Become a Patron!
The Battle Of Cable Street | Oswald Mosley | The Blackshirts
The Battle of Cable Street occurred On 4 October 1936 a violent confrontation between the Metropolitan Police and local communities. The incident was later named ‘The Battle of Cable Street’. Communist, anarchist, labour and Jewish groups joined with locals to resist a planned march through the East End by Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. This is one of my least admired areas of my genealogy, as the BUF leader for Bethnal Green, London was my second cousin ‘Alfred Graham Plaskett’, and a close friend of Oswald Mosley. Alfred was born on the 14th June 1910 and died in 1998 This is the story of that battle and how it came to be, the part that Alfred played in this, was as one of mosleys leaders and a close friend, he was a blackshirt and a Nazi sympathizer. Cable Street in the East End of London was originally a long straight path adjacent to the River Thames and where ships’ cables (ropes) were twisted and laid out along. From Victorian times until the 1950s it was known for its brothels, pubs, cheap lodgings and opium dens – presumably because of the street’s proximity to London’s docks. However it’s most famous as the location of a street battle that occurred 1936 between Oswald Moseley’s Blackshirts, thousands of anti-fascists (which included local jewish, socialist, Irish and Communist groups) and the Metropolitan Police who, in vain, tried to keep the warring parties apart. It ended up encapsulating the British fight against pre-war fascism – the political force that was marching across Europe in the mid-thirties – and realistically dealt the British fascist movement such a blow it never really recovered. Sir Oswald Ernald Moseley came from an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family, and although infamous now for once leading the British Union Of Fascists before the second world war, he had a very strange and chequered political career. He was once, at the age of twenty-one in 1918, a Conservative MP for Harrow and actually parliament’s youngest sitting member of Parliament. In 1921 however, he left the Conservative party and ‘crossed the floor’ protesting about the use of the Black and Tans (a paramilitary force created by the British to target the Irish Republican Army but which became notorious for attacking the civilian population) over in Ireland. He became an independent MP but eventually joined the Labour party (he and his first wife Cynthia ironically were ardent Fabian socialists in the 1920s) and actually became a minister, albeit without portfolio, in Ramsay McDonald’s Labour government of 1929. His radical proposals to conquer unemployment were consistently turned down by the cabinet, and deeply upset about this, he resigned in 1931. After a tour of Europe he became enamoured with the ‘new movements’ of Mussolini and other fascists and formed the British Union Of Fascists (BUF) in 1932 which soon gained 50,000 members and the early support of both The Daily Mail and The Daily Mirror. The BUF’s meetings were provocatively racist and anti-semitic and the meetings, especially the huge rally in 1934 at Olympia, were ruthlessly stewarded by their black-shirted Defence Force. However, probably because of the BUF’s aristocratic and Tory sympathisers, the police were said to be strangely lenient. On the 4th October 1936 Oswald Mosley planned for thousands of his supporters to march into the East End of London, mainly because they wanted to antagonise the large Jewish population living there. The Conservative home secretary, despite the extreme likelihood of violence, refused to ban the march and its said that ten thousand police were mobilised to prevent the anti-fascists disrupting Moseley’s rally. However barricades and illegal roadblocks were erected around the area of Cable Street off which the police tried to take down. Running battles between the police and hundred of thousands of anti-fascists chanting the Spanish civil war slogan ‘No Pasaran’, which means ‘they shall not pass’. There are stories of women emptying chamber pots and boiling water on the police and the Blackshirts, and local children throwing marbles on the road and popping paper bags of pepper to disrupt the police-horses. Eventually the Police Commissioner demanded that Moseley called the rally off and the Blackshirts were eventually dispersed towards the West End and then Hyde Park. #thebattleofcablestreet #oswaldmosley #theblackshirts
- Published: 24 March 2022
- Location: London
- Duration: 9:56
- Photography – Stephen Robert Kuta / Yhana Kuta
- Written by – Stephen Robert Kuta
Music –
Music Licensed by Epidemic Sound
*** If you enjoy our content why not support our creative process on Patreon. *** ? http://www.patreon.com/stephenandyhana ***
