The Hero of Sidney Street

I've just come from a particularly unhappy waste of time perusing the A215 Survivors conference in which there was a raging and particularly ridiculous argument about feminism. It ended with fond platitudes from the protagonists, which ought to have been a good thing, but just reminded me of an old couple I know who think that they can say whatever they like to each other so long as they wrap it up nicely with a 'my love', or 'my sweet'. Quite sickeningly fake. I have no idea why I am drawn to it. Anyway my husband chose the much more sensible option of watching Cadfael, which is a very much more useful way of spending an hour.

Here is a completely useless piece I submitted for an assignment. I think, on balance, had I not written it at all, it would have come out better. However, I plan to write it properly as a fiction story based on real events, rather than the completely unsatisfactory method used here:

Life Writing assignment (Biography)
The Hero of Sidney Street

‘Would you like to come and see the anarchists, Will?’

‘Oh yers, not ‘alf!’ replied Arthur’s brother. Arthur had sneaked out of his school in Berkshire Street towards the end of the morning and run to find his brother in the nearby Daintry Street School playground. The boys had heard their mum talking about ‘the anarchists’ that morning with a customer through the fold-down counter-flap at the front of their house; he had come to buy a single Woodbine, which was the way the poor purchased goods. Later, despite the usually strictly-enforced silence in Arthur’s enormous classroom, rumours had had been cautiously passed along the lines of children under the guise of rote-learning; the Houndsditch Murderers had been traced to a little house in Sidney Street and were under siege from the police. ‘Peter the Painter’ was said to be in the house, and the police had evacuated families in neighbouring houses overnight. They would be caned for skipping school, but that would be tomorrow; you would never live your life if you always worried about tomorrow!

The eleven-year-old Arthur and his younger brother ran the three miles through Victoria Park, past the market gardens, cricket ground and boating lake, and on towards Stepney. The journey took them through the weaver’s streets where their Huguenot relatives lived, but the increasing cost of living and their father’s drinking had driven them to increasingly worse accommodations. They were both tiny boys for their age, undernourished like their siblings and the other children living in Hackney Wick. Excitement at the prospect of what they might find helped the exhausted boys to run onward, despite their physical drawbacks.

‘How far is it, now, Arthur?’ asked the panting Will.

‘Just down by the Mile End Road, near the hospital,’ replied his brother, puffing equally hard.

The boys eventually arrived near Sidney Street and squeezed their way to the front of the crowds who milled around, vying for a better view. A short distance ahead of them, newspaper boards littered the street, and a swarm of police stamped their feet on the sodden, January pavements.

‘I dunno that I’m happy being around all these coppers, Arthur. I feel like I’ve done something wrong already!’

‘We shall just duck into the crowd if anyone comes our way, alright?” said Arthur. “They’re too busy to worry about us, anyhow.’

‘Can you see anything? What’s going on? I can’t see anything for coppers!’

'There’s men up on those roofs, do you see?' Men, some armed with guns, others with cameras, peered down the street from behind chimneys. A few ordinary people leaned from upper-storey windows, whilst others sat just inside, dandling watching children on their laps.

‘What are they looking at?’ asked Will.

‘Down there.’ Arthur pointed towards one of the terraced houses, a glut of smoke issuing from the upper windows. Police and soldiers hiding in the buildings opposite had guns trained on the house. ‘Blimey, it’s been blown to smithereens!’

‘That’s right,’ said a youth in the crowd, ‘burned like rats in an oven, I reckon.’

‘Oh, what a shame. We’ve missed it all,’ replied the disappointed Will.

‘Hah! You didn’t want to be here earlier, tosh,’ said the youth. ‘The Gardstein Gang’ve got much better guns than the poxy police. They could shoot you where you stand, but the coppers can only shoot thirty yards with their useless guns – that’s why they had to call in the Scots Guards from the Tower.’

Suddenly there were boos from the crowd and cries of ‘Oo let ‘im in?’ as a dark-coated man with a fur collar and shiny top hat crossed nearby, accompanied by a policeman armed with a double-barrelled shotgun. The police forming the cordon holding back the crowd shifted their stance, ready to quell the first signs of trouble.

'He looks important,' said Will.

'He is,' replied Arthur. 'He’s Winston Churchill. I’ve seen his picture in the papers. Mum said he’s the one that lets all those foreigners in, from Russia and places, like Peter the Painter.'

Churchill looked uneasy and stayed close to the wall, in front of a poster advertising a music hall performance of Dick Whittington, then he knelt down on one knee, took off his hat and held it behind him, peeking gingerly around a corner towards the smoking house. Everyone else, soldiers, police and detectives in plain clothes, walked around and talked as though nothing were happening at all.

'Oh no! Scarper!' cried Arthur, grabbing Will’s arm. He had spotted a man wearing an overcoat and bowler hat and carrying a clipboard approaching them rapidly from the side of the crowd – the school board inspector. The boys ran for it, dodging through the crowds again; the inspectors had a very nasty reputation, and the boys were not about to allow themselves to be caught.


A day or so later, Arthur and Will went to Sweeney Todd’s in Bonner Street. The barber’s real name was Arthur Charles, but his unsavoury manner had earned him the nickname. He always wore a long, black overcoat and a bowler hat pulled right down over his ears, even in summer, but an object of derision throughout the year.

Bonner Street was full of shops of various types, and many of the local boys hung around the area making nuisances of themselves rather than return home to a drunken mother’s or father’s fists, even in the damp winters. Just up the street from the barber’s shop, Arthur and Will knocked at the door of Sigournay’s, the funeral director’s premises. Sigournay came to the door.

‘Ere, what do you want?’ he asked.

‘Got any empty boxes, Mister?’ they asked, and ran away before he could give them a clip round the ear. All the boys did it, but Sigournay never seemed to expect it.

When they got to Sweeney Todd’s, there was already a customer in the chair, so Arthur and Will read the Police Gazette whilst they waited. There was a picture of Churchill kneeling on one knee, holding his hat behind his back, just as they had seen him. The photograph was captioned ‘Hero of Sidney Street’, which made the boys laugh.

‘Hero?’ said Will. ‘He was no hero. He was a cowardy custard!’

‘What’s that?’ roared the barber. ‘Don’t you dare speak ill of your betters, my lads!’

‘Oh blimey, not again!’ said Arthur, grabbing Will’s arm and dragging him out of the shop with the barber in hot pursuit with a broom.


Arthur, or Pop as I knew him, was my grandfather. He lived from 1899 until 2000, and maintained excellent recall throughout his life. During his final years, he told stories about his life which his daughters recorded in careful detail. In this way, he left a legacy of an ordinary man’s memories of life in the East End for the first half of the twentieth century, after which he moved several times, ultimately to Southend-on-Sea. He was amongst the youths who greeted Lenin and also saw Ghandi. During World War I, his protected job making sea-mines saved him from the call-up. He vividly described the effects of the Depression and the friends who ended up living in dugouts in the riverbanks, some of whom committed suicide rather than wait to starve.

The last time I saw him, two weeks before his death, Pop turned to my husband who shared his dislike of the ‘Hero of Sidney Street’ and said:

‘I’ll give your regards to Churchill when I see him, then, shall I?’

1,250 words.