IT SEEMS amazing that 80 years have passed since the Battle of Cable Street took place on the streets of London’s East End.

Our world has changed so much in that time. The generation that fought and prevailed on Sunday October 4 1936 may well have mostly passed and the memory grown a little dim, but the lessons remain to be learned.

Few who live in the area or who hail from families with roots extending back to those streets are unaware of the battle or its significance.

It has passed down as part of family and community folklore. But the most active participants passed to their children, not just a memory, but a warning too.

My mother was in Toynbee Hall on the day, serving tea to local dignitaries including Clem Atlee MP. My father — part of a contingent of wrestlers, boxers and weightlifters from a local gymnasium, who had battled the Mosley fascists on a daily basis up and down Vallance Road, extending down to Leman Street and the surrounding area — had other, more determined things on his mind. Neither was aware then that the day would become a turning point in British history.

It was just something that had to be done. And that’s the lesson they passed on. Either act, or let history take you down.

Mum was a teenager, fresh from Germany, escaping in 1933. So just letting history take its course was no real option. For father, his mates and the local community, the war probably started with Cable Street and did not stop till he fought at Tobruk, El Alamein and Normandy, entering Berlin nine years later.

Cable Street was and is an artery which extends through inner east London. Joining Royal Mint Street and running down to where Gardiner’s Corner once stood, it forms a point of contact with the wealthy City and its bankocracy to the west and the productive hub of the docks to the south.

In between lay the myriad of small highly skilled furniture makers, print houses and clothing factories of Stepney. It had a teeming population of over a million people shoehorned into rack rent accommodation with pirate landlords, sweated factories and often dangerous and insanitary conditions.

Yet it was also a cultural nerve centre. A coming together of indigenous English workers who had appeared as a proletariat around the time of the Napoleonic wars, with waves of immigrants.

Much of the urban layout stemmed from this period and the demography of poverty hadn’t shifted either. The East End housed the oldest immigrant Chinese community in the Western world, alongside the Irish who began to arrive in sizeable numbers after 1840, with the eastern European Jews following towards the end of the century.

There was an older generation with its conventions and memory of the Great War, of influenza and tuberculosis. They were crammed into tenements along with a new younger generation, who were organising together into unions, rent associations and even marrying “across the divide.”

Women who entered the local workforce in sizeable numbers before the turn of the century, especially in the textiles and munitions and armaments factories around Victoria Park and westwards, were an important force in both the local labour force and community.

Around the time of Cable Street, the memory of the Suffragettes was very much alive. There were music halls and amateur orchestras — those of the Workers’ Circle were especially popular, a vibrant nightlife with its local dance halls and the popular Whitechapel Gallery, which was a focus for the progressive artists of the Artist’s International Association.

There was religious difference but tolerance too and mutual respect, except among the small disaffected and confused section of the community attracted to Mosley’s “grievance” politics.

Anti-fascists did not neglect these people, seeking constantly to find ways to bring communities together and rescue them from the base and divisive arguments of Mosley.

Young communists joined the clubs and gyms where Mosley was known to be recruiting in order to ensure that he did not go unchallenged. And hanging over all this was the clash of ideology and the seemingly unstoppable march of fascism across the water.

Each of the generations and communities that made up the East End had its own fears and reservations, hopes and aspirations. 

Only the left understood that the continental march of fascism was being deliberately teased eastwards.

Through active engagement and subterfuge the British ruling class was comfortable with Hitler and Mussolini as long as they looked east, not west.

The Baldwin government thought it was isolating the USSR, when all it was isolating was Britain itself. Britain’s people were to play a decisive role in the defeat of Hitler.

At the centre of that huge, sustained, popular war effort lay the East End communities. Their first taste of a fascist onslaught came, not with the declaration of war in 1939, but with Mosley’s announcement he was to emulate “sawdust Caesar” Mussolini’s march on Rome with one of his own.

The aim of Mosley’s march was to drive a wedge through the East End of London. The planned march was more than a foray and much more than a skirmish.

Each of these types of battles was taking place on a daily basis in the area, indeed it was fought out street by street. His aim was strategic.

Achieving the upper hand in the east of London would allow him leverage in his dealings with the millionaire class — some adored him, but others would have to be made to support the Blackshirts.

It would also provide him with a victory to “sell” abroad. It is a fact that most of his funding came from fascist Italy, with which he established all sorts of dodgy business ventures.

Mosley chose a marching date that he knew could wrong-foot the heart of the organised opposition to fascism, the communists and the youth.

They had planned to demonstrate elsewhere in central London in support of the peoples of Spain, then in a life or death struggle against domestic reaction, treacherous generals such as Franco and German and Italian foreign intervention. But the response to the Mosley manoeuvre was magnificent. It was organised, disciplined and swift.

The communists and allies, including the veterans, called for the supporters of Spain to relocate to the area leading up to Gardiner’s Corner and Cable Street and around. To rally their forces they used the slogan “No Pasaran,” first echoed when the Franco march on the Spanish capital was blocked.

Streets were chalked, there were nightly poster parades as people came home from work around the Aldgate stations. Cinema and music performances were interrupted by announcements. Plans were made to defend in depth.

The aim was simple and understood by all. Mosley would not be allowed to march, despite his thousands of police escorts. Blocked by sheer number of opponents the fascists were forced into a humiliating withdrawal. Mosley was never going to get through. There was suspicion about his uniforms. The parading reminded too many of the shame and waste of the trenches rather than the camaraderie and bravery. His hatred of unions was no way to win over a working class who organised into unions over generations to escape poverty. The hectoring and the bullying speaking style, the stage management and showmanship and the concept of a “Leader” did not wash in the East End.

At the end of the day, Mosley’s brand of “fascism” was exposed as a new political face to the same old class rule.

Among its first electoral candidates were a knight, a lady, two vice-admirals, a lieutenant colonel and a major general. So much for the radical workers’ party. It was also considered an alien import. Which could never prevail over the ideology of socialism, which had grown out of the organic struggles over the centuries of the ordinary people. His friendship with Julius Streicher, later hanged for genocide, and his marriage overseen by Hitler didn’t help.

The point was driven home when he flew to Germany to meet Goebbels, the day after he was driven from the East End. And so, 80 years on, the lessons passed between generations continue to inform and inspire.