The King Street Siege
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Inside the Deadly King Street Siege That Claimed a Policeman’s Life in Newtown in 1906
By Elliot Lindsay
News of the disturbance reached the Newtown Police Station. Constable Russell was the first to respond, but wisely telephoned for assistance. First-class Constable John Wallace – on reserve duty that morning – answered the call.
Wallace, 43, was one of the most popular officers attached to the Newtown station. Only weeks earlier, on 15 January, the New South Wales Police Widows’ Fund had held its annual meeting at the very same station. The committee had praised the “large increase of membership” and “sound position” of the funds, congratulating secretary Constable John Wallace on his success.
Wallace lived with his wife Frances and their two young children – five-year-old Eddie and a baby – at 21 Hopetoun Street; the cottage was named “Balcarras,” just a short walk from the station. On this Sunday he grabbed his revolver and headed to 67 King Street, Newtown.
En route he met Senior-constable Maunsell, who jumped off a tram near the Newtown Post Office when Wallace called out that he was responding to trouble at King Street. Neither man knew the full danger. A crowd had already gathered along the street outside the terrace house.
Charles Fenwick, who lived in the house, told them there was a madman inside, but gave no further details. The front door was locked, so the two officers decided to enter through the front windows facing King Street. Maunsell took one window, Wallace the other.
Inside the darkened hall, curtains partially blocking their view, Maunsell spotted a figure near the kitchen passage. “Hello, old fellow! What’s the matter? Come out here!” he called. Wallace added, “What is this all about?”
Two shots rang out. Wallace fell groaning, hit once in the abdomen and once in the left shoulder and arm. Maunsell fired twice in return but could not be sure he had hit the assailant. More shots echoed as Wallace lay dying on the hall floor.
On a quiet Sunday morning in February 1906, the streets of Newtown were filled with the gentle sounds of church services beginning. Families strolled along King Street, trams rattled past, and the suburb’s suburban calm seemed unbreakable. But at No. 67, a solid two-storey home that stretched from its King Street frontage all the way back through its yard to Campbell Street, horror was about to erupt.
What began as a simple wage dispute in the backyard would escalate into a desperate hour-and-a-half siege, claim the life of a popular local policeman, and leave bullet holes in the walls of an ordinary Newtown house. This is the story of the King Street Siege, a tragic event long ago forgotten.
How the siege began
The Fenwick family had only lived at 67 King Street for three years. Sarah Fenwick was the widow of Captain Thomas Fenwick, who had founded the successful J. Fenwick & Co. tugboat company in Balmain in 1870 with his brother John. Thomas relocated to Ballina to establish a northern branch of the Fenwick shipping business.
However, after his first wife’s death, Thomas married Sarah Shaw of the prominent Shaw family in 1882. In 1886 they constructed the grand Fenwick House overlooking Shaw Bay on the Richmond River. Following Thomas’s death in 1896, Sarah and her younger children sold Fenwick House and relocated to Sydney, settling into the respectable suburban life of Newtown.
With them came a loyal servant: Willie Tanna, a powerfully built South Sea Islander from the island of Tanna in southern Vanuatu. From the 1860s, men and women from the Pacific Islands, often called “Kanakas,” had been recruited (sometimes forcibly) to work the cane fields of northern Queensland under indentured labour schemes. Tanna had served his time there, likely enduring brutal conditions, before moving south to Ballina in the 1890s, where he worked on the Fenwick estate as a groom and gardener.
When the family moved to Newtown in 1903, Tanna initially stayed behind but soon followed, attaching himself once more to his former employers. Sarah had no paid work for him, yet she allowed the 32-year-old to occupy a small isolated wooden room in the backyard, right behind the bathroom that opened onto the yard facing Campbell Street. He picked up gardening jobs around the suburb and was regarded as quiet and inoffensive.
By early 1906, the relationship between Tanna and the Fenwicks had grown troublesome. He began demanding money he believed was owed to him. On Sunday 11 February, around 10 a.m., he sent word via Marion Fenwick, Sarah’s 18-year-old daughter, that he wanted his bill made up.
Charles Fenwick, the 22-year-old eldest son, went out to the yard to settle the matter. “I went to him and said, ‘Get it made up and I’ll pay you what we owe. Now, how much is it?’” Charles later recounted. “Willie said ‘£40 6s.’ I said, ‘What! Who made that up?’ He answered, ‘Never mind.’” Charles insisted they owed nothing and suggested Tanna see a solicitor. At that, Tanna pulled a revolver from his pocket and clicked it in Charles’ face. The gun misfired. Charles bolted for the hall door.
Tanna was after him in an instant, though now armed with a Winchester repeating rifle. A desperate struggle erupted at the hall door of the terrace. Charles seized the rifle, his brother Bisset Fenwick wrenched it away and carried it into the dining room whose windows looked out over the backyard.
Tanna bit Charles’s wrist, but the brothers managed to push him out. Moments later Tanna bounded back through the open dining-room window, revolver in hand. He fired twice at Bisset from just a few feet away; both shots missed, embedding in the walls. The entire Fenwick family fled through front and side doors, some scrambling out windows onto King Street itself. Twelve-year-old Joseph ran to find a constable.
Poor Constable Wallace had no idea how serious the situation was when he arrived at the scene. Had he been better informed it is unlikely he would have walked blindly into a gunfight.
What followed Wallace’s shooting was a full-scale siege at 67 King Street. Inspector Elliott hurried from the Newtown Police Station and took command. Reinforcements poured in: Constables Charlton (who had rushed from St Peters), Truscott, Iverach, McMaster and others. They smashed open the front door. Tanna had retreated into the small dining room behind the hall, then into the kitchen.
Police smashed windows and doors; bullets flew in both directions. Constable Truscott, battering down the kitchen-dining room door with Iverach, came within centimetres of death as one bullet tore through his jumper sleeve, another struck his breast pocket (saved by a notebook) and exited six inches away.
Constable Charlton performed an extraordinary act of bravery: he dashed into the hall under fire, lifted the wounded Wallace, and carried him through the front room window to the King Street verandah for evacuation to the nearby Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. Constable Wallace died shortly thereafter due to the severity of his wounds.
Tanna, now wounded in the thigh and calf by police revolver fire, took his final stand in the bathroom at the rear of the property – the small room directly behind which his own wooden quarters stood. Police surrounded the house, posting men on fences, roofs, and even in the adjacent Trocadero building and the yard of Mr Williams’ livery stable next door. They called on him to surrender.
“I want my money!” Tanna shouted repeatedly. Officers promised he would get it if he came out. “I will shoot myself,” he replied. A single shot rang out. When police forced the bathroom door, they found Tanna dying from a self-inflicted chest wound. Thirty rounds of ammunition were still on his body.
The Fenwick family owed no debt to Tanna, the inquest later confirmed. At the Coroner’s Court, the Fenwicks, police witnesses and even a West Indian friend of Tanna gave evidence. The coroner ruled that Wallace had been “maliciously slain” by William Tanna, who then committed suicide. He praised the bravery of every officer involved.
The funeral of Constable Wallace was one of the largest Newtown had ever seen. On 12 February his coffin was carried across the Newtown Railway Bridge in a solemn procession watched by hundreds lining the streets. He was laid to rest at Rookwood Cemetery. At 21 Hopetoun Street, his widow Frances collapsed in hysteria when the news arrived. Young Eddie refused breakfast, repeating, “I’m waiting for dada.” The irony was cruel: the man who had so diligently managed the Police Widows’ Fund had now left his own family to benefit from it.
The house at 67 King Street looks different today. Later in the century the front of the house was extended to the footpath and converted into a shop. The graceful verandah and garden erased from memory. In recent years, the scene of so much anger has been calmed with the tranquillity of a yoga studio.
However, the building still bears faint scars, patched bullet holes in walls that once echoed with gunfire. Today, as locals walk King Street past the very spot where trams once stopped and police rushed in, the King Street Siege remains a sobering reminder of how quickly suburban peace can shatter.
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