Assassin

Three unarmed policemen were shot dead in the City of London in a single night, and the man who did most of the shooting was killed by his own side by accident. That was December 1910. British constables carried a truncheon and a whistle; the men they walked in on carried Mauser and Dreyse automatic pistols. The police had been called to a jeweller's in Houndsditch because neighbours heard hammering — someone was breaking through the back wall of the shop next door. Seven officers went in without weapons. Three died. It remains the worst loss of life the City of London Police has ever suffered, and it lasted about ninety seconds.

The gang were Latvian revolutionaries who had fled the failed 1905 uprising against the Russian Tsar and washed up in the East End with the skills that came from it: expropriation, bomb-making, pistol work. Gardstein — a false name, one of several, his real identity still disputed — was the one they followed. They had rented the house behind the shop, run a gas cylinder for cutting, and were tunnelling toward a safe holding some forty thousand pounds of jewellery. When the police forced the door, the shooting began at point-blank range in a dark passage. Gardstein was hit in the back by a round fired by one of his own men. They dragged him half a mile through Whitechapel and put him in a bed on Grove Street, where a doctor was brought and told nothing, and he died before morning. The police found him with the pistols still in the room. Two weeks later the surviving members were cornered on Sidney Street, and the Home Secretary — Winston Churchill — came in person to watch a company of Scots Guards fire into a London terrace until it burned with the men inside.

They arrived as refugees. The Russian Empire had put down the 1905 revolution in the Baltic provinces with punitive columns, field executions, and floggings in village squares, and thousands of young Latvians left rather than be hanged. London took them in and gave them tailoring shops, sweated labour, and rooms in Stepney. Some of them kept organising. The money from a robbery was not for themselves; it was for the cause back home, which is what expropriation meant. Gardstein had already been an armed revolutionary for years before he ever set foot in England.

The aftermath fell on everyone who looked like them. The trial that followed collapsed — every defendant acquitted or discharged — but the press had already decided, and the Aliens Act politics that followed reshaped British immigration for a generation. Nobody has ever established with certainty what his name was.

Forget the forty thousand pounds and the three dead constables. Remember only this: he came to London to hide, and the men who hunted him could not even establish who they had killed.