The political power of murals

February 20, 2024 / davesrebellion / 2 Comments

Last night I was privileged to be part of a panel at the Tate Modern holding a discussion with each other and the audience on “What can murals do?”. Each panelist gave a 5 minute presentation. This was mine.

I’Il tell you what I don’t like. I don’t like statues. They literally place one person on a pedestal for achievements of the many. But I love murals as a beautiful expressive form to celebrate collective struggles. They use the everyday urban fabric to remind us: something momentous happened here. They summon us to action today.

Three examples are especially meaningful for me, but I hope they will resonate with you too, in these times. They are about courageous uprisings from below – the dignity of resistance against oppressors, persecutors, exploiters and fascists.

The first commemorates the iconic clash of fascism and anti-fascism on 4 October 1936, when thousands of uniformed, jackbooted fascists, inciting violence and hatred, sought to invade the streets where tens of thousands of working class Jews eked a living, They tried to win the local Irish Catholic community against the Jews. On the day the most bloody clashes were in Cable Street, where many Irish united with Jews to build barricades, to physically stop them. The fighting was with the police, ordered by the Home Secretary to facilitate the fascists free speech and movement.

The mural graces the side wall of St Georges Town Hall on Cable Street. It was commissioned In 1976 after a campaign by local writers, poets, artists who hatched their cultural creations in the basement of that building.

Every 5 years there is a memorial march. In 2016 I was convenor of Cable Street 80. We marched from Altab Ali park in Whitechapel – named for a young Bengali sweatshop worker murdered in a racist attack in 1978 – to a rally near the mural. The artwork is so dramatic, you can almost hear it. One commentator wrote: “Every space has action, perspective is a whirlpool.” For me It is a clarion call for resistance today.

Also in 1976, when work began in Cable Street, an industrial dispute broke out in a photo processing factory in Willesden, mostly staffed by poorly paid “citizens of Empire – South Asian migrant women plus Irish and Caribbean workers. When one worker was dismissed for allegedly working too slowly, some fellow workers immediately came out in solidarity. When a manager compared workers to “chattering monkeys”, Jayaben Desai replied ‘What you are running here is not a factory, it is a zoo. In a zoo, there are many types of animals. Some are monkeys that dance on your fingertips, others are lions who can bite your head off. We are the lions, Mr. Manager’. She led a walk out of 137 workers. An uprising.

Union groups across Britain came to the picket lines – the most remarkable, miners from Yorkshire’s white monocultural pit villages gave solidarity to Asian women migrant workers. Postal workers boycotted the company. Students came too. I nursed a large bump below my knee on the way back to Leeds Uni after a policemen kicked me. This fight for union recognition won great community support.

In difficult times, economically, the two year strike ultimately failed but inspired campaigns for change. It is celebrated in two murals unveiled in 2017 – one in a small backstreet opposite the factory site, now converted into flats. But on the main road, Dudden Hill Lane, is a stunning 28metre-long mural created in community workshops facilitated by artist Ann Ferrie. Participants included families of the strikers and schoolchildren. Archive photographs from the strike became stencils that were screenprinted, photographed, then digitally composited into artwork and printed on to boards. People of all artistic abilities saw their work in the final piece.

We travel eastwards for my third example in the heart of what was the Warsaw Ghetto from 1940-43. A mural on a school building by, Dariusz Paczkowski, depicts a defiant Marek Edelman, a daffodil in his fist, and a brick wall. Edelman, a Jewish marxist, and anti-nationalist, was Second in Command in the three-week uprising of a few hundred starved combatants with improvised weapons against the armed might of the Nazis. He wrote a searing memoir called The Ghetto Fights and always stressed it was a collective uprising whose participant had already survived two and a half years in the ghetto through a culture of mutual aid and countless quiet acts of daily resistance by so many.

I met him briefly in 1997. Last year I was in Warsaw for the 80th anniversary of the ghetto uprising. I took part in the alternative ceremony led by grassroots anti-racist and anti-fascists, in contrast to the militaristic official ceremony, brimming with Polish and Israeli flags.

Edelman died in 2009. He pioneered these alternative ceremonies, knowing that this history belonged neither to Polish nor Israeli nationalists. He said “we fought for dignity and freedom not for territory nor for a national identity.”

The words in Polish on this mural could not be more apt today. “Hatred is easy. Love requires effort and sacrifice.”

So what happened after the battle, then?

October 2, 2021 / davesrebellion / Leave a comment

They thought they were invincible, that the future was theirs. Oswald Mosley, or “The Leader” as his overworked footsoldiers called him, boasted to his followers that the streets belonged to them. But the people of London’s East End, especially the Jewish and Irish communities, whom he had sought to divide against each other, united to stop him.

In a rare moment of introspection, the fascists’ newspaper, The Blackshirt, admitted that on 4 October 1936, his movement had been “humiliated”. They swore revenge on “Communism and Jewry”. They rioted in a Jewish neighbourhood a few days later and a 17-year-old Jew was thrown through a plate glass shop window.

When anti-fascists were first alerted to Mosley’s plan to invade the East End, they pinned their hopes on a mass petition to the Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, which saw nearly 100,000 signatures collected in 48 hours calling for the march to be banned. Days earlier local police in Leeds had chosen to divert a threatened fascist march through the town away from its heavily populated Jewish district.

As it turned out, though, it was better for the anti-fascist movement that the Home Secretary had such contempt and disdain for the lives and fears of the working class Jews of the East End that he prioritised Mosley’s free speech and free movement. In doing so he unwittingly enabled a people’s victory, in which 7,000 police and 5,000 fascists were hopelessly outnumbered by those who felt they had no option but to battle for the streets.

At the British Union of fascists (BUF) headquarters, recriminations over their shock defeat were flying thick and fast. Mosley, himself, had other things on his mind for a few days. Two days after the Cable Street catastrophe, he was in Berlin, marrying Diana Mitford in a small private ceremony at the home of Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, with Hitler among the specially invited guests.

Police intelligence reports reveal that over the next two months the fascists actually recruited around 2,000 new members, but these were predominantly young people keen on physical action. They were not serious ideological recruits, and they soon got bored.

The more significant reaction to the Cable Street humiliation was within Mosley’s inner circle, among those who had really believed in his project, his philosophy and his infallibility. A feast of back-stabbing and front-stabbing followed over several weeks. There were sackings, people leaving in a huff, and some questioning what kind of an entity they had got embroiled in. There was less adoration for Mosley from those who stayed to pick up the pieces.

But they regrouped, setting their hearts on strengthening their East End base, targeting local elections in March 1937. They began publishing a weekly local paper – the East London Pioneer – to supplement the nationally distributed Blackshirt paper. The BUF stood two candidates – one well-known local activist alongside one seasoned fascist from the party’s centre – in each of their three strongest East London areas: Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Limehouse.

*Local paper published by the fascists in East London for several months from October 1936*

They promised their supporters they were heading for victory. But despite their activity, their candidates were well beaten, winning 14% – 23% of the votes, while successful Labour candidates in each seat took more than 60%. Predictably, Mosley blamed “the Jews” for plumping solidly for Labour, but this was a reflex on his part. Those areas were on the edges of the Jewish enclave and included few Jewish voters.

Nevertheless, many Jewish anti-fascists canvassed for Labour votes to inflict defeat on the fascists. The left-wing Jewish People’s Council Against Fascism and Antisemitism had grown in prestige and membership as a result of its militant, public role in the fight against Mosley’s movement (a role that put the complacent “official” leadership of the Jewish community – the Board of Deputies – to shame.) The JPC’s propaganda work paid dividends, but ultimately it was non-Jewish voters who sealed the fascists’ defeat at the ballot box.

More defections followed these disappointing results, most significantly Charles Wegg-Prosser, who stood for the fascists in Limehouse. Educated at an independent Catholic school and Oxford University he joined the BUF in 1934 believing them to be a force for social and national progress. In 1936 he was the organiser of the Shoreditch branch – though he had conflicts with some fellow fascists more fixated on physical violence.

When he left after the 1937 elections he announced his defection to the anti-fascists becoming a valued propagandist for them, penning articles for the Jewish People’s Council and appearing on public platforms with other repentant ex-fascists. After the war Wegg-Prosser was a Labour councillor in Paddington and one of the founders of North Kensington Law Centre, which has particularly served immigrant and refugee groups.

The attempts to revitalise the BUF were also hampered to some extent by the state’s legislative intervention – the controversial Public Order Act. The Jewish People’s Council and the National Council of Civil Liberties, who worked together closely, both rejected the arguments for this legislation, claiming that it would actually fulfil some fascist demands by restricting protests and giving police more powers. They correctly claimed that it would be used far more against the left than the right. They argued instead for a law against racial incitement but were ahead of their time and didn’t get one.

Nevertheless, the Public Order Act stipulation banning political uniforms did affect the BUF. They looked more ordinary and felt less powerful out of their uniforms. And when the fascists sought to try and march once again in the East End, exactly a year after Cable Street, they were banned, and ended up attempting to march south of the river through Bermondsey.

Yet again, dockers, who had shown solidarity with Jews in Cable Street in 1936, were central to the resistance in Bermondsey in ’37. Barricades went up in Long Lane and the fascists had to divert from their chosen route, and go round the edge of the borough. Huge banners hung from Bermondsey’s treasured council flats, saying: “Socialism builds, Fascism destroys”.

North of the river, housing was the number one problem for all communities in the East End, and one fascists had tried to exploit by telling Irish tenants that they had bad housing because the Jews had the good housing. But the anti-fascist movement, with the Communist Party playing a central role, had a creative and successful long-term strategy to counter this.

Focusing on the mixed estates on the Jewish-Irish borders, they encouraged tenants to form committees and campaign collectively on their housing issues. The Stepney Tenants Defence League was born. By 1939 it had 11,000 members. Communities slowly began to trust each other instead of fear each other. Between 1937 and 1939 there were more than 20 successful rent strikes. And as this movement mushroomed, the fascists trying to foment hatred between tenants on the basis of ethnicity or religion were increasingly marginalised.

In those same years around 200 East Enders – half of them Jewish – took their anti-fascism on to the international stage by joining the International Brigades fighting Franco in Spain. Thirty six of them never returned.

But the years of fascist campaigning left their imprint nationally, not least on the upper echelons of certain state agencies dealing with refugees through the 1930s. The most right wing mainstream newspapers, while ultimately rejecting Mosley, ran vicious “alien scare” campaigns that strengthened the hand of Government to make it extremely hard for refugees from Nazism to get sanctuary here.

*Women from Langdale Street Man*sions during their successful 21-week rent strike in 1939

David Rosenberg was convenor of Cable Street 80 in 2016 and is the author of Battle for the East End, Five Leaves Publications. This article was also published in the special wrap-around of the Morning Star, on 2 October 2021.

“This march must not take place!”

August 9, 2020August 9, 2020 / davesrebellion / Leave a comment

Far Right activists have been making threats on social media against the Cable Street Mural, and indicating they would attempt an action on 9 August. Unite Against Fascism and Tower Hamlets Stand Up To Racism called a gathering at short notice to defend the mural and to speak out against the racists and fascists. There were several speakers. This was my talk:

David Rosenberg speaking at Cable Street. Photo: Vince Quinlivan

We are here today to protect, defend and celebrate this fantastic mural that illustrates a key moment in our history: 4^th October 1936, when Oswald Mosley was planning to march thousands of uniformed, jackbooted fascists in four columns through the heart of the Jewish immigrant area of the East End – where 60,000 working class Jews – tailors, shoemakers, cabinet makers – eked out a living.

The mural is a celebration of courage, solidarity, unity and collective strength and an immense peoples’ victory.

In the week before Mosley’s march, a local grassroots Jewish group, the Jewish People’s Council Against Racism and Fascism took a petition to the Home Secretary calling for the march to be banned. Nearly 100,000 signed it in two days – Jew and non-Jew.

But the Home Secretary recalled the important rights liberties that Britain protected: the rights to intimidate, threaten, abuse and attack immigrant populations dressed up as “free speech and free movement” for Mosley’s fascists.

For the Home Secretary it was not about freedom from attack for the community. He promised to send police down to make sure the march could pass peacefully. But the Jewish People’s Council had a Plan B.

After the Home Secretary sided with Mosley, they quickly ran off another leaflet calling

Cllr Rabina Khan

on “Citizens of London” – not just the Jews – to make sure this march does not take place. If the state won’t ban it – the people will. Which is what they did. At last a “Prevent Strategy” I can support!

At Gardiners Corner, Aldgate, which Mosley had intended to reach before dividing into four columns, there was a mass blockade. 7,000 police were mobilised but they couldn’t clear a path. They advised Mosley that he would have to enter further south.

The anti-fascists had already worked out that if he couldn’t get through at Aldgate, then Cable Street was the next most likely point of entry. They built barricades in this narrow street which at the time had shops on both sides and tenement flats above all along the street.

Who were the people of Cable Street? For the first two thirds, going east, they were mainly Jews. My grandfather’s cousin, Harry, had a stationery shop at number 27, and Harry’s family lived above it. Their shop was about 20 yards before the first barricade – a turned over lorry. On the mural you can see the wheel of that lorry. And the furniture stacked up behind the barricades.

The final third of Cable Street was mainly Irish catholic. Mosley had tried to win the Irish against the Jews. But the anti-fascist movement was bringing Jews and Irish together against Mosley. On the day, Irish people, especially the most trade unionised ones – dockers and railworkers – came from their end of Cable Street to help the Jews build barricades. In the mural you can see the banners of the Communist Party and Independent Labour Party who were fighting fascism throughout the 1930s.

Rafique Ullah, activist with the Bangladeshi Youth Front, 1970s

At one point the police dislodged the first barricade – they didn’t know there were other barricades behind and as they ran through they were trapped between the barricades. At that point women in the flats above rained down everything in their kitchens on to the police. Everything you see flying through the air in the mural comes from oral histories of people who were part of the battle.

On the mural there is a woman holding an egg wondering what to do with it. With resistance at ground level and from above, the police were forced to retreat and had to tell Mosley to go home and take his supporters with him.

There were around 200,000 people on the streets of the East End that day. if I was there at the time I would have signed the petition to ban it, but in a way I am glad that the Home Secretary cared so little about the rights of people there that he didn’t ban it, because he inadvertently brought about a bigger victory – a people ‘s victory.

Why did so many people come out that day? In a statement afterwards, Scotland Yard said they thought it was because of the weather! It was actually because the working class communities of the East End had a history of decades of struggle for better lives and were used to coming out on the streets, on picket lines, on marches to protest.

This mural was commissioned in 1976 but was not completed until 1983. It had frequently been attacked by fascists. The original artist, feeling unsupported, abandoned the project and three other artists completed it. In that period Bengali immigrants were moving into the East End, including on Cable Street. And they were facing the same racism and fascism from Mosley’s political descendants – the National Front, British Movement and Combat 18. A young Bengali clothing worker, Altab Ali was stabbed to death. And there was resistance as Asian youth organised in a similar way to how the Jewish People’s Council had done in the 1930s.

The first Asian councillors in Tower Hamlets were very enthusiastic about this mural project. The people developing the project invited the local community to be part of it. behind the banner in the bottom left you can see some faces of the new immigrant community of the 1970s.

Finally, we have to remember our history, and defend our history, as a resource in the present and for the future. Those who want to whitewash Mosley’s history of fascism and whitewash his antisemitism share the same circles as those, like David Irving, who wish to deny the Holocaust. They secretly dream of doing again what they deny ever happened.

All forms of racism and bigotry, including everyday state racism and institutional racism, will only be eradicated if we come together across ethnic and cultural divides to collectively do the eradicating. No to all racism. No to fascism. No Pasaran!

Don’t put them on a pedestal

June 10, 2020June 11, 2020 / davesrebellion / Leave a comment

Screen Shot 2020-06-10 at 10.29.43 Last Sunday, slave trader Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol was daubed with paint, pulled to the ground, jumped on by joyful protesters, rolled along to the harbour and dumped in the River Avon. The events caused quite a splash. As Colston sunk ignominiously to the bottom, what rose to the surface was a long overdue national debate about statues that grace or rather disgrace our towns and cities, and reinforce a dominant history.

Here is someone writing on this issue five years ago with some comments that are very pertinent for this moment: it’s Billy Bragg, in his foreword to the first edition of my book Rebel Footprints, a book which I had conceived of as a memorialisation of past struggles, in order to allow them to live and breathe in the present.

Billy Bragg wrote: “Half way up Whitehall, there’s a massive equestrian statue in the middle of the road. A rotund figure sits astride his horse, nose in air, wearing a cocked hat, a field marshal’s uniform and sporting massive mutton chop sideburns. Inspection of the plinth reveals this to be George, Duke of Cambridge. No, me neither.

“He’s one of a number of marshal figures impeding the traffic down Whitehall, few of whom would be readily recognisable to the British public. Recent years have witnessed a laudable attempt to democratise this space, with statues to those who fought and served in the two world wars, but this is still a thoroughfare peopled with memorials to those who defended the British Empire

“Where are the statues to those who fought and struggled for the rights of the British people? Their memorials are all around us: the universal franchise; the eight hour day; the NHS. None of these great monuments bear the names of those who battled to win them.

“The stories of those men and women have been largely overlooked by imperial history…”

Billy Bragg with Rebel Footprints

Billy Bragg mourned their absence and what could have filled that void: “…the strong tradition of dissent that has shaped our history and made us who we are.”

There are certainly some statues in London (and other big cities) that could do with coming down. And the sooner the better. Whether we need to replace them, by putting up other individuals to be revered, to be literally placed on a pedestal, is another question completely.

I, myself, signed a petition on the very day that Colston’s statue came down, urging the local authority to replace it with a true local hero – Paul Stephenson – who led the 1963 “Bristol Bus Boycott”. Black workers in Bristol were refused work despite a worker shortage due to a resolution passed by the Transport and General Workers’ Union. The boycott of the city’s buses lasted four months until the company backed down and abolished their discriminatory policy.

Paul Stephenson (right)

At the moment I signed the petition, it had just over 350 signatures. Three days later, as I write this blog, it has more than 38,000. Edward Beeston, who launched that petition wrote: “It is time Bristol moves forward with its history in the slave trade, acknowledging the evil committed and how it can educate its citizens about black history.”

There can be very few people who would publicly state that they think Colston’s statute should be recovered, refurbished and re-mounted. I suspect that if a question was put to the general public, about whether new statues of other more deserving people should be put up to replace the rogue representatives of a deeply oppressive history that is currently commemorated, a majority would probably support that.

I can think of several exceptional individuals that I celebrate in Rebel Footprints, who would be suitable candidates for new statues in London. They came from working class and marginalised communities, such as: the Black Chartist leader William Cuffay; or union activist Will Thorne who helped to win the 8-hour day for Gasworkers in 1889; Mary MacArthur who founded the National Federation of Women Workers; Melvina Walker, a cleaner who was a dedicated activist for the East London Federation of Suffragettes.

But personally, I still react instinctively against statues that invite us to look up to what Maya Angelou describes as “our heroes and she-roes”.

I actually prefer monuments to collective struggle such as the colourful and moving Cable Street mural, where you can almost hear the figures shouting and screaming, or the artistic monument to Spanish Civil War volunteers in Jubilee Gardens, both of which celebrate those who challenged fascism. Or the mural on the bridge on Dudden Hill Lane round the corner to the Grunwick Film processing factory in Willesden, where a strike committee headed by Jayaben Desai led a courageous battle by mainly female Asian workers in the late 1970s against super-exploitative and inhumane employers.

These are monuments that invite you to directly identify with lives and struggles that were lived then, on matters that continue to plague the world in the present. These monuments honour ordinary people who who took up the fight of the oppressed against the oppressors. They inform, educate and give inspiration to those who will fight for a better world, where slavery, exploitation and oppression have finally been consigned to the past.

ALPHABET OF LONDON RADICALS No 7

May 7, 2020July 23, 2020 / davesrebellion / Leave a comment

In honour of the 130th anniversary of London’s first May Day march in 1890, there will be a series of blog posts throughout May on this site.

G is for Goodman and Groser;

H is for Headlam and Housing

In October 1932 a conference was organised in London’s East End about unemployment. This was a national problem. In 1929 it reached 1.5 million, an unprecedented level at that time. By 1931 it peaked at 3 million – 20% of Britain’s workforce. London, with a very diversified economy was hit less severely than the North of England, but still its effects were considerable, especially in London’s East End, where it remained high and caused great hardship.

Father Groser

The letter inviting people to that conference was signed by an Australian-born local churchman Father John Groser, who first came to the East End in 1922 to work at St Michael’s church in Poplar. In 1929 he moved to Christ Church in Stepney, on the corner of Watney Market and Commercial Road. He remained there until the church was destroyed in the blitz of 1940.

The letter acknowledged that unemployment caused “physical depression, ill health… the frustration of personality, the loss of proper self-respect”. It was creating “an embittered and hopeless section of the community”.

These were the people he wanted to bring together and support in finding both individual and collective ways forward. He wasn’t the only one targeting them. That same month, a new political party/street movement was born that would exploit these personal tragedies while promising to restore people’s hope and pride. This was Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF). Especially from 1934-1937, they put an extraordinary amount of resources into campaigns in this area.

The iconic clash of the 1930s between fascism and anti-fascism in Britain was played out on the streets of East London at the Battle of Cable Street in 1936. Mosley and Groser were, of course, on different sides of the barricades. Also on the anti-fascist side were two other “G”s – Charlie Goodman and Joyce Goodman (at that time Joyce Rosenthal). I will return to them later.

Father Groser was in a tradition of radical church leaders that the East End was blessed with in the last 150 years. In post-WW2 times the tradition was represented first by Bishop Trevor Huddleston, a key figure in early Anti-Apartheid struggles in South Africa who returned to Britain in the mid-1950s, and became Bishop of Stepney. And then, secondly, by Anglo-Catholic Ken Leech, who as vicar of St Matthews Bethnal Green, was embroiled in the fraught anti-racist struggles of the 1970s, then worked later, in the 1990s, as Community Theologian at St Botolph’s at Aldgate, supporting marginalised younger people locally.

St Matthews Church in Bethnal Green was where the Christian socialist Stewart Headlam was based in the 1870s, before taking a post at St Michael’s in Shoreditch in the early 1880s. Headlam was an early member of the Fabian Society, at a time when it was more radical. He also put up half of the bail money that Oscar Wilde needed during his first trial for “gross indecency”, saying he was motivated to do so by “concern for the arts and freedom”. Headlam was committed to working against poverty and in the early 1900s focused his writings especially on land, housing and the evils of “landlordism”.

Groser saw housing as a key arena through which to tackle poverty and give people

Rent Strike 1939, Langdale Street Mansions

some power over their lives. He became a key figure in the Stepney Tenants Defence League (STDL), a powerful social movement which grew out of the East End’s anti-fascist struggles. It was formally independent, though the Communist Party played a key organising role as did Labour Party activists such as Groser. Indeed, Groser was the organisation’s president in 1938-39, during which the collective action of tenants through rent strikes wiped out many rent arrears, forced landlords to commit to repairs and improvements. The STDL brought together the very communities – Jews and Irish catholics – that Mosley’s fascists had tried to divide against each other, in joint struggles for mutual benefit.

Father Groser had left Australia as a young man to study theology at Leeds University and then Mirfields College in Yorkshire. His first post, in a slum parish of Newcastle, challenged what he admitted were Conservative and pro-imperialist views he had held previously. During World War 1 he worked as an army chaplain and became very critical of the war, which he saw as caused by capitalism.

Before coming to Poplar in 1922, Groser lived and worked in Cornwall, and studied the left wing theology of Conrad Noel, founder of the Catholic Crusade for Social Justice. Rather than painting heaven as the reward for a good life, Noel’s shared a vision about creating “heaven on Earth”. But when Groser took up his post at Christ Church, Watney Street, the economic depression was rendering life Hell on Earth for the poorest East Enders. Groser helped his congregants with daily problems and encouraged them to fight for their rights.

He held outdoor public meetings at which three artefacts were usually present: a

One of Groser’s outdoor meetings

crucifix, a flag of St George (which he saw as an anti-imperialist flag in contrast with the Union Jack), and the Red Flag – the symbol of left wing movements. One of Groser’s close associates, Jack Boggis, who made the rare journey from Communist Party activist to churchman, said of Groser:

“The heart of Father John’s religion… is that nothing is more important than a person. He tended to avoid such phrases as ‘living souls’, because it is easy to forget that ‘living souls’ have bodies which need to be fed, clothed and housed. So he fought for these things for them. The gospel was not confined to the church but carried into the streets.”

Groser’s concerns extended well beyond London. He took part in protests for Indian freedom and activities in support of Spanish Republicans suffering from Franco’s war on them.

Both Groser and local, secular, Communist Party activists of Stepney (many of who were Jewish by birth, but not believers), understood the need to speak face to face with people about the problems they faced and urge them to organise themselves, as tenants, workers, and unemployed, who could fight for their rights and dignity. They were committed to building communities of resistance and solidarity.

Charlie Goodman was one of these secular, working class, Jewish communist activists and anti-fascist resisters, born to Polish Jewish immigrants. He joined the Party in the mid-1930s, having first become active through the Labour League of Youth.

His family lived in Camden Town, and he went back to Poland for a year as a child, before they settled in the East End. Charlie played a very full part in the Battle of Cable Street on 4^th October 1936, when around 4,000 uniformed fascists, protected by 7,000 police were prevented from invading the Jewish streets of the East End by a mass blockade at Gardiner’s Corner and barricades in Cable Street.

A 12-year-old girl, called Joyce Rosenthal, was with another girl aged 12 at Gardiners

Charlie and Joyce on their wedding day

Corner, Aldgate, as part of the blockade. She later recalled: “We never saw a fascist that day. We never fought with the fascists. you were fighting the police. They were just hitting everyone. There were women going down under the horses’ hooves.” A few years down the line she married Charlie and became Joyce Goodman. Their first conversation was about where they were and what they were doing on that 4^th October back in ’36.

Charlie’s day had ended in Leman Street police station, carried in horizontally by six policemen who used his head as a battering ram for the Charge Room door. He spent three months in prison, before coming out, itching to continue the fight against fascism. He did that through the International Brigades, one of around 200 East Enders to go to Spain; 36 of them were buried in Spanish soil. When I first got to know Charlie Goodman in the early 1980s he was continuing to work within the vital struggles that are a common thread among several individuals I have recalleded here – for better housing conditions – through the Federation of Tenants’ Associations in east London.
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On this day – 3 October 1937: the battle of Bermondsey

October 3, 2019 / davesrebellion / 3 Comments

This is an extract from my book Rebel Footprints.

In July 1937 the British Union of Fascists (BUF) applied for permission to march through Limehouse but the Home Office refused. When the fascists sought permission to march through the East End in October 1937, exactly a year after the Battle of Cable Street, they were again stymied after local organisations lobbied the new Home Secretary, Samuel Hoare. Undeterred, the Blackshirt’s newly appointed editor, A. K. Chesterton (a cousin of the writer G. K. Chesterton) promised to invade ‘unconquered’ areas with propaganda, insisting that ‘On October 3rd we shall march again.’

Still smarting with disbelief that East End Irish dockers had supported the Jews the previous year, Mosley selected another dockers’ area – this time south of the Thames. The fascists announced a route from Parliament Square to New Kent Road, then through Tooley Street and Dockhead to an open-air rally at Mill Pool in West Lane, Bermondsey. Bermondsey’s Communist Party immediately proposed a counter-march and won instant support from the local ILP. Bermondsey and Rotherhithe Trades Council, representing 60 local trade union branches, came on board and issued a belligerent anti-fascist statement:

‘Mosley has no branch in Bermondsey – he represents no mass movement … This spot … is surrounded by the new flats erected by the Labour Council … a monument to Labour’s magnificent record of social progress in the borough. It was as if he came to demolish these buildings brick by brick before the very eyes of the people who put them up.’

Local political figures lobbied the Home Office to ban the march but the Home Secretary argued that, since very few Jews lived there, the threat to individuals was negligible. Local radicals, including the Trades Council, favoured a militant response but there were divisions on tactics. London’s Labour Party Executive suggested a boycott, allowing the march to pass, ignored, through empty streets. A respected local churchman, Revd Leslie Davidson, Rotherhithe Labour MP, Ben Smith, and the left-leaning News Chronicle supported this strategy. Smith told a large public meeting that Mosley’s procession would happen anyway, but ‘If we leave the route empty we will have achieved our object. We can have unity for a boycott but not for force.’ His audience rebelled. The majority favoured direct confrontation to block Mosley’s march. Over the next few days, several local Labour Party branches defied the London Labour Party Executive, declaring their support for a militant counter-protest.

The day before the march, the Blackshirt reserved its front page for Mosley’s florid anniversary message:

11e9ae26d492cff11a46fbbe83cb90cb ‘… five years of advance in the face of money power, press power, party power and Jewish power … during which the flame of the faith has grown within us until the blaze of our belief and of our determination lights the dark places of our land and summons our people as a beacon of hope and of rebirth.’

The bombshell was tucked away inside the paper. The march route had been altered: the starting and finishing points were unchanged, but it would now pass through Marshalsea Road, Long Lane and Abbey Street, taking it through the heart of working-class Bermondsey. This development gave added impetus to those planning to physically prevent the fascists entering the area.

Mosley’s supporters assembled near Millbank. Banned by the 1937 Public Order Act from wearing a political uniform, Mosley wore a grey jacket over his black shirt. Some 3,000 marchers formed up three abreast in a procession, convoyed by 30 mounted police at the front, and busloads of foot police bringing up the rear; ‘one policeman for every fascist marcher’, the Daily Mirror remarked.

Just as at Cable Street, thousands of anti-fascists constructed their own barricades with locally available materials. In Long Lane, protesters ‘borrowed’ a huge water tank from a nearby factory, which became the centre of a 30-foot wide barricade. The News Chronicle reported: ‘Iron ovens, cisterns and wheelbarrows were chained together and strung across roads.’ The Daily Herald described how

‘[b]arricades of costers’ barrows, fences with barbed wire, with red flags flying at the top, were flung up at incredible speed; when police tore them down, others were erected a few yards further on … Mounted and foot police, with lashing batons, swept … into the crowds of anti-fascist demonstrators … Missiles were hurled from roofs: eggs, stones and fireworks were flung at the marchers and at police horses.’

The News Chronicle described how mounted police ‘charged down Staple Street into the crowd in Long Lane … One man who was being taken away by the police after being struck on the head with a baton was rescued by a crowd of about 40 dockers.’

Faced with angry crowds and improvised barricades, the police diverted Mosley’s troops Screen Shot 2019-10-03 at 15.33.19 from their chosen route and led them instead around the rim of the borough. The Daily Worker reported that, when they finally returned to their planned path and reached Jamaica Road, they ‘met another barricade … of men, women and children from the great flats that Labour has built in Bermondsey’. Banners hanging from these blocks proclaimed: ‘Socialism builds. Fascism destroys. Bermondsey against fascism.’

Mosley never reached Mill Pool where he planned to address local people at an open-air rally. The police funnelled his marchers into Southwark Park Road and cordoned off local side streets, leaving Mosley speaking only to his marchers. Meanwhile, anti-fascists occupied Mill Pool, where a Communist Party speaker, Ted Bramley, said: ‘The 100 per cent cockney borough of Bermondsey has given the same answer to Mosley as the Jewish lads and girls did in Stepney just twelve months ago.’

Bermondsey’s protest involved smaller numbers than the East End in 1936, but the authorities’ response was harsher. Several East End Jews were among 111 people arrested. Magistrate Campion commented, ‘It is extraordinary how many of the population of Whitechapel and the East End seemed to choose Bermondsey for a Sunday afternoon walk.’ Campion condemned the anti-fascist demonstrators for causing disorder, and threatened to punish them ‘vigorously’. At least 23 custodial sentences were imposed. Former dock union secretary, Frederick Thompson, aged 60, received three months after being identified at the centre of a ‘violent crowd’; John Morton received five months for assault and three months for insulting behaviour after he tried to rescue another man who had been arrested. Betsy Malone, 23, was treated more lightly – fined a pound for taking a running kick at a policeman and telling him to arrest someone his own size!

The Blackshirt put its best gloss on a frustrating day, insisting that their marchers did pass despite the ‘violence of the apes’. But the defeat at Bermondsey represented the last major street confrontation between the two rival rebel movements of 1930s London. After Bermondsey, Mosley’s Blackshirts struggled to maintain their working-class base or make further inroads in the capital’s poorer districts.

Rebel Footprints (new edition 2019) is published by Pluto Press, £12.99

Barricades and obstructions 1936 and 2016

October 15, 2016October 15, 2016 / davesrebellion / Leave a comment

Almost a year ago I received a phone call out of the blue from Rob Griffiths, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB). I had worked with Rob as part of a team organising the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street back in 2011. “We need to start thinking and planning for the 80th,” he said.

I knew this 80th anniversary would be significant for a simple but sad reason: among the tens of thousands who took to the streets in 1936 to repel a fascist invasion of the overwhelmingly Jewish districts of the East End, were some incredibly brave teenagers. Even the youngest of those teenagers would now be in their 90s. At all the previous five- or ten-yearly commemorations, battle veterans shared their experiences with younger generations of activists. This might be the last one where we will hear those voices. I honestly don’t know whether we could organise future commemoration without the participants and witnesses of the actual event. I was determined that this one – the 80th – would be a large, vibrant and memorable event.

And it was. People I’ve never met before described it afterwards as “amazing’, “inspiring” and “beautiful”, but the fact that it happened at all was the result of winning a battle we didn’t know we would have to fight.

Resurrecting the Core

Rob and I couldn’t do it alone. We began contacting the group that had helped to organise the 75th anniversary commemoration. Some had moved away from London or were bogged down in other issues, but we quickly resurrected a core group: myself from the Jewish Socialists’ group; Rob and a few comrades from the CPB; representatives from local secular Bengali community organisations; Gerry Gable from the anti-fascist magazine, Searchlight; and the small band of comrades – the Cable Street Group – who had ensured the continuity of commemorations since 1986. An initial planning meeting for Cable Street 80 took place in the café at the idea Store (library) in Whitechapel in December 2015, which Rob and I co-chaired. A skeleton plan emerged – a march and rally, and a set of cultural events centred on an exhibition that the Cable Street Group had prepared for the 75th.

Last time round, the trade union movement, especially with the towering presence of RMT General Secretary, Bob Crow, and comrades at UNITE, supported us well. We set up a meeting at UNITE’s central London office, aiming to get unions on board again.

We created a pattern of alternating meetings. Our East End-based gatherings would develop the cultural programme. These mostly took place at what became our hub: the UNITE Community space, located in the basement of 236 Cable Street, the Old St George’s Town Hall whose outside wall is decorated with the phenomenal Cable Street Mural, a constant, stirring reminder of what we were commemorating and why. Our planning meetings focusing on the march and rally continued at UNITE’s central offices

Somewhere within these tentative first steps, Rob Griffiths suggested that we needed a convenor, and I was thrust into the role – not unwillingly, but privately daunted by the responsibility!
Announcing plans

Back in 1936, when Sir Oswald Mosley, 6th Baron of Ancoats, wanted to march through the East End, he merely had to announce it, and a friendly Home Secretary, John Simon, promptly obliged. When nearly 100,000 local residents, petitioned Simon to bar this march on the grounds that it would further inflame local tensions in a period when East End Jews were already suffering fascist violence, Simon recalled important rights and freedoms from our unwritten constitution – the rights to intimidate, threaten, abuse and attack. OK, he dressed them up as “free speech” and “freedom of movement” but it was clear in this context what they meant. The right of East Enders to live free from fear didn’t enter into the Home Secretary’s reckoning. He sent 7,000 police to support Mosley’s venture, and we all know how that worked out.

We made our announcement in February 2016, choosing the nearest weekend date to October 4th that didn’t clash with a Jewish holiday or a time when many likely supporters would be out of London hurling insults at Tories starting their conference. We settled on 9th October. A generous offer of free design and printing of our initial leaflet came our way, and we leafleted the large anti-racist demo called in March so as to claim the date and announce our assembly point: 12 noon, Altab Ali Park, Whitechapel Road, to march to Cable Street.

We didn’t need permission from the Home Secretary, but we did need permissions and cooperation from the local council. You might expect that the London Borough of Tower Hamlets would welcome the enthusiasm of a group of people committing their spare time, experience and expertise to organising a huge event to mark such a proud moment in the borough’s local history. An initial meeting of three members of our ad hoc committee with two councillors and an officer from the council’s Community Events team seemed promising. From here on, we would be meeting with council officers, initially at a site meeting, and later at a multi-agency indoor meeting at the Events team’s premises at the Brady Arts & Community Centre – appropriately a former boys’ club in the heart of the old Jewish East End. They did warn us that this would be the first of several meetings. They weren’t kidding.

In 1936, the barriers that stopped Oswald Mosley were tens of thousands of East Enders physically blocking his path at Gardiner’s Corner and a set of elaborate barricades in and around Cable Street. The barriers we faced were bureaucracy gone mad, meetings where we were bombarded with unfamiliar sets of initials and unexplained jargon, being instructed to act on decisions at those meetings without the officers producing the promised minutes or explanatory notes. We were admonished for giving out leaflets advertising an assembly point and time, without getting permission first to use that space, and, until we had that permission, were effectively banned from doing more than the vaguest publicity for the event (9th October, somewhere in the East End…). So our leaflets were mothballed for the time being.

Despite the officers’ claims they were trying to support us through the correct procedures, it felt as if they were putting every possible obstacle in our way. For the Risk Assessment, we were asked to envisage and show how we would respond all kinds of unlikely hypothetical scenarios. One of our committee members, Joel, did many hours of amazing work on this largely irrelevant detail.

Kafka’s East End

Just as the police in 1936, having dislodged the first barricade in Cable Street were dejected when they found another (and another), so, every time we thought we had leapt the final hurdles, new obstacles appeared. The most bizarre moment, less than 24 hours before a crucial meeting where we thought we were near the end of this completely Kafkaesque process, an email arrived with a “few” other points to consider before the meeting. The list started: a), b), c)… and ended with this letter: y). At the very last minute, they had actually given us 25 further points to address.

All this time we knew we needed to build maximum support for such an important event but felt we had to do so blindfolded and with our hands tied behind our backs. How could we mobilise if we couldn’t even tell our public were the event would assemble?

We proposed a route early on that would use some main streets, as well as passing key points of political significance from 1936 and take us into the heart of the local community whose, support and engagement we were seeking. It was made clear that this would cost us thousands of pounds in enforcing road closures. The final route – a compromise we could live with – was only confirmed by council officers, TFL and the police a month before the march. This agreement owed more to one police inspector with a “can do” attitude than to the council officers whose job was to facilitate and support the event.

It involved crossing one major road. Council officers and the police tried to force us to employ professional “CSAS -trained” stewards for this, telling us they were the only ones who had the legal right to force vehicles to halt. We held firm in rejecting this. We were not going to employ expensive, private stewards but wanted the march to be stewarded by people committed to the event, recruited on a voluntary basis from the trade union movement and local community organisations. We won that battle.

Whose Parks?

In the face of these obstacles, there were voices advising us to simply ignore the bureaucracy and just do it. This might have worked if we had simply wanted to protest on the streets and risk a chaotic and fraught situation with the police. But we had a responsibility to all our participants – including very elderly people and families of those who had been there in 1936, and those less able to cope with uncertain street arrangements. Besides, we had chosen the starting and finishing points for their special significance to antifascists. And in any case, these are our parks.

We chose to assemble in Altab Ali Park because it is named in memory of a young Bengali clothing worker murdered by racists in 1978. At that time, the Bengali community was facing a rerun with the National Front of the battles Jews endured in the 1930s with Mosley’s Blackshirts. We chose St George’s Gardens because this is also the site of the Cable Street Mural – the most powerful memorial of the events of ’36. We would not compromise on our right to use those spaces.

At a meeting with council officers in late August we squeezed out of them permission to advertise the assembly and destination points on two crucial publicity tools we had now established: a Cable Street 80 website set up by Dave, a CPB member; and a Facebook event page set up by John, a UNITE member in Yorkshire, enthusiastic about the Cable Street commemorative event. Even then, we had to publish a proviso, adding “subject to confirmation by the London Borough of Tower Hamlets”.

The last three weeks before the event were particularly frantic. We were asked to attend more meetings, at which a tsunami of extra demands were made by the council officers – just 47 (yes 47!) new paperwork points to clarify nine days before the event! Meanwhile, we received a threat that a fascist organisation would disrupt the day, which our stewards had to prepare for. The paperwork continued to multiply in the run-up to a final planning meeting on Thursday 6th October. I was running on empty by now. I had contracted flu in mid-September which hung around in the form of a heavy cough and cold. I turned up for that final meeting late and exhausted, but with a secret weapon up my sleeve.

As we experienced more and more bureaucracy, and increasingly ridiculous petty demands, we appraised a couple of Tower Hamlets councillors of what we now concluded was obstructive behaviour by the officers. One of these councillors was Asma Begum, whom we met at that first meeting with the Council back in April. We were also keeping the Tower Hamlets Mayor’s office informed, so they knew that we were experiencing problems. Mayor Biggs was one of our invited speakers, alongside other significant local political figures – Rushanara Ali MP and Unmesh Desai the GLA representative for City and East London.

In that final meeting I was there alone with three council officers, one transport representative, and the Police Inspector who had helped to finalise our route. We had met every reasonable demand for paperwork and assurances, and, to my mind, many unreasonable and irrelevant ones, too. I felt physically drained. My head was at exploding point. In light of their behaviour towards us over the previous weeks, I was worried that the council officers would pull some final stunt to undermine the event, so, the night before, without informing the people who would be in the room, I had informed two councillors and the mayor’s office of this meeting and suggested they might wish to attend. Cllr Begum had another meeting at the same time but said she would try to get to ours afterwards.

A knock at the door

As far as I was concerned we had delivered everything asked of us. This meeting should have rubber-stamped our final plans; the officers might even have thanked our committee for the incredible amount of tough, unpaid work, at all kinds of unsocial hours, that we had put in to meet all their bureaucratic demands. But, no. They seemed to be more concerned with trying to find holes in our plans.

The meeting got increasingly tense. I didn’t hide my frustration. Then there was a knock at the door, and in came Cllr Begum. “Hi Asma,” I said, smiling. It was a beautiful moment watching the reaction on the faces around the room as it dawned on them that they were now the ones being scrutinised. The rest of the meeting was much more pleasant and relaxed for me as the officers tried to impress Cllr Begum with their diligence and support for this significant event! (In return I fixed up a selfie for Cllr Begum with Jeremy Corbyn on the platform on the Sunday.)

At last we had the upper hand. I still had to produce some final paperwork by 9am on the Friday, then attend a site meeting on Friday afternoon for both sides to sign the contract for use of the parks, and get a set of keys for the St George’s Park gate so that the staging, equipment and portaloos could be delivered. Cllr Begum asked me, in front of the officers, if I felt i could meet that 9am deadline. I said I wasn’t sure I could. With my cold I would be too tired to work in the evening, and would have to get up long before sunrise to do it. An extra hour was magically granted. I confirmed that I could do it by 10am.

On the Friday before the Sunday of the event, I got up at 5.45 (one of many such early starts over the previous few weeks) to complete the paperwork. At 9.52am I sent the final, final, final paperwork. At 11.54 I received an email: “Thank you for your updated plans which have taken on board the outcome of the meeting yesterday. We will issue your contract this afternoon at our site meeting.” At fucking last!

We fixed the time for the afternoon meeting. I breathed a sigh of relief, ran a bath and my mood improved. But there was a sting in the tail. Just before I got in the bath the phone rang and more emails arrived. There was a query about the staging arrangements in St George’s Gardens, even though the council officers had full details of this four days earlier. Apparently we suddenly needed a “Section 30 Building Control Order” for permission to erect the staging, at a cost of £180 which had to be paid immediately. We had sufficient backing from the trade unions to cover the fee – but I then had to spend 90 minutes of non-stop emails and phone calls trying to get a whole new piece of bureaucracy sorted out there and then. What was the anchorage for the stage? Fuck knows. What would happen in a freak storm? Fuck knows. (The weather forecast for Sunday was sunny and calm.) I did the best I could, then jumped in the bath, jumped out, ran to the meeting to sign the contracts, and between visiting the sites, I jumped the final bureaucratic hurdle and paid the £180 by phone that confirmed the arrangement. A lot of jumping.

The weekend was now upon us. On the Saturday afternoon, at Watney Street Idea Store, where the Cable Street exhibition was on display, there was a fantastic meeting with three women who were witnesses and participants in October 1936. I had tickets that night for the jewdas Cable Street party at Limehouse Town Hall, which I was really looking forward to, but I was too ill to get there. My priority was to be fit enough for the next day.

The Sunday was beautiful – there were upwards of 2,000 people, energised, united, diverse, with colourful banners, and a Yiddish marching band near the front. It was a powerful, meaningful demonstration remembering the battles of the past and committing to our multicultural future. Great speakers before the march at Altab Ali Park, which I chaired, and after the march at St George’s Park on the wonderful staging set up through the RMT, chaired by Megan Dobney of South East Region TUC. The 101-year-old Cable Street veteran Max Levitas spoke. Mike Rosen recited poignant poems. Julia Bard of the Jewish Socialists’ Group recalled the struggles not only against the fascists but also against the community establishment who, in 1936, told people to stay indoors. Jeremy Corbyn gave a powerful and very personal speech to great applause, which closed the rally. We had celebrated the great Battle of Cable Street – but not without a battle of our own.

rebel notes

david rosenberg

Cable Street