The Battle of Cable Street was a series of clashes that took place at several locations in the East End of London on Sunday 4 October 1936.
The British Union of Fascists (BUF), led by Oswald Mosley, announced a march to celebrate the fourth anniversary of their organisation. The BUF had become increasingly antisemitic, so their decision to march through East London, then home to a large Jewish population, rather than close to its headquarters in Westminster, was regarded as a deliberate provocation.
A broad coalition of local representatives was unsuccessful in persuading the Home Secretary to ban the march, so the Independent Labour Party, the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Jewish People's Council Against Fascism and Anti-Semitism rallied large crowds, of mostly politically unaffiliated people, onto the streets in an attempt to block the march.
There was fighting between the BUF and counter-protestors at the fascist muster point at Tower Hill. The Metropolitan Police then clashed with both parties as they separated the factions and established a cordon around the BUF force.
The police attempted to clear a route for the fascists through the Aldgate area, but were frustrated by the crowds. Although resistance to the police around Aldgate was sometimes violent, the defence of the Gardiner's Corner sector of Aldgate, the largest and longest-lasting point of contention, was characterised by determined peaceful resistance.
The police continued their attempt to clear Aldgate, but in light of their difficulties there, also tried to clear an alternative route along narrow Cable Street, where fierce fighting occurred as they attempted to clear barricades erected along the street. Unable to clear a route through either Aldgate or Cable Street, and wishing to avoid continued disorder, the police told Mosley his march through East London could not go ahead, but he was permitted to march to the West End instead.
A large mural depicting the battle was painted on the side of St George's Town Hall to commemorate the event. It stands in Cable Street, about 350 metres (1,150 ft) east of the main barricade that stood by the junction with Christian Street.
Background
Mosley makes his name
In the November 1918 General Election, the 22-year-old aristocrat Oswald Mosley was elected to the House of Commons as a member of parliament (MP) for the Conservative Party. The Conservatives would be partners in a coalition led by the Liberal Party's wartime prime minister David Lloyd George.
Mosley's interests included promoting a generous accommodation with the republican movement to settle the increasingly intense Irish War of Independence. The government had recruited temporary constables, known as the Black and Tans, to help the Irish police suppress republican violence, but there was outrage when news of their excesses reached Britain, actions in which the government was partly complicit. Mosley (together with a number of other politicians, journalists, bishops and others) denounced them and publicised their acts of brutality. In November 1920, he became a household name after resigning from the Conservative Party in protest at the actions of the Black and Tans, continuing his campaign against them as an independent MP.
In the spring of 1924 Mosley was admitted to the Labour Party, and in 1928 inherited his father's title, becoming 6th Baronet Ancoats. He also acquired the hereditary knighthood that came with it. Mosley obtained a junior ministerial role in Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government in 1929. In February 1930 he proposed a Keynesian policy of tariffs, greater state control of the economy and increased public spending to boost the economy and ease rapidly increasing unemployment and other social problems. This was too radically left-wing for the government, whose economic approach was laissez-faire by comparison.
With the government struggling to cope with the crisis, Mosley hoped to become leader in place of MacDonald. Although very popular with the Labour Party membership, his inter-personal arrogance cost him the necessary support among the parliamentary Labour Party that would have been necessary to become leader. He quit the Labour Party in February 1931 to establish the New Party. He did not have a reputation as an antisemite at this time, and the New Party fielded Jewish candidates and sought to attract Jewish voters. However, the party did create a force of stewards, led by the boxer Ted "Kid" Lewis, a Jew from the East End of London. The force's main purpose was to protect the party's meetings from the regular attacks by Communists, but Mosley looked forward to a time when the stewards could act as a political paramilitary force.
In early 1932, Mosley visited Italian leader Benito Mussolini, Europe's leading fascist, to see Italian fascism in action. Soon after, he wound up the New Party and launched the new British Union of Fascists (BUF) on 4 October 1932.
The fascist manifesto
The new BUF presented themselves as a party of youthful dynamism, which offered – in contrast to the similarly utopian communists – a patriotic alternative to capitalism.
BUF messaging in the early years included relatively little antisemitic content (Mosley's 1934 book The Greater Britain made no reference to Jews) as Mosley believed Britain's culturally liberal tradition would make this counter-productive. However many senior BUF figures were fiercely antisemitic and over time this would lead to anti-Jewish racism becoming the party's principal pre-occupation.
The initial focus of BUF campaigning was the introduction of a new constitutional and economic framework called the Corporate State. The British principle of parliamentary sovereignty would be replaced by a more technocratic, more autocratic system, which Mosley described in The Greater Britain as a "modern dictatorship". Local government would also be reorganised to ensure it acted in accordance with the will of the executive.
Mosley's long-held views on increased public spending and greater state control of the economy were to be delivered by the Corporate State, which was based on the approach introduced in fascist Italy. The new constitutional processes included a smaller, more powerful executive, to replace the Cabinet system. There would still be a parliament, but its constitutional role would be much diminished.
The economy would be divided into sectors called Corporations, and under a system known as the occupational franchise, voters would be assigned to a Corporation depending on their job. MPs would no longer be elected on the basis of political parties competing in specific geographic areas (constituencies), but based on industrial sectors. Voters would choose from a list of competing industry experts; dockers would vote for dockers, miners for miners, housewives for housewives and so on.
MPs would collaborate with trade unions and business leaders, and with them share responsibility for recommending policy relating to their particular corporation. Mosley promised that the new Corporate State processes would balance the needs of the citizen as a worker and as a consumer, end unemployment and resolve class conflict.
The BUF, 1932–1934
Many establishment figures were sympathetic to Mosley at this stage, including press baron Viscount Rothermere, who used his outlets (including the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror) to promote the BUF; this included his front page editorial "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" headline in January 1934. Rothermere's publicity made the BUF fashionable and helped increase its membership to around 40,000–50,000 in mid-1934. In its early days the party insisted it was not antisemitic, but antisemitism crept in, especially during 1934.
The BUF maintained the paid paramilitary Fascist Defence Force (FDF), ostensibly to defend its many public meetings from disruption by its opponents. The force, initially 300-strong – but subsequently growing – was based at Black House, in King's Road, Chelsea. The FDF had a fleet of thirty vehicles, including five armoured transports, each capable of quickly moving twenty people around the country.
The BUF's fashionable status meant large numbers; establishment figures attended the BUF "Nuremberg-style" rallies across the UK. The broad appeal turned to fear and disgust, when, at the Olympia rally in West London, Mosley would pause during his long and sometimes antisemitic speech to give Blackshirt stewards the opportunity to assault and eject both male and female hecklers. Spotlights were turned on the heckler as the stewards subjected them to sometimes sustained beatings, in the full view of large numbers of people; others were attacked with weapons (including knuckledusters and rubber coshes) out of sight in the arena corridors. The impact on public opinion was compounded when the infamous Night of the Long Knives purge occurred in Germany shortly after.
The violence and antisemitism caused a backlash. Rothermere withdrew his support, venues and advertising slots became hard to book, and membership crashed (to around 5,000 in 1935). As a result of this setback Mussolini reduced his funding – though Hitler would subsequently also come to fund the movement. Mosley resolved to rebuild the party, and decided on a much more overtly antisemitic approach. While the BUF would remain very much a nation-wide movement, it would concentrate much of its resources on areas with the largest Jewish populations: East London, Leeds and Manchester.
London's Jews
The East End had been the centre of Jewish life in Britain since Oliver Cromwell allowed Jews to resettle in the country in the 1650s. The penultimate (the last coming in the 1930's) and largest cohort of Jewish migration occurred at the end of the 19th century when 150,000 Yiddish speaking Jews came to the UK, to escape persecution in the Russian Empire. Most came to the East End, arriving at Irongate Wharf (adjacent to the Tower of London and St Katherine Docks) and via the port of Harwich in Essex, and then by train to Liverpool Street Station.
In 1936 there were around 330,000 Jews in the UK, amounting to around 0.7% of the population, but growing due to refugees (many of them young children) arriving in the country from Nazi Germany. Between a third and a half of British Jews lived in East London. In 1896 this proportion had been far higher, but slum clearance had led many Jews and non-Jews to leave the inner East End. This reduction in population of the most crowded areas was reinforced by restrictions on further immigration.
Jewish settlement in East London was focused on an arc in and around Whitechapel, extending from Bishopsgate to Cable Street. The area was chosen because of its cheap rents and the independent trades. This area took in large parts of the Metropolitan Borough of Stepney, the south-west of Bethnal Green and the eastern fringe of the City of London. The population of the Borough of Stepney was around 43% Jewish.
Progress on integration had been significant but uneven. Many Jews worked in textiles, furniture and fur trades. Relatively few worked in engineering, dockyards or heavy industry. Some of the older people still spoke Yiddish.
The social and economic integration of Jews had been a factor in the degree of outmigration from the crowded inner East End to more suburban areas or East, West and North London. The more prosperous and better-connected Jews in West and North London came to dominate the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the closely linked Jewish Chronicle. The Board and the Chronicle would come to be regarded as out of touch by many East London Jews, especially when Mosley began his campaign of antisemitism. This led to the creation of many local Jewish organisations and the Jewish Peoples Council umbrella group.
The BUF in East London, 1934–1936
One of the BUFs main campaign targets was the East End of London, which, even before the depression, was one of the very poorest parts of the country; badly affected by chronic unemployment, low paid and casualised work, landlordism and poor housing. The impact of this hardship went beyond the material. Father John Groser of Watney Street church (later destroyed in the Blitz), a respected local anti-fascist, described the psychological damage: "In addition to physical depression and ill health, there is clear evidence of the frustration of the personality, the loss of proper self-respect and the creation of an embittered and hopeless section of the community".
These factors made the East End a logical campaigning location for political parties offering an alternative to laissez-faire economic liberalism, and the BUF campaigned hard on the issues of jobs and housing. East London had a further attraction for the BUF in that it was home to the largest concentration of English Jews, people that they would scapegoat for society's ills; Jews were cast as both exploitative capitalists and dangerous communists, loyal to the Soviet Union. The BUF poured resources into East London. Continental funding meant that unlike other parties, it was able to appoint a full-time paid administrator into every branch, co-ordinating activities such as publicity, physical training, general administration and political and social events.
The BUF sought to appeal to the two main non-Jewish sections of East London society, those of Protestant background (of mixed English, Scottish, Huguenot and other ancestry), and those of Catholic background (of mostly Irish ancestry). They had a degree of success in attracting recruits from both groups, especially among the very young. The first branch in the area, at Bow, opened in October 1934 with others following with varying levels of success. The more successful branches included Shoreditch and Bethnal Green but the BUF struggled in areas such as Poplar and West Ham where the railway industries, large factories and dockyards lent themselves to a unionised workforce, and the alternative political focus that provided.