Remember the Battle of Cable Street : No pasaran !

 

                                Detail from Cable Street Mural

 I have made a point of annually remembering that on this day 4th October, 1936, the Battle of Cable Street when Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists attempted to march through the predominately  Jewish section of East London, to be met by over 100,000 local residents and workers who fought with the fascists and the police  in order to protect their community, which forced the march to be abandoned.  The people of the East End inflicting a massive defeat on  Mosley’s British Union of Fascists that must never be forgotten. 

During this time Britain was facing very serious economic problems,  with a climate of mass unemployment and economic depression, and far right forces were intent on using this in order to exploit division and stir up hate. Oswald Mosley, a former member of Parliament known for his public speaking skills, founded the BUF in 1932, and within two years membership had grown to 50,000. Mosley's  fascists held vile anti-semitic views and tried to blame Jews for the cause of the country's problems. Throughout the mid 1930s, the BUF moved closer towards Hitler’s form of fascism with Mosley himself saying that “fascism can and will win in Britain”. The British fascists took on a more vehemently anti-Semitic stance, describing Jews as “rats and vermin from whitechapel” and tried to blame Jews for the cause of the country's problems. Mosley’s blackshirts had been harassing the sizeable Jewish population in the East End all through the 1930s. By 1936 anti-semitic assaults by fascists were growing and windows of Jewish-owned businesses were routinely smashed. Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’  The notorious Daily Mail headline is just one chilling indication of the very real threat Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists posed in the mid 1930s.

  

 As the fascist movement developed, so too did opposition to it. Led by Communists, socialists and trade unionists the anti-fascist movement grew, supported also by Liberals and some anti-fascist Tories.

However, those who interrupted fascist meetings found themselves dealing with unprecedented violence from Blackshirt thugs.

The notorious Olympia meeting of 7 June 1934 came to symbolise Blackshirt thuggery. After the Daily Worker posted the location of the West London meeting, a number of anti-fascists attended, intending to disrupt the meeting.

Hecklers were beaten by gangs of Blackshirts armed with knuckledusters and other weapons and thrown into the street. The BUF was roundly condemned by the mainstream and the violence of the meeting effectively ended Mosley’s pretence of respectability.

Whilst the first Jews came to Britain following the Norman Conquest of 1066, the Jewish community of London’s East End mainly comprised of families that had arrived between 1881 and 1914.

Many of these families settled in England after fleeing antisemitism and murderous pogroms in Russia, Poland and many other Eastern European countries. They followed previous waves of immigration that had brought Huguenots, Irish and other smaller groups into the area.

By the 1930s some 183,000 Jews lived in London, the majority in the East End due to cheaper rents. Stepney was home to some 60,000 Jews and the heart of Jewish East London.

With its reputation in tatters following Olympia and increasingly under the influence of Hitler, BUF leaders sought to exploit the reservoir of antisemitism in the East End in order to save the party.

By 1936 the BUF was pouring most of its resources into holding meetings in the East End and distributing crude antisemitica. Mob orators such as Mick Clarke and Owen Burke sought to whip up violence on street corners night after night.

As this approach gradually gained support in poor neighbouring areas such as Bethnal Green, Mosley announced he would celebrate the fourth birthday of the BUF by staging a provocative march through Stepney, the heart of the Jewish East End, on 4 October, 1936, following months of BUF meetings and leafleting in the area designed to intimidate Jewish people and break up the East End’s community solidarity. Political leaders in the East End petitioned the Home Secretary Sir John Simon to ban the march; however, their request was denied. On 2nd October, the Jewish People’s Council presented a second petition with 100,000 signatures to request that the march be banned on the grounds that the “avowed object of the Fascist movement in Great Britain is the incitement of malice and hatred against sections of the population.”   

Despite these efforts, the British government allowed the march to proceed as planned and assigned 7,000 members of the police force to accompany it. They were not to be welcomed, instead they were met by protestors, waving banners with slogans such as 'They shall not Pass'( no pasaron, famous republican slogan from the Spanish Civil War) , 'No Nazis here' and 'East End Unite.'  A huge force had assembled prepared to defend their streets and neighbourhoods and their right to live in them. 

Even though uniformed policemen on horseback were employed to allow Mosley's  march to pass through, anti-fascists blocked the route by barricading the street with rows of domestic furniture and the police were attacked with eggs, rotten fruit and the contents of peoples chamber pots. Local kids rolled marbles under police horses hooves. A mighty battle ensued,  with people seriously hurt on both sides. Eventually, the police ordered the fascists to disperse, but the Metropolitain Police had by now (correctly) been perceived as having protected the BUF and were turned upon by local residents.It now became a battle between the cops and the local population. It goes almost without saying that local people won that fight, with the police having to withdraw after having bowls of urine and faeces dumped on them by residents above, police horses being immobilised by thumbtacks [drawing pins] being littered all along the street, and officers being pulled off their horses, spat -- and even urinated -- upon and beaten up.

Cable Street  is rightly remembered because it saw thousands of people, from many walks of life, women, children, local jews, Irish groups, communists, socialists, anarchists standing firm as one in an incredible display of unity who worked together to prevent Mosley's fascists from marching through a Jewish area in London. Remembering too the support of the Jewish community in the dock strikes of 1912, Irish dockers stood in solidarity with Jews against the fascists, ripping up paving stones with pickaxes handles to add to the barricades.Together, they won a famous victory and put the skids under Britain’s first fascist mass movement.The  fascists did not get to march and they did not pass, and were left in humiliation so today we look back on this living history in celebration and pride.   
There is much to learn from the Battle of Cable Street about the power that individuals and groups wield in the face of intolerant policies and behaviours when they unite against racism and discrimination. Hopefully by engaging with this history, we can think critically about the choices made by the East End community and its allies in 1936 and then consider choices available to us as agents of change in the face of prejudice and discrimination in our society  and communities today.

Significantly, for some people that were involved in the protest, Cable Street was the road to Spain, and many would go on to volunteer as soldiers for the Republicans there.The legend that was Cable Street became the lasting inspiration for the continuing British fight against the fascism that was spreading all across Europe and would eventually engulf the planet in a terrible world war, the event also  launched movements for tenant rights, against economic injustice, and in defense of immigrants.

Commissioned in 1976 by the Tower Hamlets Arts Project, the artist Dave Binnington drawing inspiration from Spanish muralists and Picasso’s Guernica. Binnington after interviewing many local characters and includong them in the design, started painting a large mural commemorating the battle on the side wall of St George's Town Hall.  In 1982, the still uncompleted mural was vandalised with right-wing slogans, after which Binnington abandoned the project in disgust.  It was subsequently finished by Paul Butler, Ray Walker and Desmond Rochfort, and officially unveiled in 1983.  It has subsequently been vandalised, and repainted, several times. The mural depicts the events  of a very physical confrontation  between police and protestors  in stunning detail, anti-fascist protestors proudly carrying banners, punches being thrown, a barricade of furniture and an overturned vehicle across Cable Street manned by residents of all ages and ethnic backgrounds, a chamber pot being thrown under the hooves of horses being ridden  by baton-wielding police, and fascist  with a startling resemblance  to Adolf Hitler, looking very alarmed in just his underwear and socks.  The mural stands today as a powerful symbol of anti-fascism in the East End.

 

 There is much to learn from the Battle of Cable Street about the power that individuals and groups wield in the face of intolerant policies and behaviours when they unite against racism and discrimination. Hopefully by engaging with this history, we can think critically about the choices made by the East End community and its allies in 1936 and then consider choices available to us as agents of change in the face of prejudice and discrimination in our society  and communities today.
We might like to think those days are behind us, but anti-semitism, racism and intolerance  is on the rise. The foul winds that blew across Cable Street ago still exist today..Far Right and fascist groups are trying to grow again. We have to organise to stop them. Today and tomorrow we must still rally around the cry of No Pasaran - They shall not pass. 

W.H. Davies ( 3/7/1871 - 26/9/40 ) The Battle for Cable Street.

You ask me how I got like this, Sir
Well, I don't care to say
But I will tell you a little story
Of when I was in a big fray.

I'm not very well in my old age
And as I sits drinking my broth
My mind goes back to 1936
That Sunday,Otober the fourth.

I was walking down Bethnal Green Road, Sir
just walking about at my ease
When the strains of a famous old song, Sir
Came floating to me on the breeze.

I stoppe, I looked and listened
Now where have I heard that old song?
Then I dashed to the Salmon and Ball, Sir
I know I wouldn't go wrong.

It was the Intenationale they were singing
They were singing it with a defiant blast
And holding up a big banner
With these words: " THEY SHALL NOT PASS"

And we then marched on to the East End
They were five thousand of us , I am sure
And when we got to the Aldgate
We were met by three hundred thousand more.

'Red Front! Red Front! these workers cried
It was a sight I wouldn't have missed
To see these thousands of defiant workers
Holding up their Mighty Clenched Fist.

The police said 'Now move along please,
This is all we ask'
But we said 'No, not for those blackshirts
Those rotters THEY SHALL NOT PASS'

We then marched on to Stepney Green Sir
You could see that this fight was no sham
For there were thousands of and thousands of workers
Marching from Limehouse,Poplar, Stratford and East Ham.

You could see that Mosely wouldn't get through Sir
That our slogan that day was no boast
And I shouted 'Hip Hip hurrah'
And I saw our flag being tied to a lamp post

the children shouted from the windows "O, golly"
For Mosley, no one seemed sorry
But someone had the goodness
To lend us their two ton lorry

We got it over on its side Sir
It wasn't much of a strain
But the police kept knocking our barricade down
So we built the damn thing up again.

The police said we worked mighty fast
As with a hanky their faces they mopped
So we got out our big red banner
And stuck it right on the top.

The police then charged with their truncheons
They charged us, the working class
But they couldn't pinch our red banner
With these words THEY SHALL NOT PASS

I wish you had been there to see it
You would have said it was a ruddy fine feat
How we kept that old Red Flag flying
On those barricades of Cable Street.

So this is the end of my story
And I must get back to my broth
But I hope you will never forget Sir
It was Sunday October the fourth. 

 

Video Ghosts of Cable Street, set to the music of Men they couldn't hang

Cable Street - The Young 'Uns

On the fourth of October 1936
I was only a lad of sixteen.
But I stood beside men
Who were threescore and ten
And every age in between.

We were dockers and teachers,
Busmen, engineers,
And those with no jobs to do.
We were women and children
Equal in union — atheists, Christians, and Jews.

And we had so much to lose.

For with Hitler in Germany, Franco in Spain,
We knew what fascism meant.
So when Mosley came trouncing,
Denouncing the Jews,
To the East End of London we went.

For I’d met refugees, who had fled o’er the seas,
Germans, Italians, and Jews.
And I knew their despair
For what they’d seen there
And I couldn’t let them be abused.

We had so much to lose.

Now 3,000 fascists — their uniforms black —
Had set out to march on that day.
And 6,000 policemen
Intended to greet them
By making clear the way.

But we were there ready —
Our nerves they were steady —
One hundred thousand en masse.
And we planted our feet along Cable Street
And we sang: They shall not pass!

We sang: They shall not pass!

Then all us young lads,
We were sent to the side streets
To stop the police breaking through.
And with swift hands we made strong barricades
Out of anything we could use.

And they came to charge us,
But they couldn’t barge us,
With fists, batons, and hooves.
With as good as we got, we withstood the lot,
For we would not be moved.

We would not be moved.

And, yes, there was violence.
And, yes, there was blood.
And I saw things a lad shouldn’t see.
But I’ll not regret the day I stood
And London stood with me.

And when the news spread the day had been won
And Mosley was limping away —
There were shouts, there were cheers,
There were songs, there were tears,
And I hear them all to this day.

And we all swore then we’d stand up again
For as long as our legs could
And that when we were gone,
Our daughters and sons
Would stand where we stood.

Was the first time I’d heard two tiny words
Said by every woman and man.
Now I say them still
And I always will:
¡NO PASARÁN!

Lyrics and music  by Sean Conney