Patrick Comerford
I have stayed twice in the East End of London in the past decade, staying on both occasions at the Royal Foundation of Saint Katharine, which is built around the old Georgian vicarage of Saint James in Ratcliffe.
The Battle of Cable Street made that part of the East End famous 90 years ago on this day, 4 October 1936, and the events of that day not only shaped the identity of the East End but are also worth recalling today as the far-right is on the rise again, threatening life in cities and towns, ports and suburbs.
The old vicarage at Saint Katharine’s faces out towards Cable Street, which runs through the heart of Tower Hamlets, from Limehouse to the edge of London’s financial district, the City of London.
Cable Street runs parallel to, and south of, the Docklands Light Railway and Commercial Road, and north of The Highway. The area is close to Wapping and Shadwell Basin to the south, Tower Hill to the west, and Whitechapel and Stepney to the north. Because many Londoners define where they live by the nearest station, the Cable Street area is often known as Shadwell.
In the past, Stepney was divided into four hamlets – Ratcliffe, Limehouse, Poplar and Mile End – and the northern part of the hamlet of Ratcliffe, where the 17th century Kilkenny-born mapmaker Nicholas Comberford (1600-1673) lived, is between Shadwell and Limehouse.
Each time I stayed at Saint Katharine’s, I walked the length of Cable Street through the East End, towards the City of London.
When Saint Katharine’s moved back to the East End in the 1940s, the first Master appointed after the move was Father St John Groser (1890-1966), who had been the Rector of Saint George-in-the-East, on Canon Street Road off Cable Street
He was an Anglican priest and a prominent Christian socialist. He was said to be ‘the best-known priest in the East End’ and Kenneth Leech said that he was ‘one of the most significant Christian socialist figures in 20th century Britain’. He took part in the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, and had his nose broken by a police baton.
Cable Street started as a rope walk or straight path where hemp ropes were twisted along its length into ships’ ropes or cables. These cables supplied ships anchored nearby in the Pool of London, between London Bridge and Wapping and Rotherhithe.
Until Victorian times, the present-day Cable Street had different names for each of its sections, including Cable Street, Knock Fergus, New Road, Back Lane, Blue Gate Fields, Sun Tavern Fields, and Brook Street. The whole central area of present-day Cable Street was named after Saint George-in-the-East Church and Saint George-in-the-East parish.
Up to the 1950s, Cable Street had a reputation for cheap lodgings, brothels, drinking inns and opium dens. In 1868, the Dublin-born Dr Thomas Barnardo (1845-1905) opened his first home for destitute children nearby in Stepney Causeway.
The Battle of Cable Street took place 90 years ago, on Sunday 4 October 1936, when local communities clashed with police who were protecting a planned fascist march in Cable Street in the heart of the Jewish East End.
Local Jewish groups and residents, along with trade unionists, Labour groups, socialists, Communists, anarchists and local Irish organisations, decided to take a stand against a planned march through the East End by Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.
Mosley planned to goose-step thousands of his marchers dressed in uniforms like those of Mussolini’s Blackshirts through the East End, which then had a large Jewish population. Despite the strong likelihood of violence, the government hesitated about banning the march. A large police escort was provided in a bid to block anti-fascist protesters from disrupting the march.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews denounced the march as antisemitic and urged Jewish people to stay away. The Communist Party, under the leadership of Phil Piratin, was one of the leaders of the opposition forces.
The anti-fascist groups set up roadblocks in an attempt to prevent the march from taking place. The barricades were set up near the junction with Christian Street, towards the west end of Cable Street. About 20,000 anti-fascist demonstrators turned out, only to be met by 6,000 police, who attempted to clear the road to allow 2,000-3,000 fascists to march.
The demonstrators fought back with sticks, rocks, chair legs and other improvised weapons. Rubbish, rotten vegetables and the contents of chamber pots were thrown at the police by women from the doors and windows of houses along Cable Street. A bus was overturned and used as a barricade, Mosley’s car was attacked with bricks, and hand-to-hand fighting broke out on the surrounding streets.
After a series of running battles that day, Mosley appeared to climb down and agreed to abandon his march, claiming he now wanted to prevent bloodshed. The fascist marchers were dispersed towards Hyde Park and the police then attacked the counter-demonstrators. About 150 of them were arrested, although some escaped, and several members of the police were also arrested by demonstrators. Around 175 people were injured, including police, women and children.
Many of the arrested demonstrators reported they had been treated harshly by the police. Most were charged with the minor offence of obstructing police and fined £5, but several of the leaders were found guilty of affray and sentenced to three months hard labour.
Two days after the Battle, Mosley was married in Joseph Goebbels’s drawing room, with Hitler as his special guest. The Battle of Cable Street was a major factor leading to the passage of the Public Order Act 1936, which required police consent for political marches and forbade the wearing of political uniforms in public. It provided a short-term boost for Mosley’s fascists but eventually proved to be a significant moment in their decline in the years immediately before World War II.
Piratin was one of the heroes of the day. In 1937, he became the first Communist elected to Stepney Borough Council, and in 1945 he was elected as the Communist MP for Mile End.
Beatty Orwell, who took part in the counter-fascist protests was then a 19-year-old. She went on to be the Mayor of Tower Hamlets and served as councillor for 10 years in the 1970s and 1980s. She is now a great-grandmother 18 times over.
In the 1980s, a large mural depicting scenes from the battle was painted on the side of Saint George’s Town Hall in Cable Street, immediately west of Shadwell station and next to Library Place. This building was originally the vestry hall for the parish and later the town hall of Stepney Borough Council.
Little is recognisable from that period on today’s Cable Street, apart from the faded street signs. Cable Street is now home to a large South Asian community, a cycle route to the City, and some parts of it look as though they are becoming up-and-coming residential areas for young hipsters.
At a rally ten years ago to mark the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, the speakers included 100-year-old Dublin-born Max Levitas, a veteran of the battle, a Communist councillor in Stepney for 15 years, and still active then in political causes. He died at the age of 103 on 2 November 2018 after a life of political activism fighting for housing for the poor and for social justice. He was buried in Rainham Jewish Cemetery.
His brother, Maurice (‘Morry’) Lavitas, was a veteran of the Connolly Column in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. He took part in the commemoration of the Connolly Column in Liberty Hall, Dublin, in 1991, when he was chosen to read out the list of members. He also attended a ceremony hosted by the Lord Mayor of Dublin in the Mansion House in 1997 to honour the surviving Irish members of the International Brigade. He died in London in 2001.
Their father Harry fled from Lithuania and their mother Leah from Latvia in 1913, both escaping the antisemitic pogroms of Tsarist Russia. They met in Dublin and were married in the Camden Street Synagogue. However, on the other side of Europe, Harry’s sister Sara was burnt to death along with fellow-villagers in the synagogue of Akmeyan, and Leah’s sister Rachel was killed with her family by the Nazis in Riga.
Levitas House on Jubilee Street, new flats in Stepney Green in 2020, are a fitting memory and tribute to Max Levitas, the Dublin-born hero of the Battle of Cable Street and a veteran political activist. But the most fitting tribute to the Levitas brothers and the heroes of Cable Street 90 years ago is to continue to resist the far-right which is on the rise again.
My first visit to Cable Street came immediately after visiting Auschwitz, Birkenau and the Old Jewish Quarter of Kraków. In a time when we are seeing the rise of political extremism and racism not only in Britain but throughout Europe, and holding a tight grip on political power in the US, it is good to be reminded of the courage and resilience of people who stood against the rise of fascism in years immediately before World War II.
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