LONDON STREET BATTLE.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3148, 18 February 1911, Page 4

LONDON STREET BATTLE.

SIEGE OF ALIEN MURDERERS. INCIDENTS OF THE FIGHT. The besieged men, in the Sidney Street house, > were heard shouting in a foreign language up till an hour before the end. Major-General Codrington, the general officer commanding London district was present in uniform. Many people climbed a hoarding within easy range of the murderers’ buldets in order to watch the fight. When volunteers were asked for in the Scots Guards 1 barracks every man in the battalion, offered his services. Electric torches and revolvers were carried by the police when they first entered the house where the assassins lodged. Two formidable magazine pistols, each h iving a barrel of about six inches long, and acting on an automatic principle, were found among the debris. A baker who had a shop at the corner of Richardson Street, and Hawkins (Street did a. brisk trade, selling bread-and-cheese sandwiches to famished policemen and others. A police officer called l in a taxicab at an armorer’s shop in Graceehurch Street and took away several doublebarrelled shot guns and a quantity of No. 4 duck-shot cartridges. A party of Royal Engineers was despatched from Chatham with the object of effecting an underground entrance into the house in Sidney Street. The fire rendered their journey useless. At midday Lieutenant Ross, of the Scots Guards, decided to make a dummy policeman and to expose it to the fire of the assassins in order to obtain a g;.od shot at them. The ruse was successful.

Two mere had been ordered to inspect telegraph wires which were close to the assassins’ fort. They refused to “make targets of themselves” and waited six hours before beginning their work. It has teen estimated that during the encounter between the police and the soldiers on the one hand and the assassins on the other hand, something like two to three thousand bullets were fired. The last- time that troops were called out for service in London was on the occasion of the unemployed riots in Trafalgar Square, when Mr. John Burns received a sentence of six weeks’ imprisonment. A cinematograph operator obtained pictures under fire. Films of the fighting were shown at the Coliseum matinee and at the Palace Theatre. Alhambra, the Hippodrome, and other places in the evening. A postman on his round had to pass through the street in which the firing was going on. Ho was accompanied by several policemen and delivered letters a few doors away from the besieged premises although stray bullets were whistling round him.