two hundred officers had sealed off the block, and armed men were posted in the houses around. Detectives quietly brought the other residents out of the lower floors.⁹

The decisions on the day

The police had to decide how to take the two men. Rumors that they were about to change lodgings pushed the police to act at once rather than wait for them to come out, and they chose a large operation by night: seal off the block, post armed men in the houses around it and empty the lower floors before daylight. Williams dates the planning meeting to a quarter to one in the morning of 3 January and the cordon to about two.¹⁰

The gunmen's choice decided the rest. They opened fire as soon as the police tried to attract their attention, and one of the first shots hit a detective sergeant, a wound that later forced him to retire. From then on the two men held the top floor with their Mausers and an ammunition supply that seemed, in Smith's words, inexhaustible.¹¹

Churchill made two decisions. He gave permission for troops at once, by telephone from his bath, and then went to Sidney Street himself. He later wrote that he had thought it his duty to see what was going on, but admitted that a strong sense of curiosity had played its part, and that once there he saw he would have done better to stay quietly in his office.¹²

The siege hour by hour

Morning: outgunned. At about 7:30 a.m. the police tried to attract the men's attention, and the two opened fire from the upper windows. The Mausers outranged and outshot everything the police had, and the officers in the street were pinned down. Around half past eight a request went out for soldiers from the Tower of London.¹³

The call reached the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, in his bath. He gave permission to use the army. A detachment of Scots Guards arrived at about ten and took up firing positions in the street and in a brewery and other buildings overlooking the house, from which they riddled its upper floors. Crowds packed every entrance to the street, held back by lines of police and soldiers, while journalists and photographers watched from the rooftops. The soldiers' service rifles, Williams notes, hit about ten times harder than the police revolvers, and the volume of fire on the house became enormous.¹⁴

Midday: the Home Secretary arrives. Churchill reached Sidney Street at about noon and stayed in the open, in a top hat and fur-collared coat, close to the firing. Stanley Smith, writing for the International Churchill Society, says that he had no wish to take command but that his rank drew responsibility to him, and that he was full of ideas, from bringing up artillery to storming the stairs behind a steel shield. A Maxim gun and a section of the Royal Artillery were indeed on their way.¹⁵

Turning point: the fire

At about one o'clock smoke began to drift from the upper windows. The fire spread down through the house, driving the men before it, and the last shots were fired at about half past one. When the fire brigade arrived and demanded to go through, the police refused, and Churchill, in what Williams calls his only real intervention, ordered the firemen to keep back but to stand by in case the flames spread to the houses next door.¹⁶

The ceiling and then the roof fell in. At about half past two detectives and firemen went into the ruins and found the charred bodies of Svaars and Joseph. As the firemen worked, a wall collapsed; one of them, Charles Pearson, was struck by falling rubble and died of his injuries that July.¹⁷

Counting the losses

The toll of the whole affair fell mostly on the police. At Houndsditch three City of London officers were killed and two were left permanently disabled, and one of the robbers, George Gardstein, died of a wound from his own side. At Sidney Street both gunmen died in the house, a detective sergeant was wounded, and the fireman Charles Pearson died of injuries from the falling rubble. No soldier, onlooker or other police officer is recorded as killed.¹⁸

Aftermath

The coverage turned at once to the men's origins. The London Museum notes that sensational reporting dwelt on the gunmen as foreign aliens and painted the East End, a district of docks and newly arrived migrants, as a haven for criminals.¹⁹

Churchill was mocked for weeks. On 6 February 1911, in the debate on the King's Speech, Arthur Balfour told the Commons that the Home Secretary had been in the zone of fire with a photographer, both risking valuable lives, and added: "I understand what the photographer was doing, but what was the right hon. Gentleman doing?" Balfour called the whole affair a remarkable combination of the blackest tragedy and something that almost looked like comedy, and said he could not imagine anything more embarrassing to those running a difficult and dangerous operation than to have the head of their department present as a spectator.²⁰

The Houndsditch murders were never avenged in court. Jacob Peters, Zurka Dubof, John Rosen and Nina Vassileva were tried at the Old Bailey in April and May 1911 before Mr. Justice Grantham. The murder charge was dropped early, for lack of evidence that the accused had fired the shots, and the jury acquitted the three men; Vassileva was found guilty, but her conviction was overturned on appeal. Grantham told the jury his own view that two of the men who had fired at Houndsditch were the two who died in Sidney Street.²¹

Legacy and memory

For the police the day was a hard lesson. Williams places Sidney Street among the handful of occasions between 1890 and 1914 when the army opened fire in Britain in aid of the civil power. For Churchill it became a lasting part of his legend, retold, Smith notes, in his own memoirs.²²

The episode also says something about the man. Smith argues that the impulse was curiosity rather than a wish for publicity: Churchill was an old campaigner and war correspondent who found a gun battle in the heart of London irresistible. Churchill himself later called Balfour's jibe not altogether unjust.²³

The story has been retold many times since, on film and in books, most thoroughly in the history of the siege by Donald Rumbelow, a City of London policeman, which Smith calls the fullest account.²⁴ › 3 January in military history