ENGLAND WILL RISE AGAIN

Today is Sunday, January 23rd, 2005. Today 96 years ago, London, England, was rocked by a terrorist outrage. Two Latvian socialists robbed a rubber factory's weekly payroll outside Tottenham London Metropolitan Police Station. They grabbed £80 but were immediately chased by the rubber factory workers, and so the Latvian socialists attempted to shoot their way out.

A dramatic pursuit ensued involving horses and carts, bicycles, cars and a hijacked tram. The fleeing socialists fired some 400 shots, leaving a policeman and a child dead, and some two dozen other casualties, before they were ultimately brought to bay. They had been chased by an extraordinary posse of policemen and local people, armed and unarmed. Along the way, the London Metropolitan Police (whose gun cupboard had been locked, and the key mislaid) had borrowed about eight pistols from passers-by in the street, while other pistol toting citizens joined the chase in person.

Today, when Londoners are inured to the idea of armed robbery and drive-by shootings, the aspect of the "Tottenham Outrage" that is most likely to shock is the fact that so many ordinary members of the public at that time should have been carrying guns in the street. Bombarded with headlines about an emergent "gun culture" in England now, folks are apt to forget that the real novelty is the notion that the general populace in England should be disarmed.

In a material sense, England today has much less of a "gun culture" than at any time in its recent history. A century ago, the possession and carrying of firearms was perfectly normal in England. Firearms were sold without license in gun stores and hardware stores in virtually every town in the country, and grand department stores such as Selfridge's even offered customers an in-house handgun shooting range. There was a thriving domestic industry producing shotguns, rifles, pistols, and revolvers, and an extensive import trade in the cheap handguns that today would be called "Saturday Night Specials". Conan Doyle's Dr. Watson, dropping a revolver in his pocket before going out about town, illustrates a real commonplace of that time. Beatrix Potter's journal records a discussion at a small country hotel in Yorkshire County, where it turned out that only one of the nine guests was not carrying a revolver.

We should not fool ourselves, however, that such things were possible then because England society was more peaceful. Those years were ones of much more social and political turbulence than of England's today: with violent and incendiary suffrage protests, massive industrial strikes where the United Kingdom Army was called in and people were killed, where there was the menace of a revolutionary General Strike, and where the United Kingdom was riven by the imminent prospect of a civil war in Eire. It was in such a society that, as late as 1914, the right even of an Eire resident to carry a loaded revolver in the streets of England was upheld in the courts (Rex v. Smith, K.B. 1914) as a manifestation simply of the guarantees provided by the Bill of Rights 1688, which had created England's Parliament.

In such troubled times, why did the commonplace carrying of firearms not result in mayhem? How could it be that in the years before the First World War, armed crime in London amounted to less than 2 per cent of today's? One answer that might have been taken as self-evident then, but which has become political anathema in England now, is that the prevalence of firearms had a stabilizing influence and a deterrent effect upon crime. Such deterrent potential was indeed acknowledged in part in England's first Firearms Act, which was introduced as an emergency measure in response to imaginary fears of a Commie upheaval in 1920. England Home Dept. guidance on the implementation of the 1920 Act recognized "good reason for having a revolver if a person lives in a solitary house, where protection from thieves and burglars is essential". The England Home Dept. issued more restrictive guidance in 1937, but it was only in 1946 that the new Socialist Secretary of the England Home Dept. announced that self-defense would no longer generally be accepted as a good reason for acquiring a pistol (and as late as 1951 this reason was still being proffered in three-quarters of all applications for pistol licenses, and upheld in the courts). Between 1946 and 1951, armed robbery with handguns, averaged under two dozen incidents a year in London; today that number is exceeded every week.

As the 19th century jurist James Paterson remarked in his, Commentaries on the Liberty of the Subject and the Laws of England Relating to the Security of the Person: "In all countries where personal freedom is valued, however much each individual may rely on legal redress, the right of each to carry arms – and these the best and the sharpest – for his own protection in case of extremity, is a right of nature indelible and irrepressible, and the more it is sought to be repressed the more it will recur."

"Gun Control" in England is a recent experiment, in which the progressive "toughening" of the regulation of legal gun ownership has been followed by an increasingly dramatic rise in violent armed crime. Eighty-four years after the legal availability of pistols was restricted to Firearm Certificate holders, and seven years after their private possession was generally prohibited, they still figure in 58 per cent of armed crimes. England Home Dept. evidence to the Scotland Dunblane Inquiry prior to the 1997 handgun ban indicated that there was an annual average of just two incidents in which licensed pistols appeared in crime in England, Scotland, Ulster, and Wales combined. If, as the England Home Dept. still asserts, "there are links between firearms licensing and armed crime", the past century of England's experience has shown that link to be a sharply negative one.

If England was a safer country without the present system of denying firearms to the law-abiding, is deregulation an option? That is precisely the course that has been pursued, with conspicuous success in combating violent crime, in the United States.

For a long time it has been possible to draw a map of the United States showing the inverse relationship between gun rights laws and violent crime. At one end of the scale are the "murder capital" towns of Washington, Chicago and New York, with their gun bans (City of New York has had a theoretical general prohibition of handguns since 1911); at the other extreme, the State of Vermont, without any anti-gun laws, and with the lowest rate of violent crime in the Union (a 13th that of England). From the late 1980s, however, the relative proportions on the map have changed radically. Prior to that time it was illegal in much of the United States to carry any concealed deadly weapon outside of the home or workplace, but the State of Florida set a new legislative trend in 1987, with the introduction of "right-to-carry" permits for concealed firearms.

Issue of the new permits to law-abiding citizens was absolutely non-discretionary, and of course aroused a furor among gun control advocates, who predicted that blood would flow in the streets. The prediction proved false; Florida's homicide rate dropped, and firearms abuse by permit holders was virtually non-existent. State after state followed Florida's suit, and now in 2005 mandatory right-to-carry policies are in place in 38 out of the 50 United States.

In a nationwide survey of the impact of the legislation, John Lott and David Mustard of the University of Chicago found that by 1992, right-to-carry states had already seen an 8 per cent reduction in murders, 7 per cent reduction in aggravated assaults, and 5 per cent reduction in rapes. Extrapolating from the 10 states that had then implemented the policy, Lott and Mustard calculated that had right-to-carry legislation been nationwide, an annual average of some 1400 murders, 4200 rapes and more than 60000 aggravated assaults might have been averted. The survey has lent further support to the research of Professor Kleck, of Florida State University, who found that firearms in the United States serve to deter crime at least three times as often as they appear in its commission.

Over the last 25 years the number of firearms in private hands in the United States has more than doubled. At the same time the violent crime rate has dropped dramatically, with the significant downswing following the spread of right-to-carry legislation. The U.S. Justice Dept. observes that "firearms-related crime has plummeted since 1993", and it has declined also as a proportion of overall violent offences. Violent crime in total has declined so much since 1994 that it has now reached, the U.S. Justice Dept. states, "the lowest level ever recorded". While U.S. "gun culture" is still regularly the sensational subject of England media demonisation, the grim fact is that England now suffers three times the level of violent crime committed in the United States.

Today, on this anniversary of the "Tottenham Outrage", it is appropriate to reflect upon how the objects of outrage in England have changed within a lifetime. If the notion of an armed England citizenry is now an anathema, what might the Englanders of 1909 have made of England's violent, disarmed society of today?

The London Sunday Telegraph newspaper

Compare & contrast

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/01/23/do2302.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2005/01/23/ixopinion.html

"There's only one way to protect ourselves – and here's the proof
By Richard Munday
(Filed: 23/01/2005)

Today, 96 years ago, London was rocked by a terrorist outrage. Two Latvian anarchists, who had crossed the Channel after trying to blow up the president of France, attempted an armed wages robbery in Tottenham. Foiled at the outset when the intended victims fought back, the anarchists attempted to shoot their way out."

And so on

Does everyone on the BWMA site amend their so-called quotations before posting them?

Was your implied criticism fair, Beranger? Were the two reports not different? Anyway, here are more details. Seems that the 'international left' got the blame for these 'anarchists'. Hardly unfair. Of course, the 'international left' are in control these days.

I liked the idea of shots being 'heard in the local police station'. Those were the days...

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Tottenham Outrage 1909


PC William Tyler and 10-year-old Ralph Joscelyne were murdered and 21 people injured by two "anarchist" robbers trying to escape after a wages snatch. Paul Hefeld and Jacob Lepidus were Latvian immigrants who stole the wages from Schnurrman's rubber factory on the corner of Tottenham High Road and Chesnut Road on 23 January 1909.

The two were armed with pistols, and when the chauffeur-driven car carrying the wages clerk drew up they seized the cash bag and shot at the driver and a passing stoker who tried to restrain Lepidus. The shots brought reserve constables William Tyler and Albert Newman running from the police station, later joined by officers from the nearby section house on bicycles, and thus began the long chase during which the anarchists would fire over 400 rounds at their many pursuers.

At Mitchley Road Mission Hall PC Newman urged the chauffeur to try to run down the gunmen with the wages car. In response, Lepidus and Hefeld shot and injured Newman and the chauffeur, and shot Little Ralph Joscelyne as he ran for the cover of the car. The boy was rushed to hospital but pronounced dead on arrival. Police in the station now smashed open the locked firearms cupboard to bring pistols to the pursuit.

At a railway footbridge leading to Tottenham Marshes, PC Tyler took advantage of the wall cutting off Lepidus and Hefeld's view to race over race ground and catch up with them. 'Come on, give in. The game's up,' he said. Hefeld deliberately shot him in the face at point-blank range. Tyler bled to death in the scullery of a nearby cottage.

The chase became almost farcical as the two men commandeered a tram and forced the conductor to drive it when the driver hid upstairs. The police commandeered a tram going in the opposite direction and made it reverse after them, the occupants of the two trams firing ineffective shots at each other. The conductor got rid of his unwanted passengers by warning them there was a police station round the corner. The gunmen tumbled out and commandeered a parked milk van, immediately wrecking it by cornering too fast. They then stole a parked greengrocers van, but could not force the horse into more than the slowest of ambles because they had omitted to release the break.

The two men then abandoned the van and ran along a path beside Chingford Brook. When the path petered out, leaving them trapped by a high fence, Lepidus scrambled over it. Hefeld was exhausted, and seeing he was about to be arrested, shot himself in the head. He was taken to hospital where he refused to speak until he died three weeks later, with the uninformative remark, "My mother is in Riga." Lepidus, meanwhile, locked himself into the bedroom of a nearby cottage, and used his last bullet to kill himself as officers broke in and fired shots through the door at him.

A collection of £1,055 was raised for PC Tyler's widow. The King's Police Medal was instituted in recognition of the gallantry of those officers who had pursued the murderous pair. The outrage had considerable influence on public and police perception of immigrants and the international left, and provoked some misplaced public anti-Semitism.

Tony

I certainly think my criticism of Xcole is fair. He states that his quote comes from "The London Sunday Telegraph newspaper".

I believe you read the Telegraph as your paper of choice. Do you really think that it would print "If the notion of an armed England citizenry is now an anathema, what might the Englanders of 1909 have made of England's violent, disarmed society of today?" or "England Home Dept. evidence to the Scotland Dunblane Inquiry"

I've provided the link to the Sunday Telegraph article in my post above. Posting the whole thing & asking to contrast & compare would have been a long, long post basically to read the same story twice. Check it out to see what I mean though.

Most of the article is word for word the same, but Xcole has changed/deleted/added various words in every paragraph. To my mind, that does not qualify as "quoting" from the Sunday Telegraph.

Obviously, if there is another "London Sunday Telegraph" (that I am not aware of) that did print Xcole's article, I will apologise fully.

Thanks for the further informative detail about the incident, btw, (I didn't know about either the incident or the fact that it led to the institution of the Police Medal) but I was really making comment about amended information being presented as direct quotes from various sources.

With regard to my implied criticism of yourself, I shall look forward to your reply on the "Re: Ivory Tower - Home of UKMA" thread.

<<<I certainly think my criticism of Xcole is fair>>>

Criticism of Xcole? surely not...

"Does everyone on the BWMA site amend their so-called quotations before posting them? "

I don't "amend" ! :-D


What were anarchists doing stealing money anyway? Money means nothing to anarchists.

Look! I'm burning some now....

Steve:
<What were anarchists doing stealing money anyway? Money means nothing to anarchists.

Look! I'm burning some now....>

Smoke? I smell no smoke

Whoops, have I changed the wording of a quotation? Nahhhh.