“Get back there!” shouted the police.
But we were determined to see the drama out. It was more sensational
than any “movie” show. Immediately opposite was a tall gin palace--“The
Rising Sun.” Some strategist said, “That’s the place for us!” We raced
across before the police could outflank us.
A Jew publican stood in the doorway, sullenly.
“Whatcher want?” he asked.
“Your roof,” said one of the journalists.
“A quid each, and worth it,” said the Jew.
At that time, before the era of paper money, some of us carried golden
sovereigns in our pockets, one to a “quid.” Most of the others did,
but, as usual, I had not more than eighteenpence. A friend lent me the
necessary coin, which the Jew slipped into his pocket as he let me
pass. Twenty of us, at least, gained access to the roof of “The Rising
Sun.”
It was a good vantage point, or O.P., as we should have called it
later in history. It looked right across to the house in Sidney Street
in which Peter the Painter and his friends were defending themselves
to the death--a tall, thin house of three stories, with dirty window
blinds. In the house immediately opposite were some more Guardsmen,
with pillows and mattresses stuffed into the windows in the nature of
sandbags as used in trench warfare. We could not see the soldiers,
but we could see the effect of their intermittent fire, which had
smashed every pane of glass and kept chipping off bits of brick in the
anarchists’ abode.
The street had been cleared of all onlookers, but a group of detectives
slunk along the walls on the anarchists’ side of the street at such an
angle that they were safe from the slanting fire of the enemy. They
had to keep very close to the wall, because Peter and his pals were
dead shots and maintained something like a barrage fire with their
automatics. Any detective or policeman who showed himself would have
been sniped in a second, and these men were out to kill.
The thing became a bore as I watched it for an hour or more, during
which time Mr. Winston Churchill, who was then Home Secretary, came to
take command of active operations, thereby causing an immense amount
of ridicule in next day’s papers. With a bowler hat pushed firmly down
on his bulging brow, and one hand in his breast pocket, like Napoleon
on the field of battle, he peered round the corner of the street, and
afterward, as we learned, ordered up some field guns to blow the house
to bits.
That never happened, for a reason which we on “The Rising Sun” were
quick to see.
In the top-floor room of the anarchists’ house we observed a gas jet
burning, and presently some of us noticed the white ash of burnt paper
fluttering out of a chimney pot.
“They’re burning documents,” said one of my friends.
They were burning more than that. They were setting fire to the house,
upstairs and downstairs. The window curtains were first to catch
alight, then volumes of black smoke, through which little tongues of
flame licked up, poured through the empty window frames. They must have
used paraffin to help the progress of the fire, for the whole house was
burning with amazing rapidity.
“Did you ever see such a game in London!” exclaimed the man next to me
on the roof of the public house.
For a moment I thought I saw one of the murderers standing on the
window sill. But it was a blackened curtain which suddenly blew outside
the window frame and dangled on the sill.
A moment later I had one quick glimpse of a man’s arm with a pistol
in his hand. He fired and there was a quick flash. At the same moment
a volley of shots rang out from the Guardsmen opposite. It is certain
that they killed the man who had shown himself, for afterward they
found his body (or a bit of it) with a bullet through the skull. It was
not long afterward that the roof fell in with an upward rush of flame
and sparks. The inside of the house from top to bottom was a furnace.
The detectives, with revolvers ready, now advanced in Indian file.
One of them ran forward and kicked at the front door. It fell in, and
a sheet of flame leaped out.... No other shot was fired from within.
Peter the Painter and his fellow bandits were charred cinders in the
bonfire they had made.
So ended the “Battle of Sidney Street,” which created intense
excitement and indignation throughout England, and threw a glare of
publicity on to the secret haunts of the foreign anarchists in London.
I was one of those who directed the searchlight, for the very next day,
with Eddy, my colleague, I took up residence at 62 Sidney Street, and
explored the underworld of Whitechapel and the Anarchist clubs of the
Russian and German Jews, who were the leading spirits of a philosophy
which is now known as Bolshevism. And in that quest I had some strange
adventures, and met some very queer folk.