Ninety years ago today, London built a barricade and told fascism: you’re not coming through.
October 4th, 1936.
A Sunday.
And if you’d been standing in London’s East End that afternoon you’d have heard it before you saw it.
Thousands upon thousands of voices.
Police whistles.
The clatter of horses’ hooves.
Glass breaking.
People shouting from windows.
And above everything else, one cry.
“¡No pasarán!”
“They shall not pass.”
Welcome to Cable Street.
Welcome to one of the most extraordinary days in London’s history.
And exactly ninety years ago today, London had a fight on its hands.
The man coming east was Sir Oswald Mosley.
Aristocrat. Baronet. Former Conservative MP. Former Labour minister. Rich. Handsome. Charismatic. Clever.
And by 1936, leader of the British Union of Fascists.
The Blackshirts.
That name wasn’t metaphorical.
They wore black shirts.
Uniforms.
Military formations.
Salutes.
Flags.
Mass rallies.
Mosley had looked across the Channel at Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany and liked what he saw.
And this matters.
1936 is not some vague black and white pre-war world.
Hitler has been in power in Germany for three years.
The Nuremberg Laws stripping German Jews of their rights are already in force.
Mussolini has invaded Ethiopia.
And just a few months earlier the Spanish Civil War has begun.
Europe is catching fire.
And now Mosley proposes to march thousands of uniformed fascists straight through the East End of London.
Straight through neighbourhoods containing one of Britain’s largest Jewish populations.
You can imagine how that felt.
Indeed, you don’t have to imagine very hard.
Fascist antisemitism in the East End wasn’t theoretical.
There had been intimidation.
Street violence.
Attacks on Jews.
Vicious propaganda.
And now the Blackshirts were coming marching through.
People begged the government to stop it.
The Jewish People’s Council gathered 100,000 signatures in just two days asking the Home Secretary to ban the march.
He wouldn’t.
So the East End made other arrangements.
Word went out.
People came pouring in.
Jews.
Irish Catholic dockers.
Communists.
Socialists.
Trade unionists.
Labour supporters.
Young people.
Old people.
Women carrying shopping bags.
Children.
People who probably couldn’t have agreed on what to have for lunch, let alone how the country should be governed.
But on this they agreed.
Mosley was not marching through their streets.
The estimates vary wildly.
Contemporary reports talked of something around 100,000 anti-fascist demonstrators.
Later accounts put the number much higher, even 300,000.
Whatever the exact figure, the important thing is this.
The fascists were massively outnumbered.
The streets filled.
Whitechapel Road.
Commercial Road.
Aldgate.
Human walls.
And into this went thousands of policemen.
Some 6,000 or more by many accounts.
Mounted police as well.
Their job was to clear a route for Mosley’s march.
And here’s the important correction to the story.
When we say “The Battle of Cable Street”, you might picture Blackshirts and anti-fascists slugging it out with each other.
That’s not mainly what happened.
The fascists themselves never got into Cable Street.
The great battle was between the anti-fascist crowds and the police trying to clear a way for Mosley.
The original route was blocked.
So somebody thinks, we’ll get them through another way.
Cable Street.
Bad idea.
Very bad idea.
Because Cable Street was waiting.
A lorry was overturned.
Furniture appeared.
Mattresses.
Timber.
Paving stones were pulled up.
Barricades went across the street.
This wasn’t Trafalgar Square.
This wasn’t some great ceremonial London avenue.
This was a narrow East End street.
Tenements.
Shops.
Windows overhead.
Alleyways.
Every inch of geography mattered.
And there’s our daily word.
Barricade.
Lovely word.
It comes through French, ultimately from barrique, a barrel or cask.
And that’s the picture.
When you needed to block a street in a hurry, you dragged out whatever was big, heavy and close to hand.
Barrels.
Casks.
Timber.
Furniture.
Pile enough of it across the road and you had yourself a barricade.
So hidden inside the word barricade is a barrel.
And on Cable Street, ninety years ago today, Londoners knew exactly what a barricade was for.
The police moved in.
The crowd held.
Mounted officers tried to force their way through.
And then came one of those details that history gives you occasionally that you couldn’t improve if you were writing a film.
Children started rolling marbles under the police horses.
Marbles.
Think about that.
A tiny glass sphere against a mounted police charge.
Other people threw vegetables.
Bottles.
Bricks.
Stones.
There are accounts of pepper being thrown towards the horses.
And upstairs?
East End women opened their windows.
And emptied the contents of chamber pots onto the police below.
There’s civil disobedience.
And then there’s East End civil disobedience.
All the while the cry is going up.
“¡No pasarán!”
Spanish.
“They shall not pass.”
The slogan of the Republican defenders of Madrid against Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War.
Think how quickly that phrase had travelled.
From Spain to Stepney.
From an international civil war to a London back street.
“No pasarán.”
And they didn’t.
One of the most moving memories of the day came from the historian Bill Fishman, who was there as a young East End Jew.
He remembered bearded Jewish men standing alongside big Irish Catholic dockers.
That matters.
Because these weren’t necessarily communities that had always lived in perfect harmony.
But on October 4th, 1936, they knew who the enemy was.
Side by side.
Hold the street.
Police batons came out.
Heads were split.
People went down.
Windows were smashed.
There were scores of arrests.
Eighty-five arrests in all.
Only six of them fascists.
Women were arrested.
Even children were arrested.
And eventually the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Philip Game, made the call.
Enough.
He told Mosley, in effect, this march is not happening.
The Blackshirts were turned away.
Mosley’s great procession through the Jewish East End was finished before it had properly begun.
Cable Street had held.
And imagine the moment word went through that crowd.
They’re not coming.
Mosley’s turning back.
They didn’t get through.
Flags in the air.
People cheering.
“They shall not pass.”
And they had not passed.
Now, history being history, there’s an uncomfortable postscript.
Cable Street didn’t magically destroy British fascism.
Far from it.
Indeed, the British Union of Fascists actually gained thousands of members in the weeks immediately afterwards.
History is rarely as tidy as the commemorative plaque.
But something fundamental had happened.
Fascism had tried to turn the streets of London into political theatre.
And the East End had seized the stage.
And Whitehall took notice.
Within weeks Parliament was considering legislation.
The Public Order Act followed.
Political uniforms in public were prohibited.
Police were given greater powers over political marches.
The Blackshirt itself, that deliberately intimidating political uniform, effectively disappeared from Britain’s streets.
And Cable Street went into London folklore.
Not because everybody there was heroic.
Not because everything done that afternoon was noble.
Not because the story is quite as simple as it sometimes becomes in the retelling.
But because ordinary Londoners looked up one Sunday morning and realised that history had arrived in their street.
And there was no guarantee how the story was going to end.
Remember that.
We know Hitler loses.
They didn’t.
We know Nazi Germany will eventually be smashed.
They didn’t.
We know Mosley never becomes Britain’s Mussolini.
They didn’t.
They were standing there in 1936.
Hitler ascendant.
Mussolini ascendant.
Franco advancing.
Fascism looking horribly like the political force of the future.
And a bunch of dockers and tailors and shopkeepers and housewives and children in the East End of London said:
Not here.
Not down this street.
Not today.
And there’s one last thing.
Go to Cable Street now.
The Blackshirts have gone.
The barricades have gone.
The marbles have gone.
But on the side of the old St George’s Town Hall there’s an enormous mural.
People.
Horses.
Police.
Banners.
Fists.
Chaos.
A London street exploding into history.
And ninety years on, the words still seem to hang in the air.
“¡No pasarán!”
They shall not pass.
On October 4th, 1936, they didn’t.
This is London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time.
History time.
And today, quite literally, street history.
See you tomorrow.