A DEVILISH KIND OF COURAGE : ANARCHISTS, ALIENS AND THE SIEGE OF SIDNEY STREET

By Andrew Whitehead

Reaktion Books. 316 pages. £15.99. ISBN 978-1-78914-844-2

Reviewed by Jim Burns

In January 1911 the sounds of gunfire could be heard coming from Sidney Street, a run-of- the-mill thoroughfare in the East End of London. The curious drawn to the scene would have found dozens of uniformed and plain-clothes policemen carrying a variety of revolvers and shotguns, and a contingent of better-armed Scots Guardsmen. They were all directing their fire at a three storey house at 100 Sidney Street. It was, to put it mildly, not a typical scene for the country’s capital.

What had brought about this situation? It’s necessary to look at the wider context to understand why the action referred to was taking place. The East End was, at that time, an area with a high intake of immigrants, most of them, though not all, Jewish. They were escaping from pogroms and other mistreatment in the Pale of Settlement, the large tract of land in the Russian Empire designated as a location where most Jews had to live: “It encompassed all of what is now Belarus and Lithuania, much of Ukraine and of east and central Poland, and a small part of Latvia”. Other immigrants came from the Baltic States, then under the control of Russia, with Latvia supplying many of those who figured prominently in the events leading up to the siege of Sidney Street. Among them were some dedicated revolutionaries who had fought against Russian dominance of their country, and who escaped to Britain to evade the attentions of the secret police. They were  often known to the authorities in Britain, but no action was taken against them provided they didn’t engage in any law-breaking activities here.

Anarchism was very much in the air in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Celebrated anarchists like Enrico Malatesta, Rudolph Rocker, and Peter Kropotkin lived in London, and there was an anarchist club in Jubilee Street in the East End. The Yiddish anarchist weekly newspaperDer Arbayter Fraynd (The Worker’s Friend)  was, in Andrew Whitehead’s words, “long-established” and was edited by Rudolph Rocker. Anyone interested in anarchist activity during this period should look at William J. Fishman’s East End Jewish Radicals 1875-1914 (Duckworth, 1975) for a full  account, though Whitehead does provide an informative survey of the subject. It’s also relevant to mention the presence of anarchists in novels like Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima,  G.K.Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, and in numerous novels and short-stories by now-forgotten writers.  They frequently tended to emphasise the “foreign” origins and alien nature of anarchism.

That not all immigrants, anarchists or otherwise, were prepared to abide by the unwritten rules which allowed freedom of expression, but not of direct action which involved criminal activity, became obvious in January 1909 when two armed men attempted a payroll robbery at a factory in Tottenham. They initially got away with the money (£80, equivalent to £10,000 today) but shots were fired and a chase ensued as police (there was a police station almost opposite the factory)  and passers-by pursued the robbers. The police were unarmed, but some people who joined in carried guns, “either trophies of army service or used to shoot wildfowl on the nearby marshes”.  Gun laws were looser then than now. The account that Whitehead gives – it involves a hi-jacked tram, the death of one policeman and the wounding of another, plus the tragic killing of a ten-year old boy caught in crossfire, and a number of other people injured – is detailed, even colourful if one accepts that it wasn’t at all a comic incident. The two gunmen eventually died at their own hands when they realised they couldn’t get away. Curiously, the bag of money (all coins) they had stolen seems to have disappeared in the chaos and was never found.

The Tottenham Outrage, as it was called, had the effect of increasing the paranoia that some people felt about the number of immigrants coming into the country and congregating in the East End. It turned out that the robbers, Paul Hefeld and Jacob Lapidus,  were Latvians, though not Jewish, but the fact of them being foreign was enough to have everyone tarred with the same brush. British criminals rarely used firearms. The 1905 Aliens Act had attempted to stem the flow of newcomers, but control was loose and its effectiveness was limited. When another crime involving Latvians occurred in late-1910 it was, said critics of the government, an example of what could happen unless firm action  was taken to weed out certain groups arriving in Britain. Anti-semitism was rife among all classes of British society, and everyone knew who was meant when the term “undesirables” was used.

“Appropriation” was a tactic employed by revolutionaries in Europe to raise funds for the cause, whatever it was. It’s difficult to know if the Tottenham miscreants were trying to do just that, or if they were simply out for personal gain. But when another Latvian gang hatched a plan to break into a jeweller’s shop in Houndsditch in December 1910, it would appear that there was a political design to their intentions. The people concerned had been engaged in revolutionary work in Latvia before coming to England.

As with the Tottenham affair, Houndsditch also went badly wrong. The gang had been breaking in from an adjoining property, but a neighbour heard the noise and alerted the police. When they arrived, and as usual were unarmed, they were fired on and three policemen were killed and two injured. During the shooting a member of the gang, George Gardstein, was accidentally shot by one of his comrades and badly wounded. He was carried away and left with two women who were friends of members of the gang. He later died. I should say at this point that I’m giving a very brief account of what took place. Whitehead’s narrrative is much more complete and essential to an understanding of later developments. It might also be worth adding that all the Latvians used a range of aliases and it’s to Whitehead’s credit that he makes sense of them.   

Two other Latvians, Fritz Svaars and William Sokoloff, disappeared for a time while the police hunt for the gang intensified. It had come as a shock to have three policemen killed and two more wounded, so no effort was spared in what became a major operation as questions were asked and identities checked  throughout the immigrant quarters of the East End. Many anarchists were angry about what the Latvians had done because they knew that it would inevitably rebound on them, even if the criminals weren’t anarchists. That was an interesting question. They may have referred to themselves as anarchists and they frequented the Anarchist Club. Anarchist literature was found in their lodgings when police tracked down where they had been living. But anarchist was a word that  had a loose application and it was employed by the press, and often by the government and the police, to refer to anyone with extreme dissident political views, especially if they came from abroad. It’s sometimes useful for the authorities to have a handy term, like “anarchist” or “communist”  or “terrorist”  to  cause concern among the general public.

Svaars and Sokoloff did turn up a few days later when someone tipped off the police that they were hiding at 100 Sidney Street. It was suggested that one or other of them might actually be “Peter the Painter”, a somewhat shady figure who, over the years, achieved almost-legendary status, largely thanks to the press playing up the notion of him being the brains behind the attempt to break into the jeweller’s shop. This led to rumours that he’d escaped from the house and left the country. Very few people knew his real name at that time, though the police may have been aware of what it was.

The truth was that only Svaars and Sokoloff were present when a policeman walked down the street and threw stones at an upstairs window to attract their attention. The idea was that he would call on them to surrender, but he was fired on and badly wounded. The siege then began in earnest. It soon became obvious that the Latvians, with semi-automatic pistols and plenty of ammunition, were much better armed than the police. They could initially only bring together an assortment of “old-fashioned bulldog revolvers, shotguns, and Morris tube rifles”, and they had few men with any training in how to use them effectively.

It was decided to ask for military assistance, and a detachment of Scots Guards from the garrison at the Tower of London, and carrying up-to-date rifles, soon arrived. There are photographs and even some grainy newsreel shots of them as they positioned themselves to pour accurate fire into the windows from which a hand clutching a gun occasionally appeared. As things developed a Maxim gun (an early machine gun) was brought in, though not used, and even artillery in the form of a field  gun was seen heading in the direction of Sidney Street, along with extra soldiers.

The newsreel shots and photographs also show that Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary in the Liberal Government, got in on the act, and was credited, at least by the press, with directing operations. It’s relevant to note that the amount of firepower needed to deal with the two gunmen – Whitehead calculates that at least 1,000 shots, and possibly more, were fired – attracted some critical attention, not least from the Royal Irish Constabulary, who had some experience of dealing with “terrorists” and mockingly advised that the London police should call on them for assistance in future.

The siege lasted around six hours and came to an end when smoke and flames  began to appear from the house and the shooting had stopped. The fire brigade was called to deal with the fire which soon gutted the property and two bodies were discovered. Immediate identification was impossible because the bodies were badly burned, but autopsies revealed that Sokoloff had died from a bullet wound to the head and Svaars seemingly from suffocation due to smoke inhalation.  How the fire started is not known, though a plausible suggestion is that a gas pipe could have been penetrated by a bullet and thus set alight. Casualties among the police and soldiers were low – a policeman badly wounded and  a Scots Guardsman slightly injured. A young boy was also wounded. And a fire officer died when part of the house collapsed.

The immediate aftermath of the siege was that a number of suspects were rounded up and put on trial because it was believed that they had, in one way or another, been involved in the scheme to break into the jeweller’s shop. With one exception they were all acquitted, and the exception, a woman named Nina Vassileva, had her sentence of two years imprisonment quashed on appeal.  However, Whitehead assembles evidence to show that she had been actively involved in the planning and execution of the Houndsditch robbery. She was the woman seen accompanying the two men who carried the wounded Gardstein away from the shop and she was one of the women who looked after him before he died.

Whitefield says that she had a hard time after her release from prison. In the 1920s she “took a job at the London office of the Soviet Trade Delegation, a role which suggested pro-Soviet sympathies, and was employed by Arcos, the All-Russian Co-operative Society”. He adds that in “old age, she lived in a small flat on Brick Lane, no more than half a mile from the sight of the Houndsditch shootings”. She died in February 1963.

It’s interesting to know that Luba Milstein, who had been on trial with Vassileva, later left Britain and went to New York. She was joined there by Karl Hoffman, another of the accused and a “close friend of Fritz Svaars”.  They lived together for many years and “whatever their one-time anarchist sympathies, were both enthusiastic supporters of the Soviet Union until they died”. This presumably indicates that they were members of the American Communist Party, and might also point to the fact that their supposed alignment with anarchism could have been no more than a matter of convenience  rather than any form of dedication to its ideology. It was, in a sense, what was available before the First World War but after 1917 radical hopes rested on what was initially developing in Russia.

Looking at another aspect of what happened to some of those who were suspected of participation in the Houndsditch affair, Whitehead devotes a chapter to the elusive “Peter the Painter”. It has often been proposed that his real identity was never known, but he was, in fact, Janis Jaklis (or Zaklis) and there is a photograph of him in the book. Whitehead says that he “enjoyed some prominence in the armed movement in Latvia in 1905 and 1906”. He thinks that he did have “a role in preparing the way for the Houndsditch heist”, but “he was probably not the mastermind of the operation”. Whatever he did, Jaklis clearly thought it best to leave Britain before he was rounded up with the others. After that the trail is less clear, with reported sightings but no definite information.

It’s probable that he was sometimes confused with Jacob Peters, who had been one of those tried and acquitted at the Old Bailey. Peters returned to Russia in 1917, “got swept up in the Bolshevik rise to power and was in Petrograd and a key actor during the October Revolution.......By the following year Peters had emerged as the deputy head of Lenin’s newly established Cheka secret police”. He had never identified closely with the anarchists in London (he told the London police that he differed from his cousin, Fritz Svaars, in that “he is an Anarchist. I am a Social Democrat”) and  “When the Bolsheviks acted decisively against the ‘Black Guard’ anarchists in Moscow”, Peters was ruthless in eliminating them.   According to Whitehead, “He was deeply complicit in what became known as the ‘Red Terror’, seizing the wealth of the new administration’s enemies and suppressing any rival groups”. Like so many veteran communists, “he succumbed to Stalin’s terror. He was arrested in November 1937 as part of an alleged Latvian conspiracy and was shot and executed the following April”.  

The anarchist movement in Britain never recovered from the lingering effects of the Tottenham, Houndsditch and Sidney Street incidents. Anarchism was mostly associated with the foreign born, and didn’t have a strong home-grown base. For numerous radicals who might have once thought in terms of identifying with anarchism, the events in 1917 in Russia became the main attraction. Even some anarchists welcomed the Revolution, though many were soon disillusioned. Rudolf Rocker was of the opinion that “The rule of the Bolsheviks is a new system of repression”.

Whitehead says, “The anarchist movement that sought to re-establish itself in London’s East End after the war was a pale imitation of its earlier incarnation. The Arbayter Fraynd resumed publication, but it had become an anachronism and by the mid-1920s it was all but dead”. There are still anarchists in Britain today, of course, with Freedom Press and bookshop still located in Whitechapel. It’s a few years since I last wandered down to Angel Alley. Those wanting to know more about British anarchism could do worse than refer to John Quail’s The Slow Burning Fuse: The Lost History of the British Anarchists, published by Paladin in 1978 with a reprint from Freedom Press in 2017.

A Devilish Kind of Courage is a compelling book that not only gives a detailed account of  the events surrounding the shoot-out in  Sidney Street, but additionally throws light on the immigrant world of London’s East End in the years leading up to 1914. Alexander Whitehead has dug deep into the archives to tell his story and his book is full of facts and anecdotes about long-forgotten figures who coloured that scene. It has plenty of useful notes, a select bibliography, and some fascinating illustrations.