Talking Pictures TV is showing the 1960 British film The Siege of Sidney Street at 22:05 this evening. Thrill to Peter Wyngarde as Peter the Painter. [Later. It's now on the channel's catch-up service TPTV Encore.]
The siege. a real event from 1911, is famous because the Liberal home secretary Winston Churchill called out the Army to deal with two Latvian revolutionary anarchists and had himself photographed at the scene, apparently directing operations.
This gives me an excuse to repeat this extract from Lucy Masterman's biography of her husband Charles, who at the time was Churchill's deputy:
The "Sidney Street incident" had taken place while we were abroad, and the Home Secretary, Mr. Churchill, had incurred a certain amount of criticism for calling out the troops and for being there himself. As Mr Balfour observed later, "I understand what the photographer was doing but why the Home Secretary?"
The story was told in heightened terms in the foreign press, with illustrations in red and blue; every English person we encountered demanded what was happening, with vocal complaints that they did not expect this sort of action by a British Government. I will not deny that by the time he reached home Masterman's official loyalty was beginning to show signs of wear and tear.
He burst into Mr. Churchill's room at the Home Office with the query "What the hell have you been doing now, Winston?" The reply, in Winston's characteristic lisp, was unanswerable. "Now Charlie. Don't be croth. It was such fun."
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