Two Against London
by John Kobler
Merchants of death were they, with only their lives to sell!
When the late “Two Gun” Francis Crowley kept an attacking force of three hundred policemen at bay for three hours, spraying them from the top story of a New York apartment house with fast-spitting, hot lead, overseas commentators sneered, threw up their hands in disgust. English observers of the American scene particularly pointed to the boy desperado’s last stand as the sort of exhibition that could happen only in the United States. “Typical!” they cried.
And England’s sporting gentry, the huntin’ — shootin’ — fishin’ contingent, exclaimed in righteous horror: “Three hundred policemen to catch an eighteen-year-old boy and his sweetheart! Preposterous!”
In this, the English were inexcusably short of memory, for not so very long before the Crowley capture — twenty-seven years to be precise — there occurred in London a protracted gun-battle between two Russian thugs and Scotland Yard, the climax of a remarkable series of crimes, which made the Crowley shooting and, indeed, every other similar combat before or since, look like children playing cops and robbers.
On that historic occasion, six hundred constables, reinforced by the Scots Guard and the Royal Horse Artillery, pitted themselves against two killers trapped in an East End building. At one point, Mr. Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, personally directed the siege.
The affair has entered the annals of English crime as the Siege of Sidney Street.
At 11:30 on the night of Friday, December 16, 1910 — in a damp, fog-ridden night — a Houndsditch merchant sat up abruptly in bed. From Exchange Buildings, backing on his house, he heard rasping sounds.
The merchant hastily slipped into some clothes, dashed out into the murky street and hailed the constable patrolling the beat. “There’s burglars in Mr. Harris’s shop!” he exclaimed. He pointed at the gold and silversmith establishment across the way.
Together they approached it. The door was bolted, the shades drawn. They listened, holding their breaths. From deep within the darkened shop came the rasping of a file on steel.
The constable hurried to a telephone-box, put in an alarm call. Presently a riot squad composed of Sergeants Bentley, Bryant and Tucker, Constables Choate and Woodhams, drew up across the street from No. 11 Exchange Buildings, which was directly behind the goldsmith’s shop.
It was Sergeant Bentley who strode up to the bolted door, while his colleagues kept anxious eyes on the three converging streets.
Bentley knocked. Steps padded behind the door. The bolt was drawn back. The door swung open. In the jet blackness Bentley was aware of a woman’s presence, but it was impossible to distinguish her features. He called out gruffly: “Seems to be burglars about. Let us in!”
The woman jabbered something in a foreign tongue. She retreated into the black depths of the shop. Bentley saw her white-clad form grow dimmer, fuse with the darkness. He stepped over the threshold. He could hear nothing, see nothing. Across the street the others were watching him sharply.
Bentley hesitated a moment, then decided to go in. He fumbled in his breast-pocket for a match. At that instant, two spurts of flame slashed through the darkness. Bentley staggered back, crumpled on the threshold, two reddening holes gaping in his tunic.
For a split second his colleagues were paralyzed with shock and surprise. Then, as one man, they pressed forward, despite the fact that not one of them was armed. Before they were halfway across the street a hand gripping an automatic glowed whitely in the doorway. The finger of the hand tightened. Bullets raked the street from right to left. Almost simultaneously, the four officers were struck. The death-dealing hand came into full view now. A man dashed out of the shop. Two more men and a woman, the men pumping lead as they went, followed hard on his heels. Straight for the wounded, but still advancing officers, they went, scarlet flame and lead spitting from their guns with every step.
Sergeant Bentley lay dying in the doorway. Sergeant Bryant, hands outstretched, pitched forward into the gutter as a bullet smashed through his jaw. The three men and the woman pressed forward. Futilely, Sergeant Tucker tried to block their path. Three barking guns brought him to the street, dead before he struck the ground. A bullet from the same volley caught Constable Woodhams in the thigh.
Only Constable Choate remained standing. He dove fiercely for one of the men’s legs. Three bullets tore through his stomach. Five more splintered the bones of his legs.
Now no one remained to bar the killers’ murderous progress. The merchant had fled. Into the honeycomb of narrow streets and alleys the four plunged. But an accidental shot hit one of their own number. The man fell; the others carried him. The darkness, the fog swallowed them. And in the fog-moistened gutter lay five bleeding bodies, five unarmed officers, three dead or dying, two desperately wounded...
Never before in the history of Scotland Yard had so savage, so merciless a massacre taken a toll of police officers. An outraged populace howled for the heads of the gun-toting fugitives. What particularly embittered Londoners was the fact that the English police had always maintained a code of fair play. Constables were not then, nor are they now, allowed to carry arms and it is for this reason that armed burglary is so rare in Great Britain.
But for once, that spirit of extreme fair play — of gentleness even — had cost three gallant men their lives. Here was a personal challenge and there was not a member of the force who would rest before the slaughter of his colleagues had been avenged.
The small, tawdry section of London known as the East End comes within the jurisdiction of the City Police, not the Yard, but Chief Constable Frederick Wensley was called in to assist the City detectives. Head of the investigation was Detective John Stark; under him, Detective Superintendent Ottaway and Chief Inspector Willis. These four men plunged into the task of tracking the Houndsditch killers.
Their early efforts immediately uncovered a brilliantly conceived scheme to loot Mr. Harris’s shop, a scheme frustrated only by the deaths of the three officers. It was Inspector Wensley who discovered, by questioning real estate agents and shopkeepers near Exchange Buildings, that in December a foreigner calling himself Levi rented the shop known as No. 11 Exchange Buildings. This was the shop whence the killers had emerged.
A few days later, another foreigner, a man giving the name of Gardstein, rented the nearby shop, No. 9. Between was No. 10, a shop directly behind 118 A Houndsditch, which was the goldsmith’s establishment. But No. 10 was not immediately available. Only two days before the crime was it empty. This row of shops was separated by the Houndsditch buildings by a narrow alley bounded by a high wall.
Detectives searched No. 9 and made a number of curious finds. There was, for example, a huge cylinder of oxygen. This, neighbors reported, had been lugged up to the shop in a peddler’s cart on the afternoon preceeding the crime. In addition, a large number of hastily abandoned safebreaking tools were found in No. 9. Between No. 9 and No. 10 a hole had been cut through the separating wall, giving the cracksmen easy access to the rear of Mr. Harris’s place.
Two bottles bearing the stubs of tallow candles indicated that the cracksmen had operated by candlelight. The bottles were smeared with fingerprints, but the Yard’s fingerprint bureau was unable to make any identification.
While these clues were being sifted, a strange development broke in an entirely unexpected quarter.
The time was 3:30 Saturday morning. Dr. Scanlon, a young general practitioner of Commercial Road, was awakened by the sounds of frantic rapping on his front door. He trotted downstairs and opened to two young women, obviously foreign, obviously in a state of extreme agitation.