A Devilish Kind of Courage: anarchists, aliens, and the Siege of Sidney Street

ABSTRACT

An examination of the Siege of Sidney Street, and the associated Houndsditch police murders and ‘Tottenham Outrage’ is not new. The author of this new work, Andrew Whitehead, takes the reader beyond a narrative detail of these momentous events in British criminal history and instead looks at the political and social situation in London's East End, only a generation after the Ripper era. He examines the lives and backgrounds to the outsiders of the era – Eastern European ‘revolutionary anarchists’ fleeing Imperial Russia and the oppression of the tsarist Okhrana secret police, to the supposedly tolerant shores of England. He seeks to understand what motivated their decision to commit such heinous crimes, and the fallout for the perpetrators, and wider British society.

KEYWORDS:

• British history
• police history
• Sidney Street
• police murder