Jack The Ripper had been active in the last decade of the nineteenth century and part of the hysteria had wrapped itself up in virulent anti-immigrant feeling since Whitechapel and the neighbouring areas were heavily settled by Jewish refugees from Russian pogroms. This persisted into the new century and reached its apotheosis with the siege of Sidney Street in the first days of 1911.
Many Jews were regarded as revolutionaries, anarchists and socialists and the Sidney Street gang of Latvians were dubbed as anarchists, whereas in all likelihood they were just armed robbers, who justified their thievery as expropriation of property. Interrupted during a night-time attempt to break into a jeweller’s shop, the gang shot and killed 3 unarmed policemen and also managed to fatally shoot their own leader in the struggle. The gang dispersed, but were gradually rounded up by the police following tip offs from the public. The last two suspects were holed up in a house at 100 Sidney Street in Stepney. A shoot-out ensued, but the police firearms were easily outgunned by those of the two gangsters and they requested, for the first time in London, the assistance of the army.
Then Home Secretary Winston Churchill turned up to view proceedings and was jeered by the onlookers for the perception of a liberal immigration policy laid at his feet. This was also the first siege captured by news cameras, in this case the Pathé newsreel service. Eventually the two gangsters were killed as the house went up in smoke and claimed a final victim when one of its walls collapsed and crushed a fireman to death. Churchill’s proposed tough immigration bill was defeated as being against British values, while the other supposed gang members were all acquitted for lack of evidence to convict them. For such carnage, only the accidentally killed gang leader and the two in the house at Sidney Street were deemed responsible, despite eye witnesses that there were at least three teams involved in the robbery of the jewellers.
As a final kick in the teeth to authorities, in 2008 the local council named two tower blocks after one of the minor gang members, a full two years before any commemoration of the fallen policemen and three years before a memorial to the fireman. Perhaps the area did house anarchist sentiments after all.
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"Three Dreams In The Key Of G" has three female voices in a state of siege. One a young mother in sectarian Northern Ireland, just after the Good Friday Peace Agreement has returned paramilitary fighters from both sides back into the domestic realm for an uneasy peace there. The second a Waco-like siege in Florida, as the FBI, DEA and ATF surround a compound full of women, which they see as a threat to all of mankind. The third is in laboratories all over the globe, the Human Genome is being besieged by scientists as they try and uncover its code for life.
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| The siege will be lifted 26/07/2018 |
Published by Dead Ink Books
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