It’s taken more than a century for Fritz Svaars’ last letter to reach his family in Latvia. He wrote it a day or two before his death while hiding in a lodging house in London’s East End. Svaars was a Latvian political exile, an anarchist, wanted for his role in the murder of three London police officers during a botched robbery attempt. His letter home was both an extenuation of his conduct and a farewell. ‘[T]hey are looking for us everywhere’, he wrote – the ‘whole of London is buried in police’. He knew the chances of escape were slim. ‘Two weeks I’ve been on the run. How much longer I can manage, I don’t know’, Svaars scribbled. ‘If I’m lucky then I’ll still live and I’ll share joy and sadness with you, and if not, you also know that at some time that same hour will come to you and you’ll be ashes the same as everyone.’ As a precaution, Svaars placed the letter in an envelope addressed in Latvian, contained in another envelope with an address written in Russia, the language of Latvia’s then rulers. He entrusted this letter to a comrade to send back to the Baltic. That comrade was an informer. He handed over the letter to the police and also passed on word of where the two wanted men were hiding - in a second floor room at 100 Sidney Street in Stepney. That led – on 3rd January 1911 - to the most sensational shoot-out in London’s history. Two gunmen with semi-automatic pistols and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of ammunition kept police and troops at bay for six hours in what became known as the Siege of Sidney Street. Bullets ricocheted off the walls; East Enders thronged in their thousands to catch a glimpse of the drama; reporters secured a vantage point on the roof of a local pub; as many as five newsreel operators filmed silent footage of the encounter. Winston Churchill, then the Home Secretary, rushed top-hatted to the scene. When the besieged house caught fire, Churchill personally forbade the fire brigade from dousing the flames. The charred remains of Svaars and his fellow gunman were found amid the embers. He had died of smoke suffocation. Svaars’ six-page handwritten letter is now lodged in the London Metropolitan Archive, amid the voluminous archives of the City of London Police. These police records are the main source for my book, A Devilish Kind of Courage: Anarchists, Aliens and the Siege of Sidney Street. Two weeks before the shoot-out, City police had interrupted an attempt by an armed gang to burrow into a jeweller’s shop in Houndsditch. The robbers shot their way out, killing three police officers and seriously injuring two others – the worst single incident in the history of London’s police. The gunmen also inadvertently shot and injured one of their gang, George Gardstein, who died the following morning in lodgings shared by Fritz Svaars and another of the anarchist group known only by his assumed name of Peter the Painter. Many of the photographs and other documents seized by the police as they searched suspects’ rooms are among the police records. The images are bewitching. Among them are studio photographs of young men and women taken in what is now Poland, Ukraine, Belarus or Latvia – frustratingly, almost all are unlabelled, though a few have brief jottings in Latvian, Russian or Yiddish. I had the good fortune to have a friend, Tania, who spoke Latvian. She helped me to translate the Latvian inscriptions on some of the photos. Then, as the book was going to press, she got in touch with exciting news. She’d just been in the Latvian capital, Riga, and by chance she had met a woman who was related to Fritz Svaars (known in the Latvian style as Fricis Svare). Over Zoom, Liene, an estate agent in Riga, and her mother, Margarita, a maths professor, told me of their connection to the Svaars family. Margarita is the great-granddaughter of Fritz’s sister, Olga – the older woman had helped care for Margarita when she was a young child. The family still has a bible inscribed by Fritz’s father, a policeman, and a rich cache of sepia-tinged photos. As Margarita was growing up, no one spoke much about Fritz. Family elders said he had been ‘lost in the war’ – though they never said which war or where and how he died. During the decades that Latvia was under Soviet rule, loose talk about an armed anarchist forbear could bring unwelcome attention. Once Latvia gained independence in the early 1990s, there was more scope to talk about the past. Margarita became aware that one of her relatives had been a Latvian nationalist and leftist, a rebel, who met a violent death abroad. Although my book was written and ready to publish, with no prospect of including more than the briefest mention of the family in Riga, I wanted to see Liene and Margarita – and to give them a copy of Fritz’s plaintive and painful letter. It was about time that missive was delivered to its intended recipients. We met in a smart Chinese restaurant in Riga, a city of great architectural distinction in spite of the wars repeatedly waged over it. Margarita and her daughter shared what they knew of Fritz – that he had been active in Latvia’s unsuccessful revolution in 1905, which demanded both social justice and an end to the rule of the Russian Tsar, and that like so many young Latvians of that era he was forced to flee. Margarita struggled at first with the archaic form of Latvian that Fritz wrote in. ‘The letter has a feeling of doom’, she said having managed to make sense of it. ‘There’s a feeling of likely death – a sense of fear. It’s quite depressing.’ Liene and Margarita are neither proud nor ashamed of their gun-toting forbear. It’s part of Latvia’s tormented twentieth century history – a nation repeatedly occupied and fought over. They were anxious to understand more about Fritz and his comrades, what propelled them to become gunmen, why they were in London and how he died. I promised them they would be the first to get a copy of my book. It’s on its way.
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This column of red granite at the City of London cemetery near Ilford pays tribute to three police officers shot dead while trying to stop an armed robbery of a jeweller's shop by Latvian political emigres. The burial plots of Sergeant Charles Tucker and Sergeant Robert Bentley lie side-by-side. The third policeman, Constable Walter Choat, is buried at Byfleet. The three police officers died late on the evening of 16 December 1910. Never before had three London police officers been killed in the same incident - and it has only happened once since. Inscriptions on the column reveal that the wife and son of Sergeant Tucker are also buried here. So too is the three-year old son of Sergeant Bentley, who was born five days after his father died. Tragedy on top of tragedy. On the centenary of the killings, the Corporation of the City of London placed a memorial plaque - rather anonymous and easily missed - close to the site of the shootings on Cutler Street. The would-be robbers were revolutionary expropriators. They were seeking to burrow in to the back of a jewellery shop at 119 Houndsditch from what was then Exchange Buildings. As well as the three police officers who died, one of the robbers suffered fatal injuries when shot by accident by an associate. In this 1913 map, Exchange Buildings is marked in pink. Although all the buildings from that era have gone from the area around the scene of the shootings, the street lay-out hasn't changed, and nor has the numbering of buildings on Houndsditch. 119 Houndsditch is now part of a Starbucks! While Exchange Buildings has long gone, there's a yard with an entrance from Cutler Street which marks the spot. In the photo below, the full length window is at the back of Starbucks. This was also very probably the location of the back wall of the jeweller's shop in 1910. Exchange Buildings - three storeys with a single room on each floor and a tiny back yard with a sink and an outside loo - would have stood on this small car park space. When police tried to find out why there was banging and drilling late on as Friday night, the expropriators came out firing. Just here! Two weeks later, two of the gunmen were tracked down to a room in Stepney and perished in what became known as the Siege of Sidney Street. But that's another story ...
This is Peter the Painter - fashionably dressed and with a splendid moustache. He looks like a pillar of the establishment. In fact, he was quite the opposite and part of a long line of anti-heroes in the East End of London. Peter was a Latvian anarchist and nationalist who was believed to be a central figure in two sensational incidents of violence. The first was in December 1910, when a group of Latvian emigres were interrupted while trying to break through a party wall into a jeweller's shop in Houndsditch in the City of London. Three unarmed policemen were shot dead - and one of the gang died from shots fired by an accomplice. A couple of weeks later - in January 1911 - two of the suspected gunmen were tracked down to a room at 100 Sidney Street in Stepney. A shoot-out lasting six hours ensued, and ended only when the house caught fire. Both gunmen died at the scene. It's probable that Peter the Painter was neither at Houndsditch at the time of the shoot-out nor involved in the 'Siege of Sidney Street', but helped by his alliterative nom de guerre and the wanted posters put out by the police, he became something of a legend: the criminal mastermind who managed to get away. The conventional account of Peter the Painter is that his identity has never been ascertained. In fact, the City of London police were confident that they could put a name to him by the close of 1912. But he wasn't in Britain and they had no evidence sufficient to secure extradition, so they kept quiet. The anarchist and historian Phil Ruff has told the story of the afterlife of Peter the Painter, in as much as it can be retrieved, in his book A Towering Flame. At the weekend, I strolled round the City and adjoining East End in the footsteps of Peter the Painter. HOUNDSDITCH Harris's jewellers was on the north side of Houndsditch just beyond the junction with Cutler Street. Nowadays there's not a single building within 100 yards of the spot that was there back in 1910. But the street layout is much the same. (And there at the eastern end of Houndsditch you can see St Botolph's, Aldgate - often regarded as the entry point to the East End.) The gang sought to burrow in from the back of the shop, having taken a tenancy on a tiny house in 11 Exchange Buildings, the outside loo of which shared a wall with the jeweller's. Those buildings are long gone - but what was Exchange Buildings remains a yard with an entrance on Cutler Street. |
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