Spaghetti House siege - September 28, 1975

On this day in 1975, an attempt to rob the Spaghetti House restaurant in London turned into a nearly week-long siege.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class. It's a production of I
Heart Radio. Hi, I'm Eves and Welcome to This Day
in History Class, a show that uncovers history one day
at a time. Today is September. The day was September nine.

(00:28):
As staff at the Spaghetti House restaurant in nights Bridge, London,
we're collecting the week's earnings. Three armed black men burst
into the restaurant and demanded the money. The attempted robbery
turned into a six day siege that led to the
imprisonment of all three of the robbers and an accomplice.
The incident made use of new policing and surveillance techniques,

(00:50):
and it sparked debates along racial lines on whether it
was a political or criminal act. Franklin Davies, Anthony Monroe,
and Wesley Dick are known as Shuya Moshesh broke into
the Spaghetti House early that Sunday morning. They were attempting
to rob the chain's managers as they prepared to deposit
the weekly earnings somewhere between eleven thousand and thirteen thousand

(01:14):
pounds at the bank. The three men took the all
Italian staff down into a basement storeroom, but one manager
escaped and alerted the police. The police quickly arrived at
the scene, blocking off the area and preparing for the
incident to turn violent. As the attempted robbery turned into
a hostage situation, four hundred police officers were involved in

(01:38):
the seed. Davies made demands for a flight to Jamaica,
a radio, and the release of two black people who
were in prison. He was given a radio, coffee, and cigarettes,
but his other demands were not fulfilled. Over the next
couple of days, two hostages were released from the building.
Police were using fiber optic cameras they had installed to

(02:00):
monitor the situation inside the storeroom. Dr Peter Scott, a
forensic psychologist, advised the police on the mental state of
the robbers. After failed negotiations and manipulation of the robbers
via the press, the group surrendered on October three. Davies
had shot himself in the stomach and the police found

(02:21):
him lying in the basement with a note in his pocket,
but still alive. Davies was Nigerian, Dick was West Indian,
and Monroe was Guyanese. In the mid nineteen hundreds, hundreds
of thousands of West Indians already British citizens migrated to
Britain in the seventies. Unemployment, discrimination, poverty, housing issues, and

(02:43):
racist policies led to social and economic turbulence, including uprisings, riots,
and violence directed at black communities by white people. Davis, Monroe,
and Dick were all part of black liberation organizations. Monroe
ran a supplementary school for black children, Dick attended the
sixth pay in African Congress in Tanzania in nineteen seventy

(03:05):
four and volunteered at the Institute of Race Relations. And
Davies had tried to enlist in armies fighting against colonialism
in Africa. He had already served a sentence for armed robbery.
They told police that they were part of the Black
Liberation Army and that they were resisting capitalism and black oppression,
but the police dismissed the racial component and political aims

(03:28):
of the robbery, claiming that it was just a criminal
robbery gone wrong. Newspaper articles, editorials, and letters to the
editor were published concerning the siege. Mainstream media presented the
three men as criminals with no clear motivation who represented
the larger problem of race danger. While many people in

(03:48):
the black community recognized the incident as an effort in
the fight against a racist society that owed its dues
after years of oppression and theft. Less than a week
after the siege in did the spaghetti house reopened for business.
The trial for the siege began in June of nineteen
seventy six. Dick, Monroe, and Davies, as well as three

(04:09):
of their accomplices, were charged with armed robbery, holding people hostage, conspiracy,
and assisting the robbery. The three robbers chose not to
have legal representation during the trial. They turned their backs
on the judge and held up a poster in protest.
They were then sent back to their holding sales, where
they remained until the verdict and sentencing. Monroe, Dick, and

(04:33):
Davies got seventeen, eighteen and twenty one years, respectively in prison.
The nineteen seventy six play A Hole in Babylon by
Horace Ova and the nineteen seventy eight novel The Siege
of Babylon by Farouke Dondee were inspired by the conflict
surrounding the Spaghetti House siege. I'm Eves Jeffcote, and hopefully
you know a little more about history today than you

(04:55):
did yesterday. We love it if you left us a
comment on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook at t D i
h C podcast, thanks for joining me on this trip
through history. See you here, same place tomorrow. For more

(05:18):
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