ONE of the first great anti-fascist speeches was re-enacted 100 years on to the hour on Saturday, as actor Emma Beattie delivered an address from Sylvia Pankhurst on the very spot it was first delivered.

The Sylvia Pankhurst Memorial Committee, which is fundraising for a statue of the revolutionary feminist to be raised in Clerkenwell Green, organised the commemorative event at Clerkenwell’s Gunmakers’ Arms — where on March 25 1923, when it was an Italian community club called Dondi’s, Pankhurst spoke at a protest meeting “against the fascist reaction in Italy.”

The crowd booed, hissed, cheered and applauded as Ms Beattie brought Pankhurst to life with the passionate denunciation of Mussolini’s terror — and its complacent or even admiring reception in Britain, with the exception of her own Workers’ Dreadnought newspaper.

Historian Alfio Bernabei, whose exhibition about Pankhurst and her husband Silvio Corio runs until April 28 at the Charing Cross Library, said the rally at Dondi’s was the first anti-fascist meeting in Britain — taking place at the heart of what was then London’s Little Italy, where anti-fascists were struggling against Rome’s bid to exert control over Britain’s Italian community.

A member of the National Association of Italian Partisans, founded by the partisans who overthrew and hanged Mussolini in 1943 and then fought Nazi occupation, he said the organisation had made a donation to the statue campaign because “Sylvia was the first well known public figure in Britain to recognise the threat of fascism — a partisan before the partisans.”

Former South East Region TUC secretary Megan Dobney, one of the “gang of four” women who founded the memorial committee alongside Philippa Clark, Professor Mary Davis and Barbara Switzer, related the long campaign to see Sylvia Pankhurst honoured with a statue and why Clerkenwell Green would be a suitable site given the area’s long radical history — and Pankhurst’s intimate connection with it.

“Clerkenwell is like home to me — this Little Italy is part of my life,” the communist revolutionary had told the crowd at Dondi’s back in 1923, explaining how important the anti-fascist struggle in London’s Italian community was to her.

Find out more about the campaign at sylviapankhurst.gn.apc.org