Cable Street memories: The day that every horse went down

Sir Oswald Mosley reviews his ‘troops’ before the
Cable Street stand-off, at which the fascists were defeated

For Cable Street veteran, Michael Sherbourne, the famous battle against the fascists in Whitechapel, 75 years ago next Tuesday, was a foregone conclusion.

"It was a deliberate provocation. We knew we were going to stop them."

The 94-year-old, who fought in Israel in 1948 and campaigned for Soviet Jews, doesn't consider his story of that October day to be unusual. "Every young Jew in London was there. I was 19 - to say that I was there is nothing special."

Few veterans of the Battle of Cable Street are still alive to recall the day when Jews, trade unionists, and Communists barricaded Whitechapel against the police-protected march of Sir Oswald Mosley's "blackshirts", forcing them out of the East End. This Sunday, members of Jewish, Socialist and Bengali groups will march from Aldgate to a rally in Cable Street to mark the anniversary. Speakers include members of the TUC, anti-racism group Searchlight, Labour councillors and original Cable Street participants.

Writer David Rosenberg, of the Jewish Socialists' Group, is one of the organisers and author of a book on Jewish responses to fascism in the 1930s. "I've been involved in anti-fascist activities for 25 years and demonstrated against the National Front as a teenager," he said. "I keep hearing new things all the time about what happened. But there are very few still able to remember it personally, which is why it is still important. The issues haven't gone away; there's still the BNP and the EDL."

One of the speakers at the rally will be Max Levitas, 96, a Jewish East Ender and former Communist councillor in Tower Hamlets. He was arrested in 1934 for daubing anti-fascist slogans on Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, against a Mosley-organised rally in Hyde Park.

He said: "What was happening in Germany made us determined that fascism should not take control in this country. On the day in 1936 when we heard they intended to come up Cable Street, we started to build barricades with rubbish and furniture. I was a runner, passing messages to the leadership. It went on for hours, until we heard the march was banned by the Home Secretary. You should have been there to hear the cry, and see people jumping and shouting in joy. People who had never drunk beer in their lives, drank a glass of beer. We had won."

But he added: "We had asked the Board of Deputies to represent us to the government, asking them to ban the march. And they wouldn't. They said all the Jewish people should stay at home. We disagreed entirely. The more you stay at home, the stronger they get."

Mr Sherbourne and his brother were caught up in different parts of the protest. "We were given brown paper bags, with about 100 glass marbles in each. We waited, and saw the police get on horseback, preparing to charge. As they did, we threw the marbles along the ground. And every horse went down."

His brother Cyril, now 88, watched the struggle unfold. "We heard choruses of 'they shall not pass' all day. If they had got through, it would have been a massacre. It was a great turning point."

Mr Levitas felt that today's East End has learnt from the Battle of Cable Street about standing up to racism, most recently opposing the English Defence League march through Tower Hamlets.

"The majority of people in this country are against racism. But you have to educate them to speak out, and in a united fashion."

Jewish Chronicle

Cable Street 75

On 4 October 1936 London’s East End took to the streets to stop Oswald Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts from marching through its then largely Jewish districts. Communists, socialists and trade unionists led one of the largest – and most successful – mobilisations of Britain’s working class ever to have taken place. The fascists came to the area to divide Jews and non-Jews but were faced with a community that united against the threat.

Come and join the march and rally to remember that historic victory and to send a powerful message of unity against the forces of fascism, racism and antisemitism today!

Assemble:
11.30am Aldgate East (junction of Braham Street and Leman Street)

Rally:
1.00pm St Georges in the East Park (Cable Street)



Speakers
We are pleased to announce our first list of speakers for the event:
Max Levitas Battle of Cable Street Veteran
Frances O'Grady Deputy General Secretary TUC
Matthew Collins Searchlight
Robert Griffiths General Secretary Communist Party
Bob Crow General Secretary RMT
Kosru Uddin Labour Councillor
Julie Begum Swadhinata Trust
David Rosenberg Jewish Socialists' Group
Gail Cartmail Assistant General Secretary UNITE
Diana Holland Assistant General Secretary UNITE
Akik Rahman Altab Ali Memorial Foundation

For a full list of speakers and supporting organisations visit www.cablestreet75.org.uk

Blackshirt women's children live with shame

Children of Blackshirt women, who joined Oswald Mosley's pro-Nazi British Union of Fascists, often feel that they have had to live with the burden of the guilt and shame caused by their mother's fascist sympathies

When I was 11, I was taken by my mother to visit her birthplace in Kennington, London. As we walked around my mother showed me where the air-raid shelters were during the war, but then she began telling me about the Blackshirt meetings. At 11 it did not mean much to me but it has played on my mind ever since.

I decided to reopen the case of how the Blackshirts attempted to recruit my mother. It led me to question how many British women supported Hitler during the war, and what was their fate?

"I could have ended up in prison," my mother said. And many of these women did.

Now aged 88, my mother told me about the ink factory she worked in as a young girl.

"At first I was packing ink, it was horrible. There I met Primrose, nobody liked her, but she invited me home. I met her family and I fell for it - they were trying to get me to be a Blackshirt."

In documentaries about the Blackshirts, the pictures I have seen are only of men, marching in the streets in their paramilitary uniforms. I knew about the daughters of the aristocracy, like Diana Mitford who married Oswald Mosley, but I had not realised that young girls, like my own mother, could have been sucked in too. But speaking to the historian Julie Gottlieb (author of Feminine Fascism) I was surprised to learn that the first fascist political organisation in Britain was actually founded by a woman.

"It was called the fascisti, then changed its name to the British Fascists and it was founded... in 1923, by a Miss Rotha Lintorn-Orman," she told me.

Until then the most prominent political movement for women had been the Suffragettes. One of the most influential Suffragettes was Norah Elam, who was in charge of propaganda and imprisoned for making inflammatory speeches on women's suffrage. Sent to Holloway prison in 1914, she shared a cell with Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the British Suffragettes. But Norah Elam was imprisoned again during World War II, this time with Diana Mosley, wife of the fascist leader.

Like me, Norah's granddaughter and great-granddaughter Angela and Susan McPherson have been on a quest to find out more about their family's history. They knew little about the colourful past of their granny Norah.

"It was a bit of a shock," they told me. A bit of a shock indeed.

But women like my mother were not interested in politics, as Norah Elam was, so was it the comradeship or merely the appeal of the smart uniform that was the attraction? Julie Gottlieb described the Blackshirt uniform as "a great marketing tool, and an incredible draw particularly for the youth. Some historians call this period the battle of the shirts".

The party grew and even children were recruited to support Hitler's ideology. Diana Bailey, as a young girl in Bognor Regis, remembers her mother and father in their Blackshirt uniforms.

"We were told to paint slogans on the walls with 'Britain Awake' and 'Perish the Jews'. I was nine years old," she said.

Francis Beckett's mother Anne was also a young working woman, like my mother. Anne was sent along to Mosley's headquarters by the Pitman's Shorthand temp agency to work as a secretary.

"She wanted to be an actress but she made what she said was a dreadful mistake, she learnt shorthand. Pitman's sent her to Black House, HQ for the Blackshirts. She found it exciting. She was never a racist but worked amongst racists," Francis Beckett said.

It was at fascist headquarters that Anne joined the Blackshirts and met and later married one of the Blackshirt elite, John Beckett, Francis's father. John was sent to prison with Oswald Mosley during the war - and his family spent the rest of their lives living hand to mouth. A former Labour MP, John Beckett should have taken his place in the post-war Attlee government. Instead, he worked as a night watchman for Securicor.

Seeing how easily Francis's mother had become a Blackshirt, I asked my mother if something similar had happened to her, with her factory workmate Primrose and her fascist family.

"They were talking about these meetings - I thought they had got me there for a reason. They were talking about Mosley, so after this I left, and later gave in my notice at the ink factory," she said.

So after all these years I can stop imagining my mother sitting in the rows of a mass meeting, 'zieg heiling' their leader and being hauled off to Holloway Prison. But in talking to these families I can see how life could so easily have been very different for my family.

Diana Bailey continues to live with the consequences of her parents' actions - and says she will never lose her feelings of guilt.

"When Richard Dimbleby went into Belsen I felt the guilt of the whole of the world, I felt utterly responsible for what happened in those camps, because I did write 'Perish the Jews' on walls, it is something I will never get over."

* Mother Was a Blackshirt will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Monday 4 January at 1100 GMT.

BBC

Historian finds a fascist link to Broughton synagogue

A Prestwich historian has revealed that a strictly orthodox synagogue in Northumberland Street, Higher Broughton, was once the regional HQ of the British Union of Fascists.

Dr Yaakov Wise, Hon Research Fellow at the Centre for Jewish Studies at Manchester University, made the startling discovery whilst studying 1930s newspapers, Home Office Records and MI5 files for his doctorate. He claims British Union of Fascist's (BUF) founder Sir Oswald Mosley even considered moving his national headquarters from Chelsea to Northumberland Street where the Machzikei Hadas Synagogue now stands.

Dr Wise said: "It's an amazing paradox that this important Jewish institution was once a hotbed of anti-Semitic hatred."

He said Mosley attended the opening ceremony of the BUF Northern HQ in the Spring of 1934. A photo, now in archives at the Central Library, Manchester. shows Mosley with an honour guard of Blackshirts, mirroring the poses of fellow fascists Hitler and Mussolini.

According to Dr Wise, many of Mosley's followers were not ideologists but Lancashire cotton workers who, due to the Depression, had lost their jobs. Dr Wise has records from 1936-7 of Blackshirts from around the country arriving at Victoria Station and marching down Bury New Road to the Northumberland Street HQ. There was also a rally at Belle Vue in 1936. These rallies attracted protesters from the young Communists, Socialists and Jews and the ensuing skirmishes were quelled by police. This activity mirrored the better known Cable Street anti-fascist riots in the East End of London. Mosley also spoke at the Athenaeum Club in Bury, which now houses Bury Education Offices.

The organisation was made illegal in 1937 and in 1938, furniture importer and wholesaler Abraham Jacob Pfeffer bought the building in Higher Broughton. It was established as a synagogue the following year. The original 1870's merchant's villa was demolished in the 1950s and the current building dates from 1959.

Prestwich and Whitfield Guide