Besieging Fake History

 Otto English’s description of the Siege of Sidney Street is laughably bad:

In a footnote he adds the following description of the event: 

Where to start with this?

Problem #1: English Confuses Two Separate Incidents

The gunfight on Sidney Street in January 1911 did not result in the deaths of three policemen. No policemen were killed during the Siege of Sidney Street. One policeman was seriously wounded in the gunfight – Sergeant Ben Leeson – and had to retire. He published his memoirs, Lost London, in 1934.

Three policemen - Sergeants Tucker and Bentley and Constable Choate – were murdered by the criminal gang but not during the Siege of Sidney Street. Their killings took place a month earlier, in December, in Houndsditch. 

Not to be confused with the Siege of Sidney St

Problem #2: English is Wrong About the Number of Gangsters Killed

Only two gangsters were killed in the gunfight, not three. Their names were Fritz Svaars and Joseph Sokoloff. One was killed by bullets and the other suffocated in the smoke. Another member of the gang – George Gardstein – had been killed by police during the earlier Houndsditch incident.

Problem #3: English is Wrong About Churchill's Initial Reaction

Churchill did not “hot foot” it down to Stepney when he heard about the gunfight. He was first notified of the battle when he was in his London home – 33 Eccleston Square. Churchill “hot footed it” to the Home Office. However, there were no additional updates there. It was only then that he decided to go see events for himself. 

Problem #4: Churchill Didn't Take a Photographer With Him

At one point English mentions the work of Churchill's greatest biographer -  Martin Gilbert. It seems that English didn't bother to read Gilbert's work though. If he had he wouldn't have made this mistake. Churchill did not take a photographer with him to Sidney Street. Churchill himself mocked the suggestion that he did:

I am sure he [Alfred Lyttelton] does not suppose there is a branch of the Home Office to organise the movements of photographers. It is the misfortune of a good many Members to encourter in our daily walks an increasing number of persons armed with cameras to take pictures for the illustrated Press which is so rapidly developing. I would remind the right hon. Gentleman that his own Leader (Mr A.J. Balfour), when he risked his valuable life in a flying machine was the victim of similar publicity, but I certain should not go so far as to imitate the right hon. Gentleman (mr Lyttelton) by suggesting that he was himself concerned in procuring the attendance of a photographer to witness his daring feat in the way of aerial experience (quoted in Gilbert, Churchill: A Life, p.229)

Problem #5: Churchill Didn't Take Charge of the Police Operation

Churchill did not make a "show" of taking charge of events. To quote an eyewitness to the event, Sydney Holland:

The only possible excuse for anyone saying that [Churchill] gave orders is that [he] did once and very rightly go forward and wave back the crowd at the end of the road.... and you did also give orders that [he] and I were not to be shot in our hindquarters by a policeman who was standing with a 12-bore behind [us]” (quoted in Gilbert, Churchill: A Life, pp.223-224).

  Churchill also was approached by a junior firefighter and asked to overrule a police command for the fire brigade to stay back. Churchill declined to do so (or rather, he instructed the Fire Brigade to wait) because of the danger from gunfire. But this hardly amounted to him taking command of the police operations. Donald Rumbelow, a former curator of the City of London’s Police Museum, wrote that:

"[Churchill] had no wish to take personal control but his position of authority inevitably attracted to itself direct responsibility. He saw that he would have done much better to have remained in his office but it was impossible to get into his car and drive away while matters were so uncertain and – he wrote later – so ‘extremely interesting’" (Rumbelow, The Houndsditch Murders, p.136; emphasis added).

Problem #6: English Gets the Cause of the Fire Wrong

English's attribution of the cause of the blaze to artillery shot is contradicted by two eyewitness accounts. According to firefighter Cyril Morris, the opinion of the fire brigade was that the fire was caused by a bullet hitting a gas pipe:

We found two charred bodies in the debris, one of them had been shot through the head and the other had apparently died of suffocation. At the inquest a verdict of justifiable homicide was returned. Much discussion took place afterward as to what caused the fire. Did the anarchists deliberately set the building alight, thus creating a diversion to enable them to escape? The view of the London Fire Brigade at the time was that a gas pipe was punctured on one of the upper floors, and that the gas was lighted either at the time of the bullet piercing it or perhaps afterwards by a bullet causing a spark which ignited the escaping gas (Morris, Fire!, p.39).

Journalist Philip Gibbs, who witnessed the event from a nearby pub, wrote that the fire was actually caused by the criminals themselves:

In the top-floor room of the anarchists' house we observed a gas jet burning, and presently some of us noticed the white ash of burnt paper fluttering out of a chimney pot.

"They're burning documents," said one of my friends.

They were burning more than that. They were setting fire to the house, upstairs and downstairs. The window curtains were first to catch alight, then volumes of black smoke, through which little tongues of flame licked up, poured through the empty window frames. They must have used paraffin to help the progress of the fire, for the whole house was burning with amazing rapidity (Gibbs, Adventures in Journalism, p.67).

In fact, it would have been extremely difficult for the Royal Artillery to cause the fire because they didn't shell the street. The fire started around 1 PM (Rumbelow, The Houndsditch Murders, p.136), and the artillery did not arrive until c.2:40 PM, around the same time Churchill left the scene. Martin Gilbert records Churchill's denial that he ever called up the artillery (Gilbert, Churchill: A Life, p.224).

Churchill's testimony at the inquest. Note the artillery arrived after the fire had already started

Conclusion: Fake History

In the span of several sentences, English managed to make six incorrect assertions. Had he just looked at the Wikipedia page he could have avoided this. A poor effort for someone claiming to debunk “fake history”.  

Bibliography

Gibbs, Philip, Adventures in Journalism (Harper & Brothers, 1923)

Gilbert, Martin, Churchill: A Life (Pimlico, 2000)

Morris, Cyril Clarke Boville, Fire! (Blackie and Son Ltd, 1939)

Rumbelow, Donald, The Houndsditch Murders and the Siege of Sidney Street (The History Press, 2009)

The Neo-Confederate Gambit

 You know the expression “never meet your heroes”? Well, I think there needs to be an addendum to that advice – never follow your heroes on twitter. Readers may be familiar with Professor Phillips O’Brien but for those who are not, he is Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of St Andrews. He’s also an extremely capable historian who has written one of the best books on the Second World War in recent years. If you haven’t read How the War Was Won go and buy a copy. It is revisionist history at its finest.

Buy this book

Alas, an expertise on logistics and machinery doesn’t translate into expertise in other areas. At the height of the summer of Floyd in 2020 Professor O’Brien wrote a series of tweets about the issues of race and the historian’s fallacy.

O’Brien starts with summarising the two main opposite opinions – on the one hand we shouldn’t judge Churchill’s antiquated views on race because “racist views were dominant” during his life, in O’Brien’s words. On the other hand, Churchill was an “out and out racist” and basically no better than Hitler.  O'Brien doesn't agree with the latter view but spends no time debunking it. Instead he mainly criticises the former viewpoint. He says that “no era was simply racist – there was always a range of opinion and it’s important to look at the individual within the context of that range”. This is missing the point. No one has ever claimed that there was 100% unanimous consensus pre-1965 that white Europeans were superior to black Africans or brown Asians. Such a degree of unanimity on any issue at any time has probably never existed. It doesn’t mean though that the 19^th century or the first half of the 20^th century were not eras in which a preponderance of white people likely held racist views.

For an analogy, there were unquestionably atheists in France in the 14^th century. Does it follow that 14^th century France was not therefore a very religious society compared to 21^st century France? Of course not.

It borders on negationism to suggest otherwise. Yes, there were a number of white people in the 19^th century who held egalitarian views on race, comparable to mainstream attitudes today. But in how many places in the 19^th century did whites and blacks live as political, legal or social equals? I’m not going to enumerate them all but the answer will be somewhere between no where and very few places.

Suppose a pollster could travel back to the 1870s and ask random white people in Europe, the United States or any European settler colony for their opinion on racial issues. It is likely that the comments they would have recorded would have included something on the lines of:

• Race is a biological phenomenon. 

• Differences in attainment reflected largely inherent differences in race or ethnicity.

• Civilised societies were a product of characteristics which, if not unique to white Europeans, were found in far greater number among those of European stock compared to those of Sub-Saharan African stock.

• It was not unreasonable for white societies to protect themselves by controlling either the numbers of people of colour, or limiting their rights and freedoms.

O’Brien’s example – white society in the United States in the Civil War – doesn’t prove his point at all. In fact, it shows just how widespread racist ideals were in the mid-19^th century. O’Brien highlights radical abolitionists like Thaddeus Stevens as evidence that there was a “huge variety of views on race”. But according to the leading historian of the period, Eric Foner, Thaddeus Stevens represented a minority opinion. Stevens’s biographer, Bruce Levine, goes further and describes radical abolitionists like Stevens as a “widely despised handful”. Ironically, many people at the time thought that Stevens himself was a bigot against other white folks – white Southerners. Not only that, but Steven’s reputation plummeted after his death. For about 70 years white Americans regarded him as the worst person their nation had ever produced, with the possible exception of Benedict Arnold!

On the other hand, the reputation of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate General, soared even in the north. So much so that by the middle of the 20th century a US president of Pennsylvanian Dutch origin who grew up in Kansas considered him one of the four greatest Americans of all time. The fact that Lee was a slaveholder was unimportant. 

In his age, Thaddeus Stevens was an extreme outlier. In selecting him to downplay racism in white-American society during the 1860s, Professor O’Brien sounds like a Neo-Confederate. The type who cherry pick examples of African-Americans who fought for the Confederacy to pretend the Confederacy was not fighting to sustain slavery. Or who cherry pick one or two quotes by Robert E. Lee to portray him as an abolitionist. It isn’t convincing.

Professor O’Brien then moves on to Abraham Lincoln, and credits him as an example of someone who “evolve[d] in interesting and enlightening ways”. This apparently proves that his age wasn't simply a racist one. However, O'Brien is silent on what exactly Lincoln’s evolution involved. Lincoln, for most of his life, was an extreme racist by our standards who would make someone like Richard Spencer look tame. In 1858 in the debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln famously said:

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

In 1862 he told a delegation of African Americans visiting the White House that it would be better if African Americans packed their bags and left:

“You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word we suffer on each side.”

This sounds extreme to us, but it is worth bearing in mind that when most American abolitionists called for the end of slavery, they did not have in mind that slave owners and former slaves would sit down together at the table of brotherhood. They wanted to deport (or "repatriate") all African-Americans from the United States to Africa. They didn’t like slavery, but the idea of racial equality was no less revolting to them as it was to an antebellum slaveholder away down south in Dixie. 

Now it is true that Lincoln didn’t remain of that view forever. As Professor O’Brien says, he “evolved”. But this evolution only went so far as one speech made in 1865 saying that some (not all) African-Americans should be given the vote. In other words, he remained a virulent racist by our standards.

The point I am trying to make is not that I think Lincoln was an awful human being. It is that, while he was maybe enlightened and progressive by the standards of the 1860s, he falls very short of the standards of the 2020s. 

Another example O’Brien cites is FDR, who was “not just a creature of his time”. While he concedes that FDR was “racist in [his] own way” he credits him with using “his power to try and do some good”. I also admire FDR, but there is no getting around the fact that he rounded up an entire ethnic group and detained them in internment camps on the basis of little evidence. Is this an example of “some good” he tried to do? Why does FDR get a pass?

With that out of the way, let’s move onto Churchill. O’Brien characterises him as “pretty terrible” by the standards of his era, who was “consistently one of the more aggressive and oppressive racists” of his age, who tolerated war crimes in South Africa and Sudan and believed in a racial hierarchy with Anglo-Saxons at the top.

This is just plain wrong. I don’t understand how O’Brien can bring up Churchill’s experience in Sudan and completely omit the fact that Churchill was appalled by British atrocities against wounded Dervishes. He ignores Churchill’s experience at the Colonial Office and how he was a consistent opponent of brutality against colonised subjects. O'Brien brings up the Irish, but Churchill didn't really harbour any  strong prejudice against the Irish and came around to support Home Rule and even the unification of Ireland. 

More curiously though is O’Brien’s total omission of Churchill’s attitude to Jews. Jews were among the biggest victims of racism during Churchill’s lifetime so you’d think they would merit a mention. There were many single massacres of Jews in WW2 in which more Jews were murdered than Irish people (both armed Republicans and civilians) died during the entire Anglo-Irish War. Churchill, as is well known, was a consistent opponent of anti-Semitic discrimination and supporter of Zionism. So much so that it struck his contemporaries as unusual (“Winston had one fault. He was too fond of Jews”, as one of them said to Sir Martin Gilbert). 

Churchill’s opposition to Indian independence was not unique at all, although the manner of his opposition set him apart from the Conservative party. Concessions to India in the 1930s (which Churchill opposed) were not seriously intended to advance India to independence but instead represented a bait and switch to keep India in the Empire for years. This has been known since Carl Bridge published Holding India to the Empire in 1986.

O’Brien then writes that we shouldn’t look at historical figures as though we were putting together a “balance sheet”. The thing with balance sheets though is that they have to provide a true and fair view of the financial position of an organisation. If you were to use that analogy for historical figures, you have to accurately reflect what those figures said a did and you have to mention the positive things Churchill did and thought along with the negative. You also need to provide appropriate weighting for them. It matters more that Churchill criticised the Amritsar massacre than it does that he made a joke at a dinner party about Gandhi being trampled to death by elephants, for example. 

In summary, to suggest that the period of 1874 – 1965 wasn’t extremely racist by today’s standards borders is absurd and borders on denialism. It is not unreasonable to deplore Churchill’s attitudes on race (or other subjects) but to ignore the milieu in which they developed is ahistorical. To claim that Churchill was an extremist in his own time is simply wrong.