This piece about Conrad's The Secret Agent and Edwardian terrorism appears this week in the '100 years ago' issue of Time Out London (link now fixed):
A national newspaper fulminates at the way London has become a safe haven for ‘gangs of assassins’. Foreign governments complain about the readiness of the British to grant asylum to political fugitives. And a leading novelist publishes a book about the ‘blood-stained inanity’ of an infamous terrorist outrage. But this isn’t London in 2007: the newspaper isn’t the Daily Mail and the writer in question isn’t Martin Amis or Ian McEwan. The strident editorial is from the Globe and the year is 1907, when Joseph Conrad published ‘The Secret Agent’, a novel based on an anarchist bomb attack that took place some 13 years earlier.
When Conrad’s novel opens, Adolf Verloc, an agent provocateur, has been in the pay of one of the great European powers for 11 years. As cover, Verloc keeps a gloomy shop in Soho, where he lives with his mother in law, his wife and her dim brother Stevie. Verloc is summoned to the embassy in London to meet First Secretary Mr Vladimir. He has been called in because Vladimir is in despair at the ‘leniency of the judicial procedures’ in Britain. Something needs to be done about the lack of ‘repressive measures’ taken against the political exiles who have sought asylum in London.
This is a fairly accurate portrayal of the attitude of European governments at the time to Britain’s asylum laws, which were comparatively liberal, even after the passing of the Aliens Act in 1905. The Act was drafted in response to anxieties about the numbers of Russian and Polish Jews settling in the East End and was aimed principally at excluding the destitute and the diseased, exceptions being made for those fleeing persecution.
Many of the exiles enjoying British hospitality in London at the turn of the century were anarchists, like Peter Kropotkin and Henri Malatesta, and some of them veterans of the bombing campaigns conducted across mainland Europe during the 1890s. They happily took advantage of Britain’s refusal to sign protocols of international police cooperation drafted at two conferences for ‘Social Defence Against Anarchists’.
In order to get the British to wake up to the anarchist threat, Vladimir proposes that Verloc arrange a spectacular terrorist act in London. And what could be more spectacular, he thinks, than an attack, not on royalty or religion, but on the ‘sacrosanct fetish’ of the day: science. Vladimir instructs Verloc to prepare a bomb attack on Greenwich Observatory, a landmark known throughout the ‘civilised world’.
Verloc recruits the suggestible Stevie to carry the explosives. But the plot goes catastrophically wrong when he stumbles in the fog enveloping Greenwich Park and blows himself, and not the intended target, to bits. ‘They had to fetch a shovel to gather him up with,’ a policeman observes.
It seems that Conrad derived this and other details in his book from contemporary reports of the ‘Greenwich Bomb Outrage’ of February 1894, in which a French anarchist named Martial Bourdin botched his attempt to blow up the Observatory. The Morning Leader reported that Bourdin was ‘blown to pieces’, and described how police had to peel human flesh from the park railings. Bourdin, a habitué of the Autonomie Club, an anarchist meeting-place in Windmill Street, just off Tottenham Court Road, had been accompanied to Greenwich by his brother-in-law HB Samuel, editor of the journal Commonweal. In a pamphlet entitled ‘The Greenwich Mystery’, which Conrad seems to have read, David Nicoll, who edited the Anarchist newspaper, fingered Samuel as a spy working on behalf of ‘Continental despotisms anxious to lay hands on the refugees from their tyranny’.
But if the intention of the Greenwich plot was to discredit the anarchists, then it largely failed. The anarchist press in London continued to thrive. As well as the Commonweal and the Anarchist, there was Arbeter Fraynd, the organ of Yiddish-speaking anarchists in Britain, and The Torch, a ‘revolutionary journal of anarchist communism’ produced by the three barely pubescent children of William Michael Rossetti, Her Majesty’s Secretary to the Inland Revenue, and printed in a basement near Regent’s Park.
It was the activities of a gang of Latvian refugees that did most to bring anarchism into disrepute in the years following the publication of ‘The Secret Agent, before it was finished off for good by the Aliens Restriction Act and the outbreak of war in 1914. Between 1909 and 1911, the Latvians, led by Peter Piaktow, funded their political activity by ‘expropriations’, mostly carried out at the barrel of a gun. In the ‘Tottenham Outrage’ of 1909, for example, two people died and 27 were injured after police chased armed anarchists for six miles following an attempted wages snatch.
But Piaktow’s outfit are best known for their part in the Sidney Street Siege of January 1911. Peter and two accomplices, on the run after another bungled robbery, were reported to be holed up in a rooming house in Stepney. Armed police laid siege to the building, and on the morning of January 3 a fierce gun battle broke out, observed, at some risk to his own safety, by the Home Secretary Winston Churchill. After the building caught fire, the bodies of two of the anarchists were recovered. But no trace of Peter was ever found. He had disappeared, and anarchism, as a serious political presence in Britain, was about to do the same.