In the weeks leading up to the battle of Cable Street, Oswald Mosley, inspired by his friend Hitler, sent his Blackshirt militia into the East End of London to whip up hatred against Jewish people. Jewish buildings were daubed, synagogues smashed and posters calling for patriotism and national pride in the face of the “untrustworthy international Jewish Entity” were nailed on walls and doorways.
Then, on Sunday 4 October 1936, the fourth birthday of Mosley’s fascist party, he sent more than 3,000 uniformed Blackshirts in four marching columns through London’s East End and its predominantly Jewish community, promising a “Greater Britain” and blaming all society’s ills on these immigrant Jews. He fully expected to be supported by the working-class population of the area and assumed it would be delighted by his rousing speeches of hate – as Mussolini and Hitler’s audiences had been abroad. Instead, the local community came together to drive the fascists out – immigrants, socialists, Jews and trade unionists stood side by side in solidarity.
This summer, I watched civil unrest in the UK unfold. Just like in the months preceding October 1936, it had been brewing for a while. Hotels housing migrants were attacked by angry mobs and vandalised. One was set on fire.
A few weekends ago, I walked down my local high street to see a Jewish-owned building with all its windows smashed and covered in red paint. At the end of October, a Jewish community centre in north-west London was set upon by masked “activists” shouting outside, intimidating pensioners and young families with children in pushchairs trying to enter its doors. It may not be 1936, but there are worrying parallels.
My great-grandmother Annie, an immigrant from Belarus, was one of the 60,000 Jews living in the East End during those troubled times. She loved England, calling it the Golden Medina. Yes, there was hatred, yes, there was extreme poverty. She lived in slum tenement housing eking out a living as a seamstress, but at least nobody wanted to kill her there. In the Mogilev shtetl she grew up in – in the Pale of Settlement region, where Russian Jews were forced to live as peasant farmers by a viciously antisemitic tsar – she had nearly been raped and had watched her father narrowly escape beheading by the rampaging Cossacks.
Whenever my family gathered on bank holidays and Fiddler on the Roof was on television, she would point at the screen as we watched and in her thick Yiddish accent pronounce: “Documentary, documentary.” I grew up with my Bubbe Annie and her tales of working in Auntie Yetta’s Hackney factory, sleeping on the floor, earning a penny a week and marrying Isaac, the political boy she met on the third-class passage from Belarus to the UK. I was surrounded by incredible immigrant matriarchs who all survived the pogroms and were now bringing up their families against the odds in a foreign country with new customs and a dislike of tough foreign women. My Bubbe Annie said coming face to face with Mosley at the barricades at the entrance of Cable Street was her proudest moment.
These were the stories I was brought up with. And stories that I think deserve to be told. As an actor and writer, for many years I have wanted to reclaim Shakespeare’s “problematic Jewish play”, The Merchant of Venice, and infuse it with my own understanding of Jew-hatred and my immigrant working-class family history, set against a backdrop of what these East End Jewish matriarchs did for Britain at the battle of Cable Street.
This year, that has come to fruition in The Merchant of Venice 1936, in which director Brigid Larmour and I re-envisioned Shakespeare’s play with a female Shylock, living off Cable Street on the eve of Mosley’s planned march. This reimagining is important. The battle of Cable Street was a seismic moment in the British civil rights movement and it is up to all of us to preserve its legacy in culture. It should be taught in the school curriculum alongside studies of the US civil rights movement. It is cherished dearly by those who know it.
On that Sunday in 1936, my Uncle Alf, a staunch anti-fascist and trade unionist, defied his mother, Annie, and joined the tens of thousands of demonstrators against the march. He was pushed through a plateglass shopfront on Gardener’s Corner by the Blackshirts. Covered in blood, he stormed up to the family flat, where, upon seeing him, Bubbe Annie decided to break her cardinal rule of keeping her head down and joined the barricade at the entrance of Cable Street, where Mosley and his militia intended to march through to the meeting point for their rally.
Bubbe Annie said that day was the best of being British. She didn’t stand alone on that barricade of overturned milkfloats, chairs piled high – and anything else that could stop the marchers. Her Irish working-class neighbours, the English working class, the small African-Caribbean community, the dockers, the trade unionists, communists, a handful of Somali seamen, Orthodox Jews with long coats and soft felt hats, jostled side by side with Catholics, women and girls linking arms, and ordinary heroes from all over the country who had travelled down to stand in solidarity and tell the fascists “you shall not pass”. And they did not pass. Mosley and his de facto private army with huge police protection were stopped in their tracks and forced to retreat.
The legacy of the battle of Cable Street is one of hope. Of people united against hatred and against racism, people from every minority and working-class background pulling together against a greater evil that wanted to turn them against each other, yet failed.
Extremists are now pitting us against each other, to radicalise us to mistrust “the other”. At a time of such hopelessness, what my family and countless others did back then can remind us of what can happen when we unite; when we don’t allow outside forces to divide us and lose our communal humanity and shared goals. We still have much to learn from 4 October 1936.
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Tracy-Ann Oberman is an actor and writer. Merchant of Venice 1936 is playing at the Trafalgar theatre, London from 28 December to 24 January 2025, then touring
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