Tottenham Outrage

The Tottenham Outrage of 23 January 1909 was an armed robbery in Tottenham, North London, that resulted in a two-hour chase between the police and armed criminals over a distance of six miles (10 km), with an estimated 400 rounds of ammunition fired by the thieves. The robbery, of workers' wages from the Schnurmann rubber factory, was carried out by Paul Helfeld and Jacob Lepidus, Jewish Latvian immigrants. Of the twenty-three casualties, two were fatal and several others serious, among them seven policemen. The two thieves killed themselves at the end of the pursuit.

Helfeld and Lepidus were members of a Latvian socialist party responsible for smuggling revolutionary literature into Russia. Both had been living with Lepidus's brother Paul in Paris in 1907 when Paul was killed by the premature detonation of the bomb he was carrying to assassinate the president of France, Armand Fallières. They fled France to north London, where they became members of a small group of Latvian agitators. For some time before the robbery, Helfeld was employed at the Schnurmann factory.

The bravery of the police during the chase led to the creation of the King's Police Medal, which was awarded to several of those involved in the pursuit. A joint funeral for the two victims—Police Constable William Tyler and Ralph Joscelyne, a ten-year-old boy—was attended by a crowd of up to half a million mourners, including 2,000 policemen. The event exacerbated ill feeling towards immigrants in London, and much of the press coverage was anti-Semitic in nature. This affected public sentiment after another armed robbery by Latvian immigrants in December 1910, which resulted in the murder of three policemen; the events culminated in the siege of Sidney Street.