THE HOITNDSDITCH MURDERS.
THE shooting down of five policemen in Houndsditch on Friday week, when they were investigating what appeared to be an attempt at robbery in a jeweller's shop, was a crime which would almost certainly not have been committed by English robbers. The law makes so strong a distinction in the matter of punishment between armed and unarmed burglary that it has practically become a habit among English burglars not to use arms ; they have no intention of committing murder, and, short of murder, the help they can get in escaping by firing to wound is not enough to make the game worth the candle. The only considerable danger from firearms to which our police are exposed conies from foreign criminals. It is undoubted that the danger is greater than formerly ; one has only to look back, for an illustration, to the amazing incident two years age at Tottenham, when two armed foreigners planned a robbery, and in trying to escape fired on every one who came in their way. They killed one policeman and wounded three others, killed a boy and wounded over a dozen other persons. We do not think the danger to the police, which we freely admit, from criminals of this kind in any sense justifies, however, the wild talk of the last few days as to the necessity of arming the police on all occasions, and enforcing new alien laws. The present rules for arming the police in exceptional cases give as much protection as is perhaps practical or compatible with considerations of public policy ; and the alien laws provide for the turning away of undesirable persons. Unless we exclude everybody —which is an absurdity—it is impossible to prevent some Anarchists and other dangerous criminals taking up their residence here if nothing notoriously bad has been proved against them. As to the arming of the police we shall say a few words presently. Before going further let us add our testimony to the deep and grateful sense which all Englishmen entertain of the splendid devotion, coolness, and pluck with which the police face the risk of such a hideously unequal contest as that of Friday week. It was a ghastly slaughter. Such a thing, though very rare in the dealings of the police with English criminals, is always possible in such streets as those (many of them populated entirely by aliens) which lie between the City and Whitechapel. The public sympathy and grief expressed at the official funeral service of the murdered policemen at St. Paul's Cathedral were a just and genuine expression of the obligation we all feel ourselves to be under to the finest police force in the world. It was an extraordinary story which came out piecemeal at the inquests on the bodies of the murdered men. In Houndsditch there are many good shops, although squalid houses and streets lie quite near. Persons living next to the shop of Mr. Harris, a jeweller, had their suspicions excited by curious sounds of hammering, and reported these to the police. Some foreigners had recently rented a house in a small court known as Exchange Buildings, at the back of Mr. Harris's shop, and it was thought that they might be tunnelling through the walls to get at Mr. Harris's safe. Rumour said the safe contained things worth £30,000. Seven policemen altogether, two of them in plain clothes, gathered near the suspected house, No. 11 Exchange Buildings, and near Mr. Harris's shop, to find out what was happening. At the inquest on the body of Sergeant Bentley, James Martin, a plain- clothes constable, said he was patrolling Houndsditch in company with Constable Strongman when they met Sergeant Bentley, who said : " There is a noise at the back of Mr. Harris's shop." Strongman was sent to the police- station to telephone for Mr. Harris, who does not live at his shop, and Sergeant Bentley and Martin went to the back of the shop,—to Exchange Buildings. In a short time the other policemen arrived. The party then con- sisted of Sergeants Bentley, Tucker, and Bryant, and Constables Choat, Strongman, Martin, and Woodhams.
Sergeant Bentley knocked at the door of No. 11 Exchange Buildings. The door opened about six inches. " Have you been working here or knocking about inside? " asked Bentley of the man who peered out. There was no answer. " Do you understand English ? " was the next question. Again there was no answer. Then Bentley said : " If you have got any one who understands English, fetch him up." The door closed till only about an inch remained open, and the man who had dimly been seen within apparently went upstairs. Up to this point the police had not cared, it seems, to violate the privacy of a house which they were not at all sure was connected with the knocking, even if the knocking had any sinister meaning, of which there was no evidence as yet. But when the foreigner went upstairs—the stairs were behind the door—. Bentley stepped inside the house. He stood there a minute or so, still not wishing to penetrate further if he could get any satisfactory answer to his questions. At the end of the short wait the back door of the house, which was apparently in a line with the front door, flew open, and a hand and arm were thrust in. The hand held a revolver. That was seen by Martin. There was a flash and a report, and Sergeant Bryant and Martin rushed forwards to the front door from the pavement where they had been standing. As they did so another flash was seen from the stairs. It is not clear from the accounts of the inquest exactly what happened next. Sergeant Bentley fell backwards, perhaps pushed, through the open front doorway, and the front door itself seems to have been swung to till only a crack remained open. Through this crack a hand appeared with a revolver, and the hand turned about and fired up and down the street. In a few seconds Sergeant Bryant was leaning wounded against the house ; Bentley was lying on the pavement; Choat and Woodhams were lying in the road further away ; Martin fell over, but was not wounded ; Strongman was also lying in the road. " It was only two seconds after the first report," said Martin, " that they were all lying in the street." This account of such rapid but confused events naturally omits some facts. Sergeant Tucker is not men- tioned. It is from the report of the inquests on Tucker and Constable Choat that we learn that Strongman helped Tucker to walk a short way from Exchange Buildings, and that then Tucker sank down on the pavement and died. Choat died in the London Hospital about five in the morning. He had eight bullet wounds, and it is said that the murderers used automatic pistols and soft-nosed bullets. Bentley died in St. Bartholomew's Hospital at half-past seven in the morning.
No one saw the murderers escape from 11 Exchange Buildings. But an extraordinary part of the story has yet to come. A doctor in Commercial Road was called up at half-past three in the morning by a woman who said he was wanted at once. He dressed and came down, and found two women waiting for him. No questions were asked. The women, muttering to one another in some unrecognisable language, walked in front of the doctor. Presently one woman went away, and the other led the doctor to 59 Grove Street, where he and she had some difficulty in getting into the house. After they had knocked loudly for a considerable time the door opened. No one was seen to open it, but there were noises as though some person had come out of the neighbouring room and quickly slipped back again. All this time no conversation had taken place between the doctor and the woman. When asked at one of the inquests if it was not a strange thing to be called urgently to a house, and then not to be able for some time to get in, the doctor said: " That very often happens." The woman led the way upstairs. The house was dark. The doctor struck a match, and followed the woman to a room where he saw a man lying on a bed, and mumbling to himself. The man, who said his name was George Gardstein, was mortally wounded. He had foreign features, and spoke in very broken English. He said he had been shot by a friend in mistake. The doctor could get no information from the woman ; the only language he could make her understand was French. The doctor suggested that the man should be taken to the London Hospital. Both the man and woman at once exclaimed " No, no ! " An hour later the doctor took the woman to his surgery and gave her a narcotic for the man. Later in the day he revisited the house in Grove Street. Directly he knocked at the door it was opened by two young men. The doctor said : " How is the man upstairs ? " They answered that they knew nothing about him. The doctor went upstairs and found that the wounded man had died. The woman was not there. Only the dead body was in the room. The doctor noticed little else except that the room was in disorder and a mandoline was lying on a table. The dead man, said the doctor, had " small soft bands" as though he had never done any manual work. Is it possible that Mr. Harris was to be robbed in the interests of some anarchical society abroad ? Is it possible, also, that this dead foreigner was killed, not by accident, but because he was suspected of having betrayed his fellows ? In the room the police who came later found a Mauser pistol and ammunition and a dagger. The two women who called up the doctor in the early hours of Saturday morning are under arrest. They are Russians. One of them has been recognised as having been seen at Exchange Buildings, and the police say that in the house in Grove Street she burnt a great quantity of papers. At this period facts fail us, and we must wait for the adjourned inquiries.
As to the arming of the police, it is customary to keep a stock of pistols at the police-stations for specially dangerous work. These can always be placed in the hands of those who are fit to use them. A general arming of the police would be a danger to the public, because a policeman in a "tight place" might be tempted to fire on a mob and very likely would wound some innocent person. More- over, if all policemen were armed, the consequence might easily be that English burglars would feel that their safety depended upon their being able to retaliate in kind. In France the weapons of the police are matched by the weapons of criminals. We believe the practical solution of the difficulty is—what really holds good now—that it should not be formally laid. down that the police are to be unarmed ; that the dangerous foreign criminal should know that the police who are tracking him have the authority to be armed, and that in their particular search for him they very likely are armed. Many detectives are now looking for those who were known as associates of the dead man Gardstein. These, we believe, are armed. We may point out that the policemen who gathered round 11 Exchange Buildings would not have been armed unless universal arming of the force in all circumstances had been the practice. They were not searching for particular criminals, and had only a vague suggestion of robbery to investigate. The case is therefore not relevant to the demand that the police shall always be armed when on the track of foreign criminals That selected officers might more often be armed in carrying out their duties in certain parts of London we think desirable. But this seems to be possible under the discretion now allowed to the authorities. The use of revolvers needs most careful training, and we are entirely opposed in the interests of the police themselves, as well as in that of the public, to the force being generally armed.
Previous page
