1936: Driving the fascists out of the East End

Battle of Cable Street mural in east London

Ninety years ago this week, tens of thousands of working class people halted the forward march of the British Union of Fascists (BUF).

They turned the tide of fascism in 1930s Britain in the Battle of Cable Street.

The fascists were ­determined to show their power by marching through East London—where many Jewish people lived—on 4 October 1936.

But thousands of Jews, Communists, socialists and trade unionists refused to let them pass.

They ignored their leaders, who told them not to provoke the fascists.

They refused to be ­intimidated by the police horses that charged the crowds to make a route for the fascists.

Instead, they stood together, fought back and showed how militant confrontation could break the back of a growing fascist movement.

Charlie Goodman, who was a young Communist at the time, recalled, “Cable Street was a bit different to what it is today. There were also lots of little sheds where the seamen kept various things, old lorries and that sort of thing.

“When we got there, we saw that the seamen had already opened the sheds and pulled out some old lorries and turned them on their sides.”

Tram drivers stopped their trams in Aldgate, blocking off the BUF’s intended route.

Mounted police charged the crowds, but thousands of ordinary people stood their ground and blocked the cops.

Communist Party member Jack Dash remembered, “The Cossacks came, the mounted police.

“We of the trade union ­movement with great experience of struggles had armed ourselves with thousands of marbles in our pockets and so we threw them on the floor.

“The mounted police couldn’t stand up and slipped over and down they went. Then it became a running fight with the crowd and the mounted police and the foot police.”

And it wasn’t just experienced trade unionists who stood up to the fascists.

Londoner Angela Davis remembered how her mother Millie was just 17 when she disobeyed her religious father and, with her sisters, joined the crowd.

“The girls went out with pepper pots in their coat pockets to throw pepper in the ­fascists’ faces”, she recalled.

“They were all prepared to literally do battle with them. They wanted to stand shoulder to shoulder with the dockers—working people the same as they were.”

Women poured boiling water from their windows and threw heavy objects from tenement windows at the police below.

After hours of physical ­fighting, and over 150 arrests, the confidence of the BUF had been crushed.

Few realised it at the time, but the fascists never recovered from their humiliation at Cable Street.

This defeat was far from inevitable. Oswald Mosley was the founder of the BUF. He defected from the Labour Party and set up the new party in 1932.

The BUF rapidly carved a wide space in British politics through a campaign of vicious antisemitism and the use of paramilitary Blackshirts to intimidate opposition and terrorise communities.

The BUF also found ­supporters among influential figures.

They included Harold Harmsworth, founder of the Daily Mail newspaper, who directly helped boost ­membership to a self-reported 50,000.

Though the BUF briefly lost momentum after brutalising protesters at its Olympia rally in 1934, it continued to build through holding marches and launching violent attacks.

On 26 September 1936, the BUF called a march to celebrate its fourth anniversary.

Emboldened by their growing influence—and by the success of the Nazi Party in Germany— it decided to hold the march in east London.

Some 50 percent of the ­population were Jewish, including many who had fled the Nazis.

It was a provocation aimed at Jews and disillusioned ­working class people they wanted to poison against their neighbours.

The BUF had deployed these tactics across Britain before.

How anti-fascists beat the Blackshirts in the 1930s

  Read More

A petition accusing the BUF of the “incitement of malice and hatred against sections of the population” and demanding the home secretary ban the march attracted more than 100,000 signatures.

The home secretary refused, deciding instead to send thousands of police officers to defend the march.

The Labour Party, the The Board of Deputies of British Jews and other voices of authority warned people to stay out of the area and allow the fascists to march.

The Communist Party ­leadership wanted its members to go to a rally for Republican Spain in Trafalgar Square.

The Communist Party ­leadership was tied to the interests of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union.

It wanted to build ­alliances with left-leaning Labour politicians and trade union leaders. Militant confrontations could jeopardise such relationships.

But many Communist Party members defied their leaders in a rank and file rebellion.

As Communist Party Stepney branch secretary Joe Jones argued, “The best way to help Spanish people was to stop Mosley marching through East London. It was the same fight.”

Jewish people, Communists, trade unionists and ­anti-fascists built the protest through leafleting and word of mouth.

They got between 200,000 and 500,000 onto the streets with just a week’s notice.

British and European Jews, Protestants and Irish Catholics, Somali seamen and the rest of the diverse population of east London came together to defend themselves.

They chanted the slogan of the anti-fascist movement in Spain—“They shall not pass”.

Workers came from as far as Wales to join the ­counter-demonstration, to show solidarity with East London’s Jews.

They knew that Mosley’s Blackshirts posed a threat to the whole working class movement. On the day, between 2,000 and 5,000 fascists headed for Cable Street, including 400 Blackshirt women.

As they assembled at Tower Hill, they chanted, “We’ve got to get rid of the yids,” and, “Roll on the pogrom”.

Fighting began as soon as the two groups saw each other and did not end until many hours later.

Over 7,000 police officers were called in to control the unrest, including the entire mounted police department.

Eventually, around 700 ­counter-protestors were pushed back into Cable Street, where they set up barricades along the street.

When Mosley finally arrived to lead the march, there was no path for him and his Blackshirts.

The police commissioner was forced to tell him that the planned march could not go ahead.

Instead, demoralised ­fascists marched to Hyde Park, the crowd slowly dissipating as they went. Mosley declined to make a speech in the park.

To Jewish people in east London in 1936, Mosley was not a pathetic jackbooted bogeyman, as he is often seen today. He was a threat to their lives.

He became a joke figure only because the Battle of Cable Street damaged the BUF so deeply it was never able to recover.

After the ­humiliation of Cable Street, Mosley’s allies began ­withdrawing money from the BUF. They included Mussolini and ­various members of the House of Lords.

Today fascist figures such as Danny “Tommo” Thomas, Tommy Robinson and Rupert Lowe pose the same threat to workers and minorities as Mosley did in the 1930s.

And they too have big ­backers among Bitcoin billionaires and “tech bros”. The powerful see gangs wearing black balaclavas and are thrilled at the prospect of silencing their enemies.

Many organisations now claim the victory at Cable Street as there own—including some which opposed the mobilisations.

It is often the case, the past rebellions become safe to embrace.

But the Battle of Cable Street was only won because of many months of anti-fascist organising by many rank and file Communist Party members, trade ­unionists and Jewish ­working class ­activists in east London.

And it wasn’t just east London. The brave interventions of Jewish Communists Benny Rothman and Emma Goldman at BUF ­rallies in Manchester are often unmentioned.

There was also mass ­opposition to the BUF in Stockton, Leeds, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Newcastle.

The British ruling class love to pose as the enemies of fascism.

But, just a few years before the Second World War, they tolerated a highly organised, ­violent gang of fascists.

The real legacy of the Battle of Cable Street is that militant confrontation, organised from the bottom up, is the most effective way to beat back fascism.

And that can happen again as we face the rise of a new fascist movement in Britain.

As the veteran of Cable Street, Charlie Goodman argued, “The 4 October 1936 was the experience of the fact that if people really believe that they can do a thing, they’ll do it.”