Malatesta and the anarchists
The East End has elected its members of parliament for another five years – and no great surprises in our choices perhaps. So it’s strange to think that 90 years ago, Tower Hamlets was seen as not just a hotbed of political discontent, but a threat to democracy itself. In the early years of the 20th century the press and Parliament were in a state of near panic about the anarchists of the East End.
Three events thrust them into the public eye. The first was the Tottenham Outrage. On 23 January 1909, two Latvian refugees from the East End attacked a messenger carrying the wages for a Tottenham rubber factory. In the course of the struggle shots were fired and overheard at the nearby police station. A police chase ensued, and they ran the criminals to earth after a six-mile pursuit in which two people were killed and 27 injured.
Then, on the evening of 16 December 1910, a Houndsditch resident heard hammering coming from the jewellers shop next door. A group of Eastern European émigrés (and anarchists) were in the process of tunnelling through a wall to the jeweller’s safe. Several unarmed constables responded. One, Bentley, was fatally shot as he entered the building. In an ensuing street battle, Constables Strongman, Choat and Tucker were killed by gunfire. Of the robbers, Gardstein was accidentally shot and mortally wounded.
Then, on New Year’s Day 1911, came The Sidney Street Siege. The police sealed off a building supposedly hiding the remainder of the Houndsditch gang. Home Secretary Winston Churchill personally directed operations, police marksman opened fire, the building went up in flames, and the charred bodies of two anarchists, Svaars and Joseph were pulled from the embers.
Those events of nearly a century ago took place against a backdrop of panic about the influence of foreign ‘troublemakers’ upon the East End. Churchill himself later described Peter the Painter (a semi-mythical figure possibly involved in the siege) as “one of those wild beasts who, in later years, amid the convulsions of the Great War, were to devour and ravage the Russian State and people”. In the popular mind, anarchists were now thieves and murderers of policemen – but there was much more to the story than that.
The revolutionary politicians of the left had been driven from Germany and Russia and sought refuge in the East End. On Whitechapel High Street, opposite the London Hospital, a hall played host to the fifth congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (which played a key role in the emergence of the Bolshevik Party in what was to become the USSR). Stalin, of course, came to the East End and stayed in a hostel in Fieldgate Street, and Litvinov and Trotsky visited too. With Lenin paying many visits to Whitechapel, all the key players of the Russian revolution had visited Tower Hamlets during the few years before the First World War.
And with the crowned heads of Europe falling one by one to popular revolutions over the preceding decades (and most of the rest to go by World War II) it was perhaps unsurprising that Churchill and the police saw activities in the East End as a threat.
Much official interest focused on the Anarchists Club in Jubilee Street. Efforts were made to tie on of the most prominent members, Errico Malatesta, in with the Houndsditch Murders. Malatesta was an Italian anarchist who had been arrested in his home country at just 14, in 1867, or writing a letter to King Victor Emmanuel II, complaining about a local injustice.
He found London a safe haven from persecution in Italy, but soon he was attracting attention from the British police too. In 1900, Victor Emmanuel’s successor, Umberto, was assassinated, and the police began watching Malatesta. By 1909, he was under arrest, along with famed East End anarchist Rudolf Rocker, on a charge of criminal libel. He narrowly escaped deportation, when supporters organized a protest in Trafalgar Square.
And in 1910, as the police searched the Houndsditch crime scene, they found a card bearing Malatesta’s name. It was a red herring. The investigation revealed that, several months earlier, one of the thieves had contacted the Anarchists Club, and been introduced to Malatesta. The Italian anarchist was found innocent.
Britain never did erupt in revolution or anarchy. The East End revolutionaries were to return to their own lands to overthrow the ruling classes … and no threat to Crown and Parliament was to emerge from Tower Hamlets.