newsCable Street Revisited: Leading anti-Fascist academic puts the 1936 march that never was under the microscope once again
Cable Street, a New Musical returns to London on September 6, 2024. It celebrates what its producers and actors call working class solidarity against Oswald Mosley and 3,000 of his his followers on October 4, 1936 at Cable Street in the East End of London.
Cable Street – A New Musical returns to London next month. It’s timely, because riots after the death of three small children in Southport, Merseyside, England on Monday July 29, 2024 brought much of Britain to a standstill. Since then, Stand Up To Racism protesters, plus strong police action, have silenced anti-Islam and anti-asylum seeker activists. But leading anti-Fascist academics warn that working-class solidarity on its own doesn’t solve the problem. It didn’t in 1936. It might not again. TREVOR GRUNDY reports –
CABLE STREET the musical is written by Tim Gilvin and Alex Kanefsky. It will run for the second time this year at London’s Southwark Playhouse from September 6 to October 10.
So, if you have a spare £25.00 for a standard ticket or £20.00 for a concession, make sure you’re there if you are interested in an event that say the music makers in London, signalled the death of Fascism in Britain. Apart from enjoying the music and the plot you’ll also be able to meet members of the show’s Creative Team and hear what Professor Nadia Valman, who specialises in 20th century Urban culture has to say.
The show organisers describe it as “an electrifying reimagining of one of London’s most significant days” and “a celebration of community and a rallying cry to action.”
The Guardian described the show in January as “a dazzling musical portrait of a community against Fascism.”
The Stage wrote about its “genuine theatrical swagger.”
The Sun said it was “a welcome message of hope.”
The Communist Morning Star said it was “exuberant and inspirational.”
Which producer, or actor, could ask for anything more?
Mosley inspects members of the BUF’s A Squad before a march that never took place
The battle of Cable Street is seen by most journalists as the event that effectively ended the odd career of Sir Oswald Mosley, thanks to a coalition of East End Jews, Irish dockworkers, Communists, members of the small Caribbean community and a handful of sailors from East Africa. How many of them differs from 100,000 to 300,000. Police reports say the former rather than the latter.
“No pasaran” was the Spanish cry that echoed in the streets of East London on October 4, 1936 as Mosley and 3,000 0f his supporters in the British Union of Fascists (BUF) made a plan to mark the fourth anniversary of the foundation of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932.
The birthday celebration was to be held in one of the most densely Jewish part of East London.
Fierce fighting broke out between anti-Fascists and the Metropolitan Police.
There was some violence between Fascists and Communists. But not much. The most serious fighting was between anti-Fascists and the Met Police, many of them on horseback . Horses skidded and fell after anti-Fascists threw marbles under their hooves.
The Royal Navy Reserve boxing champion and Mosley-supporting Tommy Moran knocked out several Jews and won legendary status within the BUF.
Newsreels of the early stages of the scuffle showed Moran defeating protesters in a series of fistfights. But he was badly injured and appeared later smiling but with a thick bandage round his head.
To avoid further blood-shed, Police Commissioner Sir Philip Game told Mosley to abandon his plan to march through a Jewish part of the city.
Mosley, as always, obeyed the police.
The march was supposed to have started at Gardiners Corner but a vast crowd of anti-Fascists stopped that.
The police told Mosley and his followers to scarper-off home via Cable Street and that’s where barricades were set up and the legend began.
Mosley was driven home by his chauffeur and spent the evening with the woman hailed in the media as the most beautiful woman in England.
The following day, Mosley flew to Berlin where on October 6 he married Diana Guiness (nee Mitford) at the home of Dr Goebbels.
Hitler was a guest and he presented the smiling British couple with a picture of himself as a wedding present.
The return of the musical, couldn’t come at a better time, a month after the tragic events at Southport.
There is no need to repeat here anything about the riots that took place throughout the UK once false reports said the man involved was a Muslim immigrant.
Almost 200 people have been jailed at the time of writing this.
Riots stopped because of severe prison sentences imposed on those found guilty of throwing bricks at the police and sometimes trying to set light to buildings which housed immigrants.
The Cable Street musical repeats this over-arching message – Working class coalition and action will defeat Fascism. It did in so 1936. It will do so again in 2024.
But before you start humming the Red Flag or singing La Marseillaise take note of the way the Battle of Cable Street is being re-examined by academics specialising in the rise and fall and then the rise again of Fascism in Britain.
Anti-Fascists at one of the barricades which stopped Mosley marching in the East End and (below) Police action against anti-Fascist demonstrators
For example, the programme Anti-Social on BBCs Radio 4 on August 16, 2024
Those taking part were – Professor Nigel Copsey of Teeside University. Maxine Bowler, Socialist Workers Party in Sheffield. The BBC Presenter was Andrew Fleming
This is part of what Copsey had to say.
“The East End was an obvious choice for Mosley. This area was home to Britain’s largest Jewish community. The BUF had established a local fiefdom of support here, particularly in Bethnal Green. This followed a summer of heightened tensions in the East End, with significant levels of Jew-baiting and anti-Semitic violence. Mosley wanted to take advantage of this and the march itself was for its Jewish residents extremely provocative and really quite threatening. There were protests. People on the ground were outraged on the proposed plans but the government didn’t act and anti-fascists erected physical barricades across what was a narrow street. The police then tried to force a way through to allow the fascists to march through Cable Street. And this led to the so-called Battle of Cable Street, which was not a battlle between fascists and anti-fascists but a battle between anti-fascists and Metropolitan Police.”
Fleming:
“Oh, I don’t think I realised that. I thought it was a sort of straight fight between one side and the other but I see it was the counter-protests versus the Police.”
Copsey:
“Essentially at Cable Street that was the case. Concern for metropolitan disorder, the Police Commissioner Philip Game then instructed Mosley and his column of 3,000 or so fascists to abandon their march. In terms of fascists and anti-fascists conflict the most celebrated episode was at Gardiner’s Corner when the BUF’s boxing champion, Tommy Moran, was set upon by anti-fascists. He tried to box his way out of it and this was captured on cinema newsreel.”
Fleming:
“There was fascist and anti-fascist violence?”
Copsey:
“Yes, but it was limited.”
Mosley talking to journalists after the formation of Union Movement in 1948. Mosley had homes at Cheyne Walk in London, large properties in Ireland and a luxurious home at Orsay, 25kms from the centre of Paris, called Le Temple de la Gloire (The Temple of Glory) pictured below.
Mosley Speaks in Ridley Road, East London in 1948
Fleming:
“What sort of myths have been created about Cable Street?”
Copsey:
“The main myth of Cable Street is that the working class in the East End came together and they inflicted this crushing defeat on Mosley which drove the BUF into a spiral of decline from which it never recovers. The myth itself is an exaggeration. Cable Street did not smash the fascists neither did it put an immediate end to fascist activity in the East End. On the very day anti-fascists held a victory parade after the events of October 4 on that very day over 100 youths engaged in a pogrom on Mile End Road. Jewish windows were smashed, cars set on fire and a seven- year- old girl is thrown through a window. Now, when we look at Special Branch reports what we find is the BUF actually recruits around 2,000 new members in the wake of Cable Street. Meanwhile, anti-Semitic incidents and fascist meetings continue. In February, 1937, in this area the BUF held over something like 100
meetings or so as part of its campaign for the London County Council elections and in those elections in its fiefdom of Bethnal Green it captures 23 percent of the vote. Did it stop Mosley in London? No! Later in October 1937 the BUF marched through Bermondsey and this was as bloody as Cable Street but has not attracted anywhere near the same amount of historical interest.”
This was not the first time that the ability of workers united beating Fascism in Britain.
Long after Mosley’s death in France (December 1980) Friends of Mosley published a magazine called Comrade which gave the Fascist interpretation about what happened -and did not happen – at the Battle of Cable Street in October 1936
The author and academic Daniel Tilles wrote an article published in the Jewish Chronicle on October 6, 2011 which was headlined Why victory at Cable Street really belonged to Mosley’s fascists.
Daniel Tilles is co-editor of the collection ‘ Fascism and the Jewish: Italy and Britain’ (Vallentine Mitchell, 2010) and he has contributed a chapter on Jewish anti-Fascism to Geoffrey Alderman’s ‘ New Directions in Anglo-Jewish History ‘ (Academic Studies Press, 2010).
He wrote, “The Battle of Cable Street, 75 years ago this week, has taken a proud place in Jewish collective memory, and is regarded as a decisive victory against Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Yet looking past the popular mythology and at contemporary records instead, we find a very different picture. Far from damaging the BUF, Cable Street boosted it; and rather than bringing any relief to the Jews of the East End it triggered the most intensive and violent period of anti-Jewish activity in modern British history.”
He noted that weeks after Cable Street the police said that there was “abundant evidence that the Fascist movement has been steadily gaining ground” in the East End.
The BUF had conducted its most successful series of meetings since its founding; 2,000 new members had joined the party and a definite pro-Fascist feeling has manifested itself, a Special Branch police report said.
Tilles continued: “The weekend after Cable Street saw the most serious anti-Jewish violence of the inter-war period, as a gang of 200 Fascist youths rampaged down Mile End Road. The police and the Board of Deputies both observed that incidents of Fascist ‘Jew-baiting’ rose significantly after October, while the next summer the leading Jewish defence organisation in the East End, the Jewish People’s Council, warned of the Fascist “terrorism which appears to increase e week by week.”
Mosley was interviewed by David Frost on The Frost Programme on November 15, 1967. Frost said there were two Oswald Mosleys – one a brilliant economist who could have been Prime Minister and another, an anti-Semitic rabble rouser in the East End of London. A year later, Mosley’s autobiography, My Life, was serialised in The Times and his wife, Diana, was an acclaimed author and regular contributor to the London Review of Books who never ceased to admire – perhaps even love – Adolf Hitler.
Frost said there were two Oswald Mosleys. After the Second World War, Mosley banned his followers using the Nazi salute in public. He told David Frost that it was just an ancient Roman way of greeting and saluting friends and had nothing to do with Mussolini or Hitler. He said he had never hated all Jews, only those trying to provoke a war between Britain and Germany. But his closest followers went to their graves hating Jews, Zionism and Israel. One of them was A.K. Chesterton, Mosley’s pre-war Director of Propaganda who wrote Portrait of a Leader. Chesterton also wrote the anti-Semitic Apotheosis of the Jew.
Diana Mosley (pictured right of her sister Unity) never apologised for worshipping Hitler in the 1930s (and beyond) or attending Nazi rallies.
“The focus of this activity were local elections in the East End in March 1937. From the outset the Blackshirts had advertised these as “a choice between us and the parties of Jewry,” and their manifesto consisted almost entirely of anti-Jewish attacks. Although the party failed to win a seat, its showing revealed the enduring popularity of Fascism in the area, Competing against the three mainstream parties, the six BUF candidates received 7,000 votes between them 18 percent of the vote). The number would have been far higher had not only rate-payers been allowed to vote, thus disenfranchising much of the party’s disproportionately young support. At municipal elections in the autumn, the party gained a similar result in the same East End districts.
He ended his article in one of the world’s best known Jewish newspapers with these words – “The idea, then, that Cable Street represented a significant victory is simply a myth.”
Anyone who believes Cable Street ended Mosley’s Fascist life should watch a video which is available on Google, a video called Mosley’s march from Millbank to Bermondsey on October 3, 1937
It is part of Norman’s Film Library.
In July 1939, Mosley held a “peace rally” at Earl’s Court in London and police estimated that 30,000 ticket holders attended.
My early life was spent in thrall to Oswald Mosley.
My parents were pre-war Fascists and post-war members of Mosley’s Union Movement. I left England in 1966 for a new life as a journalist in Zambia and returned to a home I hardly recognised 30 years later in 1996.
In 1998, William Heinemann published a book by me called Memoir of a Fascist Childhood. It was widely and, on the whole, well-reviewed in British and Commonwealth newspapers and magazines and in March 2000, I flew to Tel Aviv with my wife. I had been invited by Laniado Hospital in Netanya to visit parts of Israel and talk to young Jews about Fascism.
After the publication of his book in 1998, Trevor Grundy was, in March 2000, invited by the London-based directors of Laniado Hospital in Netanya to fly to Israel and talk to young Jews about Fascism in Britain. He went here with his wife, Jane, and David Kaplan who is a former President of the Jewish Students’ Union in Scotland. Later that year, he spoke to mainly Jewish students at universities up and down Britain about his childhood and growing up years in thrall to Mosley. The lecture tour ended in Edinburgh at the home of a former British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Sir Malcolm Rifkind (Pictures: Trevor Grundy in Jerusalem, March 2000 and with Sir Malcolm Rifkind in Edinburgh at the end of that year).
Trevor Grundy with the Zimbabwean author and historian Lawrence Vambe in Shropshire, England. Vambe said that many of the key men who surrounded Ian Smith before Rhodesia’s illegal Declaration of Independence on November 11, 1965 were supporters of Sir Oswald Mosley, the most prominent being Ivor Benson who was a former assistant editor of the liberal Rand Daily Mail. Benson was sacked by that newspaper after hosting Mosley during one of his visits to South Africa and writing an editorial praising the British fascist leader who was a close friend of Oswald Pirow, one of the pillars of the apartheid system. (Picture: Jane Grundy).
Before I flew to Israel, I went to Laniado’s offices in Golders Green to pick up tickets. I sat on my own at an open-air coffee shop. An unruly child ran past me and accidently knocked the hot drink all over a new pair of trousers.
Sitting close to me was a man and a woman. He stood up, said he was sorry I was soaked and offered to buy me another coffee. We shook hands. His name was Rosen – Harold Rosen and his wife Betty.
Mr Rosen asked me what I was doing in Golder’s Green and I told him about the journey I was to make and the book I had written.
He said he would send me a book that he’d just published and that it would interest me because when he was 16 years old he was one of the thousands of Jews who stopped Mosley marching in 1936.
Rosen was fascinated to hear that Tommy Moran was a regular visitor to our home in Marylebone.
The book he sent to me was called Are You Still Circumcised?
He wrote inside it – “For Trevor – To celebrate a fine chance encounter. The answer to the title question is “only just!”
The 1999 book is a collection of autobiographical stories about growing- up as a Jew in a family of Communists in the East End of London in the 1930s. Through these stories, Rosen brought to life an immigrant generation’s abrasive encounter with the anglicising power of schooling. The collection includes accounts of a Jewish Communist family’s conflicts with authority and Rosen (at the age of 16 years) watching fights on October 4 near Cable Street.
Many of the stories are funny and some of the most amusing are included in a chapter headed A Necessary Myth: Cable Street Revisited. If only people going to see Cable Street next month could be handed a copy of Harold Rosen’s memoir along with the programme.
To the question Are you still circumcised, Harold Rosen jokingly replied – “Yes, but only just” which was, no doubt, a reference to his frequent arguments with Zionists in Israel and Stalinists in Britain.
A few months later, he told me over lunch with his family at his home at Muswell Hill that he witnessed a series of fights between Tommy Moran and some of his Jewish Communist friends. Harold Acton was fascinated when I told him Tommy Moran was a regular visitor to our Victorian home in Marylebone in the mid-1950s.
He was also amazed to hear that at that time my parents hosted the children of so many leading Nazis including the daughter of Otto Skorzeny, and son of Werner Naumann. Gudron Himmler had tea with my parents and I met the war hero Hans Ulrich Rudel at a Mosley dinner in 1956.
I have a copy of his book Stuka Pilot which he signed for me and wrote next to his name the words “In friendship.”
Twenty first century Fascists and Nazis have exchanged hatred of Jews for hatred of Muslims. But rabbis in yeshivas in Israel say that’s nothing to be pleased about because once the fire of hatred has been lit, flames can be wafted in any direction. Jews know that better than anyone. (Picture by Trevor Grundy, Jerusalem, March 2000).
I told Harold Rosen that during a visit to a yeshiva in Jerusalem I asked a rabbi how he felt now that Muslims and not Jews were under fire in Europe.
The rabbi said that it brought no joy to his heart because once the fire of hatred was lit, anyone could waft the flames anywhere and at anyone.
He told me to look it up in the Bible, so I did – Ecclesiastes 1:9 : “What has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the Sun.”
The much older Harold Rosen tells us in this enchanting but little-known book how, years after the event, he met people who were in the East End at the same time as Mosley’s Blackshirts and how different people remember the same things in different ways.
You sense laughter coming out of his pen when he says that the great event shouldn’t even be called the Battle of Cable Street because most of the fighting – most of it between anti-Fascists and the Police – took place at Gardiner’s Corner where the Molsey march folded.
Whatever. Wherever. It was in Cable Street where barricades were erected and the world “barricade” makes the blood run faster and stronger.
He wrote –“The barricade! The potential of urban revolution: 1848 across Europe, the Parisian Communards in 1871, the Russian Revolution. So then, the very choice of name was a crucial part of the creation of a myth in the particular sense that I am giving to that word.”
He told me that October 4, 1936 was a tremendous victory for anti-Fascists, one that made Jews and East End Communists feel part of a world revolution even though none of the had set foot in the Soviet Union.
But it was also, he said, a day that exposed what he called “the craven attitude of the Labour Party and the Jewish authorities” who told protesters to stay off the streets, keep a low profile and not cause trouble.
In 1996 on the 60th anniversary of the great “battle” Harold Rosen joined what he called “a damp little gathering“ and plodded around parts of the East End which shaped him as a child. But only a dozen veterans with memories of the abandoned October march turned up.
His comment was “. . . memories of events which are not nurtured by state monopoly struggle for a niche in people’s consciousness.”
So, it is important that the memory of Cable Street is kept alive, even though memories differ about what happened.
After all, in Harold Rosen’s words “Cable Street is a red – letter day in the left-wing almanac”
But rejoicing comes with a warning.
He wrote, ”A so-called flashbulb memory, supposedly the bright, perfectly remembered moment, often turns out to be wrongly remembered and endowed with significance after the event or even before it. What makes them different is the high level of emotion which saturated the original experience and its meaning in the life of the remembered. They prove to be resistant to change; they achieve a canonical form which seems to render them proof against amnesia loss.”
Harold Rosen in front of the famous Battle of Cable Street memorial mural. It was originally designed by David Billington but other local artists made their contributions between 1979-1983.
Last words from a great man, Harold Rosen, the Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Education, University of London and one of the world’s great authorities on memory and education.
He wrote –
“If you are lucky, there are moments in your life which are especially and uniquely illuminated. They stand out from the rest of your life as bright icons, huge representative symbols, which give meaning to how you have lived. This is why we purify such moments, polish them and in our heads, play them over again and again. Cable Street was one of those moments for the Left in the 1930s. We gave it a mythological and heroic dimension. Because we are short of such out and out victories, we badly needed those dynamic images.”