On a bright Sunday morning seventy-five years ago today the East End became a battlefield in the continental struggle between Fascism and democracy that would engulf the world three years later.
The Battle of Cable Street (external link) now rightly enjoys legendary status. Looking at the grainy images of the day’s events is a powerful reminder of a time when so much was at stake and how an East London conflict could have global resonance.
On October 4th 1936 Oswald Mosley intended to commemorate the fourth founding anniversary of his British Union of Fascists by marching around 3000 ‘Blackshirts’ into the heart of the East End.
Over sixty per cent of London’s Jewish community lived in this area of London. In the thirties the narrow, overcrowded streets of Stepney were home to around half the East End Jewish population. Yiddish was spoken on the streets and a quarter of the population had been born overseas, mostly in Eastern Europe. Many had fled anti-Semitic persecution in their homelands.
Mosley planned to inspect his black-uniformed legion, now renamed the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists, at Tower Hill before marching toward four meeting points at Limehouse, Bow, Shoreditch and Bethnal Green. A grand rally was scheduled to take place in the evening at Victoria Park.
Bankrolled by the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, the Blackshirts were making political capital out of the poverty and slum deprivation that blighted the East End. Blackshirt propaganda, spat from the mouths of street corner demagogues Mick Clarke and William Joyce (later to become infamous as Lord Haw-Haw, the Nazi propagandist hanged for treason in 1946), cynically blamed Jews for the appalling conditions in which Eastenders lived and worked. In the run up to October 4th Mosley’s Blackshirts employed Nazi Brown Shirt methods to intimidate the local Jewish population in Stepney. Jewish shops were daubed with graffiti urging local people to boycott them.
Concerned by the potential for violent disorder, Stepney’s mayor asked the Home Office to ban the Blackshirt march. The grassroots Jewish People’s Council Against Fascism and Anti-Semitism organised a 100, 000 strong petition against it but the Home Secretary John Simon was dismissive. He claimed that banning the march would infringe the Blackshirts’ right to free speech. In response the local community mobilised to halt them at Gardiner’s Corner, preventing the march from reaching the main artery of Commercial Road. The call to resist was made by both left-wing organisations and Jewish community groups. The anti-fascists adopted the Spanish Republican slogan from the defence of Madrid that summer – ‘No Pasarán’ (‘They Shall Not Pass’).
By 1.30pm crowds numbering tens of thousands were arriving. Police violence toward an earlier parade of Jewish ex-servicemen on the Whitechapel Road heightened feelings of anger and suspicions over fascist sympathies among the authorities. In fact these suspicions were well-founded – Mosley’s Establishment connections extended into the higher echelons of Stanley Baldwin’s government and the armed forces. Despite police collaboration, the anti-fascists kept one step ahead of their opponents by organising a network of spotters on bicycles and infiltrators within the ranks of the Blackshirts. One spy, the Communist medical student Hugh Faulkner, was regularly telephoning the anti-fascists from Tower Hill with updates on the Blackshirts’ movements.
As Whitechapel High Street thronged with protestors, anti-fascist tram drivers jumped off leaving their vehicles as a huge metallic road block. Six thousand Metropolitan Policemen, including a division on horseback, baton-charged the demonstrators. Their attempts to clear a path for the Blackshirts were frustrated by a crowd now swelled into the hundreds of thousands. A police autogyro buzzed menacingly in the skies overhead. With the support of the police, the Blackshirts attempted to march up Royal Mint Street onto Cable Street instead. Anticipating this move, the anti-fascists had already erected barricades along Cable Street at its narrowest choke points using materials from a nearby timber yard and an overturned lorry.
Cable Street ran almost the entire length of Stepney and had seen centuries of immigration. The street itself was mainly a mixture of Jewish and Irish residents; a densely populated row of shop fronts with cramped tenement housing above. Crucially it bordered Wapping, home to the largely Irish immigrant community around the docks. Jewish tailors’ families had taken in the hungry children of Irish dockers during the strike of 1911. To repay the debt a powerful contingent of Irish dockers headed for Cable Street to man the barricades. As the police attempted to breach the defences, Cable Street residents rained down missiles upon them from the windows above. At 3.40pm from his headquarters in a side street off Tower Hill, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Philip Game ordered the march to be turned back. Mosley’s followers were forced into a humiliating retreat and headed for the Embankment before dispersing.
Although the Battle of Cable Street was a long nail in the Blackshirts’ coffin, it did not signal their immediate defeat – internment as wartime traitors marked their final inglorious end. Nor did Cable Street mean the demise of Oswald Mosley – he returned in 1948 as leader of the Union Movement which found a fresh target for racism in London’s newly-arrived Caribbean immigrants. Events at Cable Street did however inspire a generation in their refusal to capitulate in the face of fascist tyranny. This spirit led many to volunteer to fight for the Spanish Republic and in the ranks of the British armed forces when war broke out in 1939. One anti-fascist teenager arrested that day in 1936, Charlie Goodman, went on to see action in both the Spanish Civil War and World War Two. Those who stood at Gardiner’s Corner and manned the barricades on Cable Street were in many cases motivated by political conviction, but also simple social solidarity with their friends and neighbours. One participant, Julie Gershon recalled, ‘It was terrific to watch. Something you could never forget. I can remember the old girls with their aprons on…with shawls around their shoulders and glory on their faces’.
The Cable Street we see in the black and white photographs is now long gone, obliterated by the Luftwaffe’s bombs. The Jews and the Irish have now mostly moved out to be replaced by a predominantly Bengali community. Seventy-five years on however, the memory of the Battle of Cable Street remains very much alive in the local community through a series of commemorative events and the newly restored mural (external link) that covers the side of St George’s Town Hall. Unlike the dictators he sought to emulate, Hitler and Mussolini, Mosley died a peaceful death in self-imposed exile. Somehow one suspects that that sunny October day in 1936 was never far from his thoughts though.
Images courtesy of the Bishopsgate Institute.
