A desperate attempt now was made to clear the space on the west side of the Mansion House, but the difficulty was enormous. A great block of vehicles and foot-passengers spread right across the end of Queen Victoria Street and the Poultry. The mob could only be driven southward or westward through the two narrow necks of Walbrook and Bucklersbury, and those thoroughfares were so packed already that the attempt to clear them was ineffectual. The position was rendered doubly grave by the sudden arrival of another body of police from Cloak Lane, with the result that the people herded in Walbrook found themselves attacked in rear as well as in front. Those who sought to escape via the short curve of Bucklersbury were driven against another force of police at the Queen Victoria Street end, behind whom was a phalanx of omnibuses and cabs, wedged together, and rendering escape impossible. Caught thus, like rats in a trap, the crowd fought desperately. The glass door of a stick and umbrella shop, which had been insufficiently secured, was forced by a band of Leaguers, and with such weapons as the stock afforded the police were furiously belaboured and forced to act on the defensive. At this crisis the electric lights flared out, and those who were near the Mansion House were able to discern the figure of a deformed man standing on the parapet of the book-seller’s shop behind which rises the tower of St Stephen’s church. He was bare-headed, and the blue light shone upon his grizzled hair and strong, pale features. By a movement of the arm he appeared to convey a signal to the outskirts of the crowd where Queen Victoria Street and the Poultry form an angle. At any rate, as if by concerted action, sudden volleys of stones rattled against the north and west fronts of the Lord Mayor’s residence, and a terrific crash of broken glass immediately followed. Within the Mansion House itself, the Chief Clerk, as adviser of the Lord Mayor in criminal matters, had been in attendance for some hours, and with great difficulty the City Solicitor and the Town Clerk had also been brought together to attend a conference. The narrow passage at the rear of the building was strongly guarded by police, and any approach to it from the west had long been impracticable. The legal officials and superior police officers had obtained ingress _via_ George Street on the east, the entrance used being that at which the “Black Maria” usually set down its prisoners for the justice-room.