On the 16th of December 1910, in Houndsditch in the East End of London, a small band of Latvian immigrants embarked on a plan to break into a jewelry store, steal its contents, and – it seems – use the appropriated funds to help finance an anarchist revolution. That attempted robbery marked the beginning of a dramatic series of events, culminating in early January 1911 in an epic six-hour shootout that has gone down in history as the Sidney Street Siege. Intensively reported by the press and captured on film by the then-novel medium of newsreels, the siege would have long-term repercussions both for British attitudes towards asylum and, in particular, for the fate of the communities that inhabited London’s early twentieth century East End: anarchist emigres, political refugees, revolutionary socialists, and Eastern European Jews.
That series of events and its reverberations form the subject of this episode, which opens with a walking tour from History Workshop Journal editor Andrew Whitehead, author of A Devilish Kind of Courage: Anarchists, Aliens, and the Siege of Sidney Street, and then turns to conversation about the history and legacy of London’s anarchist emigres featuring Andrew Whitehead and Constance Bantman, author of The French Anarchists in London, 1880-1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation.
