The Times (London)

July 8, 2004, Thursday

SECTION: Features; Screen; 8

LENGTH: 622 words

HEADLINE: Were they radical heroes or common thieves?

BYLINE: Bob Stanley

BODY:
Bob Stanley on a violent enigma from 1911.

THE Sidney Street siege, the epic gun battle which took place in the East End of London in 1911, is revisited at the National Film Theatre next week.

A gang of criminals, who had killed three policemen while shooting their way out of a failed robbery in Houndsditch, holed up at 100 Sidney Street. The Army was called in. Pathe footage of "the Battle of London" shows the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, ordering troops to fire on the glum Stepney terrace. The sight of soldiers in the doorways of a newsagents and a chophouse is still unnerving.

The "Houndsditch Assassins" were planning to rob a jewellers by drilling from the house next door when they were discovered.

Their motives - apart from cash - were obscure. They may have been raising money to fund a revolution in Russia, yet they were anarchists or, some say, just villains cloaking their greed with a cause - certainly the far left has accorded them little hero worship.

Then there was the gang's mysterious leader, Peter the Painter - one Peter Piatkow - said to have escaped from the Russian secret police and to have slipped out of the burning house on Sidney Steet, never to be traced. The gang used so many pseudonyms it is possible that "Peter" never even existed.

All rum stuff for filmmakers happy to bend the truth. The gang were co-opted by Hitchcock for the first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934, a spy thriller loaded with the same pre-war paranoia that surrounded the real anarchists. Peter Lorre's part was undoubtedly based on Peter the Painter.

Its denouement in the dark wharves of Wapping echoed Sidney Street - shame that the James Stewart remake skipped the East End setting.

The Siege of Sidney Street (1960; poster pictured), a surprisingly good, low budget adaptation, gave Peter Wyngarde his first starring role. The scriptwriter Jimmy Sangster, who worked on a stack of Hammer films, The Six Million Dollar Man, Kojak, and Ironside, cheekily cast himself as Churchill during the siege. The resemblance to the Pathe footage is most impressive because Sidney Street had been obliterated by the Luftwaffe, and the film was shot in Ardmore Street, Dublin. Sangster toyed with the facts, but the love interest, Sara, played by Nicole Berger, fresh from the set of Shoot the Pianist, was real enough: Peter's girlfriend Rosie had a breakdown, according to Colin Rogers's book, The Battle of Stepney.

Wyngarde's cold, clipped voice is perfect for such lines as "we steal because no one will give" and "a man dies but an idea grows". The Daily Mail's Margaret Hinxman found him "utterly convincing . . . warm as a caress, ruthless as a razor slash".

As a typical Eastern European wild man, Peter the Painter is shown to have loose morals, savagely kissing Sara on their first date and then breakfasting with her - shirtless - the following morning. Until then, you're not sure whether you should be rooting for him or not. Wyngarde reprised this chilling but charming role just once, in the Hellfire Club episode of The Avengers, before he grew a moustache and became the housewives' choice, Jason King.

The parallels between the "armed alien burglars" of 1911 and asylum-seekers of today are clear enough: the surging crowds in the Pathe film, rubbernecking at the scene; the man overheard by the Manchester Guardian chuckling "they'll be fried like rats in an oven" (which Sangster used for the film).

The right-wing press was predictably outraged when the case against the anarchists collapsed, as it couldn't be proved who had shot the policemen.

* The Sidney Street Siege On Film, NFT 2, Wednesday July 14, 6.20pm (020-7928 3232).
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