The Siege of Sidney Street, also known as the Battle of Stepney, was a gunfight in the East End of London between a combined police and army force and two Latvian revolutionaries. The siege was the culmination of a series of events that began in December 1910, with an attempted jewellery robbery at Houndsditch in the City of London. It was the first time the police had requested military assistance in London to deal with an armedStand-off. The events were fictionalised in film and novels.
About Siege of Sidney Street in brief
The Siege of Sidney Street, also known as the Battle of Stepney, was a gunfight in the East End of London between a combined police and army force and two Latvian revolutionaries. The siege was the culmination of a series of events that began in December 1910, with an attempted jewellery robbery at Houndsditch in the City of London. The police evacuated local residents from the environs, and on the morning of 3 January a firefight broke out. Armed with inferior weapons, the police sought assistance from the army. Towards the end of the stand-off, the building caught fire; one of the agitators in the building was shot before the fire spread. While the London Fire Brigade were damping down the ruins—in which they found the two bodies—the building collapsed, killing a fireman, Superintendent Charles Pearson. The events were fictionalised in film—in The Man Who Knew Too Much and The Siege Of Sidney Street —and novels. The murdered policemen and the fireman who died are commemorated with memorial plaques. The influx of émigrés and violent crime associated with the increase of violent crime led to popular concerns and comments in the press. The government passed the Aliens Act in 1905 in an attempt to reduce immigration into Britain. The popular press reflected the opinions of many people at the time of many opinions in an article in The Manchester Evening Chronicle; a leading article supported the bill to bar immigrants from entering the UK. In the 19th century, the Russian Empire was home to about five million Jews.
Many emigrated and between 1875 and 1914 around 120,000 arrived in the United Kingdom, mostly in England. Some of the expatriates were revolutionaries, many of whom were unable to adapt to life in the politically less oppressive London. From the turn of the century, gang warfare persisted in the Whitechapel and Aldgate areas of London, between groups of Bessarabians and refugees from Odessa; various revolutionary factions were active in the area. The event often used a tactic often used by revolutionary groups in Russia: often used to fund the expropriation or theft of private property to fund radical activities. The siege marked the first time the police had requested military assistance in London to deal with an armedStand-off. It was also the first siege in Britain to be caught on camera, as the events were filmed by Pathé News. All but one of those arrested for the Hounds ditch robbery were acquitted; the conviction was overturned on appeal. At the trial in May 1911, all but one of the accused were acquitted, and the conviction of the leader of the gang, George Gardstein, was overturned. The terms’socialist’ and ‘anarchist’ had been conflated in the British press, who used the terms interchangeably to refer to those with revolutionary beliefs. A leading article in the Times described the area as ‘the worst alien anarchists and criminals who seek our too hospitable shore’ And these are the men who use the pistol and the knife.
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This page is based on the article Siege of Sidney Street published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
