* * * * It is a fairly far cry
back to 1911, but a good many people must remember the famous Sidney Street siege of that year, when a battle took place between two desperate gunmen established in a house there and a storming-party of the Scots Guards, with the Home Secretary, Mr. Winston Churchill, in regulation top hat, an eager witness of the operations. (He was so photographed, and in a subsequent debate Mr. Balfour remarked drily "I understand what the photographer was doing there, but not what the Home Secretary was.") A question in the House of Commons this week provides an unsuspected link with the Sidney Street episode. A long and animated interchange took place about the sudden disappearance on January 17th of this year of Miss May Peters, a telephonist employed at the British Embassy at Moscow. Miss Peters was daughter of the notorious Peter the Painter, one of the two besieged gunmen of Sidney Street. His was always supposed to be one of the two charred bodies found in the burnt house, but a story I have just heard suggests that in fact he escaped and got away to Russia. Confirmation of that would be interesting. As for the case of Miss Peters, it is disturbing in the extreme. Though she holds a British passport the Soviet authorities insist that she is a Soviet citizen, her father having been Russian, and adopt the usual non-possumus attitude in the matter. What our own Government can do, except keep on protesting, is not clear. The idea of retaliation in kind is palpably absurd. We do not kidnap Soviet telephonists.
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