On January 3, 1911, two Latvian anarchists wanted for a police murder were tracked down to a room on Sidney Street in London’s overwhelmingly Jewish East End. For six hours, the two besieged men, equipped with semiautomatic pistols, held out against the police and army sharpshooters. Winston Churchill, then Britain’s interior minister, came to the scene, peering out from a doorway to see the action for himself. The two gunmen died, but the shootout—unparalleled in London’s history—entered folklore as “the siege of Sidney Street.”

In this illustrated talk, historian Andrew Whitehead—author of the recently published A Devilish Kind of Courage: Anarchists, Aliens and the Siege of Sidney Street—will explore what the shootout revealed about London’s Jewish East End and the remarkable strength of its Yiddish-speaking anarchist movement at the time.