Battle of Cable Street: ‘I was there when the East End said “No pasaran” to the fascists’
October 4th marks the 88th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street – when plans by Sir Oswald Mosley and his ‘Blackshirt’ British Union Of Fascists – to march through the East End were blocked by an alliance of local Jews, communists, trade unionists and Irish Catholics. Mark Gould spoke to Bill Fishman, one of the East Enders who was there.
Bill Fishman, a Jewish boy from Stepney, was just 15 when he became caught up in the Battle of Cable Street – one of those now near mythological moments in British history when thousands of East Enders rose in opposition to a rising tide of racist extremism.
Cable Street, and the intimidation and violence leading up to it, had a lasting effect on Bill. After war service in India he became a respected teacher in Tower Hamlets and later, an academic and historian at Queen Mary College, writing scholarly and entertaining books on race, politics, people and poverty in the East End.
Bill died in December 2014 at the age of 93. We became friends when I was a young reporter on the East London Advertiser in the 1980s when he first told me about experiencing fascism in the East End and being an eyewitness to the ‘battle’.
As a youngster, Bill was politically aware, already a member of the Labour Youth League which heard Mosley was planning a big rally for Sunday, October 4. Bill said Mosley’s party had been waging a hate campaign against Jews, communists and the Irish in the East End for several years.
‘Accusing Jews of taking ‘English’ jobs, Mosley’s bodyguard – the Blackshirts – terrorised Jewish stallholders in Petticoat Lane market, beat up Jews going home after synagogue and covered walls with graffiti.
‘Aping the tactics of the fascist regimes in Germany, Italy and Spain, they carried out a reign of terror. “Perish Judah” and “Death to the Jews” were scrawled all over the East End.’
Bill remembered it was a warm sunny day when the Labour Youth League was told ‘get down to Gardiner’s Corner’ – a famous department store in Aldgate. ‘I got off the 253 tram just after noon and there were already people marching and carrying banners proclaiming “No Pasaran” – the Spanish Republican slogan meaning “They shall not pass”.
‘I stood on the steps of the Whitechapel Art Gallery watching Mosley arrive in a black open-top sports car. He was a playboy aristocrat and as glamorous as ever. Black-shirted he marched in front of about 3,000 Blackshirts and a sea of Union Jacks. It was as though he were the commander-in-chief of the army, the Blackshirts in columns and a mass of police to protect them.’
At Gardiner’s Corner, Mosley encountered his first setback. Bill recalled: ‘I saw a tram pull up in the middle of the junction, barring the Blackshirts’ way. Then the driver got out and walked off. I found out later he was a member of the Communist Party.
‘As the tension rose, we began chanting “1,2,3,4,5. We want Mosley dead or alive!” and “No Pasaran”.
‘With the tram blocking the way, the police decided to charge the crowd to disperse us. They were waving their truncheons but we were so packed together, there was nowhere for us to go.
‘I could see police horses going up in the air because kids were throwing marbles under their hooves. That made the police more hostile and they spent the next hour charging into us.
‘Then, suddenly, people were waving to us from the back of the crowd. The Communist Party had a system of loudspeaker vans and a command post with a phone and team of messengers from which to co-ordinate the action.’
With Mosley halted at Gardiner’s Corner, Metropolitan police chief Sir Philip Game told him the march could go another way, south through Royal Mint Street and Cable Street.
‘As Mosley was passing on instructions, Michael Faulkner, a “spy” who had infiltrated the Blackshirts, rushed to the phone near Aldgate Station and rang Phil Piratin, the communist leader. Piratin told the loudspeaker vans to transmit the message: “Get down to Cable Street”,’ Bill said.
‘The sheer weight of numbers meant it was a slow procession but I got there in time to watch the battle. I was young and afraid of what was basically a fight between the police and us because we couldn’t get near the Blackshirts. The street is very narrow and there were three and four-storey houses where Irish dockers lived.
‘They quickly erected barricades of lorries piled with old mattresses and furniture. Women in the houses hurled rotten vegetables, muck from chamber pots and rubbish onto the police, who were struggling to dismantle the barricades.
‘Things escalated again when the police sent snatch squads into the crowd to nab supposed ringleaders. Organised groups of dockers hit back with stones and sticks while making several ‘arrests’ themselves. Indeed, there are some families in the East End who still have police helmets and batons as souvenirs.’
Finally with the situation in stalemate, Sir Philip Game ordered Mosley to turn back and march through the deserted City of London. As Clive Bettington, the chair of the Jewish East End Celebration Society, notes Mosley had other things on his mind.
‘He turned around as he did not want to be arrested as he was shortly to travel to Germany to secretly marry socialite Diana Mitford at the home of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.’
Aping the tactics of the fascist regimes in Germany, Italy and Spain, they carried out a reign of terror. “Perish Judah” and “Death to the Jews” were scrawled all over the East End.
Bettington feels there are too many “misapprehensions” around Cable Street and he, like Bill Fishman, stresses that the actual fighting was between the anti-Mosley crowds and the police.
Given it was a warm day, which would always draw massive crowds to the nearby Petticoat Lane and Club Row markets, Bettington takes odds with claims that hundreds of thousands turned out against Mosley. ‘Those taking part numbered only about 10,000. The figures of 300,000 and 500,000 put forward Phil Piratin are just not credible.’
He also disputes claims that community leaders in the Jewish Board of Deputies took no action against Mosley. ‘They took a lot of action behind the scenes, but the Board was strongly opposed to Jews getting involved in any of the violence.’
In the months after Cable Street, Mosley’s popularity waned as the public became aware of the rising Nazi menace in Germany. But the weekend after the battle saw what historians call the worst incident of anti-Jewish violence in Britain during the interwar period — the ‘Pogrom of Mile End‘ — when 200 Blackshirt youths ran amok in Stepney smashing the windows of Jewish shops and homes and throwing an elderly man and young girl through a window.
Bill Fishman, ever the historian, spoke about the repercussions: ‘The government hurried through laws banning political parties from wearing military-style uniforms – depriving them of both menace and allure. Stanley Baldwin’s Tory government passed the Public Order Act, which gave the police the power to ban “provocative” marches.
‘During the Second World War, Mosley and Diane Mitford were interned as a threat to national security. Years in the political wilderness followed before his death in 1980.’
Bill concludes: ‘Although a lot of fascists still lived in the East End following the Cable Street victory, never again would the ideology be so popular. Jews, communists, Irish and local Englishmen and women rose up simply because they didn’t want extremism.’
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The Battle of Cable Street is well known; lesser known is the Battle of Grove Road in Bow which took place a week later when Mosley’s Blackshirts tried to congregate in Victoria Park. My dad, who lived in Roman Road at that time, told me the story when I was a kid and said that again Mosley had to cancel the meeting and retreat after local people turned out to oppose him.