Tottenham Outrage

The Tottenham Outrage of 23 January 1909 was an armed robbery in Tottenham, North London, that resulted in a two-hour chase. The robbery, of workers’ wages from the Schnurmann rubber factory, was carried out by Paul Helfeld and Jacob Lepidus, Jewish Latvian immigrants. Of the twenty-three casualties, two were fatal and several others serious, among them seven policemen. The two thieves committed suicide at the end of the pursuit. The bravery of the police during the chase led to the creation of the King’s Police Medal, which was awarded to several of those involved.

About Tottenham Outrage in brief

The Tottenham Outrage of 23 January 1909 was an armed robbery in Tottenham, North London, that resulted in a two-hour chase. The robbery, of workers’ wages from the Schnurmann rubber factory, was carried out by Paul Helfeld and Jacob Lepidus, Jewish Latvian immigrants. Of the twenty-three casualties, two were fatal and several others serious, among them seven policemen. The two thieves committed suicide at the end of the pursuit. The bravery of the police during the chase led to the creation of the King’s Police Medal, which was awarded to several of those involved. The event exacerbated ill feeling towards immigrants in London, and much of the press coverage was anti-Semitic in nature. The influx of émigrés, and the associated rising rates of violent crime, led to widespread concerns and press coverage. As a result, the British government passed the Aliens Act 1905 in an attempt to reduce immigration. In the 19th century the Russian Empire, then including Latvia, was home to about five million Jews, the largest Jewish community in the world at the time. Many emigrated, and between 1875 and 1914 around 120,000 arrived in the United Kingdom, mostly in England. Some of the expatriates were revolutionaries, and many were unable to adapt to life in London. Several revolutionary factions were active in East and North London. One tactic often employed by revolutionaries in Russia was the expropriation of private property to fund radical activities.

The Times described a notorious Russian revolutionary group as a “machete-wielding gang of thugs” in the late 1890s. The terms’socialist’ and ‘anarchist’ had been conflated by the British press to refer generally to those with revolutionary beliefs. In 1909, the terms were almost accepted as part of the East End landscape, with the terms ‘Anarchist’, ‘Socialist’, and ‘Social Democrat’ used to refer to those who held anti-government views. The term ‘Russian’ was used to describe a group of Russians living in one part of Tottenham, the area gained the nickname ‘Little Russia’ in the early 20th century. The area was known as ‘Russia’ until the Second World War, when it was renamed ‘Tottenham’ in honour of the Russian-born residents of the area who had emigrated to the UK in the 1880s and early 1900s. It was also known as the ‘Little Russian’ area in the 1930s, when the area was dubbed ‘Little Moscow’ because of the large number of Russian immigrants living in the area. The name was later changed to ‘Little Tottenham’ in honor of the ‘Russian-born’ residents of North London in the 1950s and ’60s. A joint funeral for the two victims, police Constable William Tyler and Ralph Joscelyne, a ten-year-old boy, was attended by a crowd of up to half a million mourners, including 2,000 policemen.

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