The Battle of Cable Street, 4th October 1936

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By 1932, Oswald Mosley had already served as a Conservative, Independent and Labour MP, before quitting Labour when they rejected his plan to tackle unemployment,

He founded the New Party, which stood 25 candidates at the 1931 General Election, but won no seats, with all but two of its candidates polling less than 5%.

In October 1932, Mosley founded The British Union of Fascists. The BUF attempted to build a national following, projecting itself as an anti-establishment force and calling for ‘decisive action’. The party focused on the areas worst affected by the Great Depression, including the East End. The fascist leadership in the East End were antisemitic. Jewish businesses were set on fire, the windows of jewish house were smashed and Jews were attacked. The BUF received funding from Mussolini's fascists in Italy, and Hitler's Nazis in Germany.

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On the fourth of October 1936, a quarter of a million people took to the streets of East London to oppose an attempt by the British Fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, to march 5000 of his blackshirts through the predominantly Jewish Borough of Stepney. The planned fascist march, with its show of paramilitary force, was the latest manifestation of a long campaign of antisemitic terror.

Between 1880 and 1914, the Jewish community in London grew significantly. Jews whose homes had been swallowed up by the expanding Russian Empire had experienced growing repression and discrimination for a century. While state-sanctioned antisemitic violence had also been present, the pogroms of the 1870s took this to a new level. Approximately two million Jews left the Russian Empire, with around 150,000 settling in Britain.

As David Rosenberg observes in his book, ‘Battle for the East End’, the new immigrants were different to the previous generations of Jews that had arrived from Spain, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands. Some of the earlier Jewish immigrants had been successful in business and moved to more affluent areas of London. The newcomers, however, were poor and often lacked skills.

For some, the aim had been to reach the United States, but they couldn’t afford the onward travel. Instead they endured poverty and antisemitism, with limited support from the Jewish hierarchy.

A wider racist opposition to the new arrivals found its expression in the Aliens Act of 1905, which introduced controls on ‘undesirables’ entering the country. Designed, as it was to exclude poor immigrants from outside the Empire, it sent a clear message to the community, at the same time as a renewed wave of pogroms swept across Russia.

In the 1930s, the Jewish population was concentrated around Whitechapel.

Some families, like Beatty Orwell’s, already felt well-established.

In the 1930s, 95% of those living in Petticoat Lane were Jewish, and Yiddish was often spoken in the market.

Towards the Thames, Wapping was mainly home to Irish Dockers and their families.

Sandwiched between Whitechapel and Wapping was Cable Street, a smaller east-west road of narrow two to four storey houses, the ground floors filled with shops and workshops, the cramped rooms above housing a diverse population.

What the different groups shared was poverty and poor housing.

By late 1932, the British economy was beginning to emerge from the Great Depression, but in the East End unemployment remained stubbornly high. In 1931, The Labour Government under Ramsay Macdonald had cut support for the unemployed, driving many into even greater poverty.

Stepney had been recognised as a slum area, but the desire to clear the slums and rebuild ran into practical difficulties – the residents while the overcrowded slums were demolished, but those who worked in the tailoring workshops were simply too poor to commute to their long hours, low paid jobs.

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