Before Piotr Painter appeared, policemen in London were unarmed, and the people of England lived a bit like the hobbits from the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien. All evil lurked somewhere far away - on the continent. However, a gang of Russian anarchists made the Islands lose their innocence as well.
It was around 10.00 a.m. on January 3, 1911. Winston Churchill, Minister of the Interior of His Majesty's Government, was just taking a bath - and he liked it very much. He was lying in the tub when he was urgently called to the phone - he ran out of the bathroom, dripping water. It turned out that the menacing bandits, wanted for two weeks, had locked themselves in one of the houses on Sidney Street in the East End. They've already killed one policeman and are still shooting at each other. They seemed to have a large supply of ammunition.
Churchill did not hesitate for a moment. He rushed to the ministry, and from there to the scene. He then held office for only a few months. For several years he was a politician of the liberal party, for which he betrayed the conservatives. He was only 36 years old, but he was already known throughout the country, also as a soldier, journalist and hero of the Boer wars.
Back then, though it is hard to believe, he was thin. He was characterized by a peculiar political ADHD - which gained him supporters, but also many enemies. He was considered a publicity-loving narcissist and arrogant. There is no indication that he was very concerned about these opinions. As the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, he tried to introduce a lot of rational reforms - for example in the prison system, where he wanted to make the lives of convicts easier.
Helpless Bobby
It is not entirely true that Britain was so innocent at the time. There were violent social and political strikes and riots in the country, during which the police had their hands full; Irish nationalism was bloody. And there was no shortage of ordinary criminals.
The fact is, however, that a London policeman (popularly known as Bobby) did not do without a revolver - he only had a wooden truncheon with him. Officers wearing, for example, London's Metropolitan Police uniforms enjoyed such authority that no one would dare to shoot them. Nobody except radicals like Piotr Painter.
Let us go back to the night of December 16-17, 1910. Then a certain Londoner living on Houndsditch Street called the police because he was concerned about the noises in the neighborhood. One of the constables knocked on the door at the address indicated. A man opened the door but didn't answer the questions, just disappeared into the back of the house. The policeman called for reinforcements.
It all started with a shootout on Houndsditch Street.
Another constable knocked on the door; after a while he was already dead. More shots were fired. The bandits killed or injured all six policemen and fled. One of them, George Gardstein, wanted for the murder in Warsaw in 1905, however, suffered a fatal wound. This allowed the policemen to find out who the villains were.
It soon turned out that the criminals came from Latvia, which belonged to Russia, and that they were making noise because they tried to break into a jewelery factory located in the house next door to raise funds for the anarchist-communist revolution. They were to be led by a nondescript Peter the Painter - Piotr Malarz alias Pēteris Krāsotājs or Peter Piatkow.
The press and the subjects of King George V did not hide their indignation. The situation was serious. "We were faced with a kind of crimes and criminals with which we had not dealt with for generations in England" Churchill later wrote. The liberal government was also struck for having recently blocked anti-immigrant laws - and yet the murderers were newcomers from Europe.
Churchill issued an ordinance to provide police officers with the latest firearms. A roundup of anarchists and radicals from Russia was launched all over the country. The British police, furious with the deaths of their colleagues, proved their effectiveness - they soon captured most of the gang members. Only a handful remained at large.
Churchill's curiosity
On January 2, 1911, police were believed to have tracked down Peter the Painter and his companions at home 100 on Sidney Street in the East End. The next day, the action began. The bandits, however, fired casually at each other. The policeman died again. The bullets ricocheted off the walls and sidewalk, injuring a Scottish Guard sergeant, a policeman, and three civilians. Churchill later noted that, although street fights were already known in Europe, "in a quiet, law-abiding England, as far as one can remember, nothing of the sort was seen." He agreed to summon the army - which was a precedent in London's history.
When the interior minister showed up near the house besieged by the police and the army in the morning, numerous journalists (including those equipped with the first film cameras) and hundreds of onlookers were already there. On the other hand, the local postman did not think that all the confusion could prevent him from delivering the letters and as if he had never been walking down the street.
Churchill later explained that he was attracted to Sidney Street by a sense of duty, but also, he frankly admitted, by a hidden curiosity. It is not good when a politician who has power over the officials shows up at the point of crisis. The main stakeholder understood this - "I'd do a lot better if I stayed in the office," he later admitted.
Funeral of the policemen who died during the shooting on the night of December 16-17, 1910.
Meanwhile, it was too late. He could not back down, and his presence "inevitably" placed him directly responsible for the events. So he began to interfere and give orders. They were getting ready for the storming of the tenement house, in which Minister Churchill also wanted to take part, using a steel shield ...
At about 1.30 p.m., however, a thick smoke could be noticed over the besieged house. A fire had apparently broken out as a result of the fire from Scottish guards and policemen. Someone from the neighborhood had to call the fire brigade and they arrived. The police tried to stop the firefighters by explaining to them that they were in danger, but they felt it was their duty to put out the fire.
Only the intervention of Churchill, who decided that the house should burn down, made the brave rescuers quit their work. The building at 100 Sindey Street burst into flames. The interior minister was, of course, one of the first to break in. When the fire finally put out the fire (one of the firefighters later died of injuries), the charred bodies of two bandits were found inside. Their personal details were established - but none of them turned out to be Piotr Painter.
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Who was Piotr Painter?
Thunder rained down on Churchill. He was accused of showing up at the scene to gain applause or just because he was driven by his adventurous nature. In parliament, one of the opposition Conservative Party leaders, former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, mocked Churchill's newspaper photos of him in the fire zone, saying, "I can understand what the photographer was for, but what was the minister doing there !?"
The whole thing, as Churchill's biographer, Roy Jenkins wrote, had cemented his reputation as a minister who was far from prudent and calm, or rather some kind of a crazy scout who wants to behave in the streets of London as somewhere in South Africa during the Boer War . At that time, Churchill was also accused of cracking down on the striking workers by force, especially the miners from Tonypanda in Wales - although he had sent an army there, which dealt with the riots more efficiently and more gently than the police. Ultimately, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith ousted Churchill from the home affairs, appointing him First Lord of the Admiralty - which he only benefited.
Piotr Painter, on the other hand, was never captured. According to Churchill, he might have ended up in Russia later during the Bolshevik Revolution, where he was to continue to wreak havoc and havoc. Indeed, one of Piotr the Painter's companions, then active in London, later appeared alongside Feliks Dzerzhinsky when he was in charge of the Cheka.
But perhaps Piotr Malarz, a bit like Kuba the Ripper, less than a quarter of a century earlier ... never existed - at least in both cases the identity of the criminals was not 100% established. In 1911, Piotr Malarz was as infamous as Jack the Ripper in London, and especially in the East End - but Irish fighters often called the Mauser C96 after him. Probably, however, Peter the Painter was neither in December on Houndsditch Street, nor did he play the role that Winston Churchill had attributed to him. By contrast, British policemen are still overwhelmingly unarmed.
Bibliography:
- W. S. Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures , Poznań 2003;
- Jenkins, Churchill , London 2001;
- Stafford, Churchill and the Secret Service , Krakow 2000.
- https://winstonchurchill.org/the-life-of-churchill/rising-politician/the-siege-of-sidney-street/
- https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/jan/02/sidney-street-siege-100-years