They Shall Not Pass: The Battle of Cable Street and the Day the East End Stopped Mosley
Updated: 10 hours ago
Here's the thing most people get wrong about the Battle of Cable Street. Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts weren't in it. They never set foot on Cable Street. They spent the afternoon standing in formation near the Tower of London, about half a mile away, waiting for a road that never opened.
The fight on 4 October 1936 was between the people of the East End and the Metropolitan Police, who'd been told to clear a path for a fascist march through the most Jewish streets in Britain. The police couldn't do it. As one man who was there, the journalist Reg Weston, put it years later: "It was a battle with the police."
Ninety years on, it's still the most famous day in the history of British anti-fascism. The true story is messier than the legend, and a good deal more interesting. This is how the day actually went, hour by hour, and what came after.
Quick Answers
The Battle of Cable Street took place on Sunday 4 October 1936 in Stepney, east London.
Oswald Mosley planned to march about 3,000 uniformed members of the British Union of Fascists through the Jewish East End.
Tens of thousands of local people blocked the route at Gardiner's Corner in Aldgate and built barricades on Cable Street.
The fighting was between protesters and police. The fascists never reached the East End.
The Police Commissioner, Sir Philip Game, called the march off and sent Mosley west instead.
It didn't finish Mosley. A week later came the worst antisemitic attack of the period, and his London membership went up.
The Public Order Act, in force from 1 January 1937, banned political uniforms.
Cable Street in Numbers
Mosley's marchers: Usually put at about 3,000. Estimates run from 2,000 to 5,000
Police: Between 6,000 and 10,000, including the Met's mounted division
Anti-fascists: Anything from 50,000 to half a million, depending on who's counting
Arrests: 85 according to the police files: 79 anti-fascists and six fascists. Some accounts say 150
Injured: Around 175, including 73 police officers. Fifteen people went to hospital
Petition to ban the march: About 100,000 signatures, gathered in two days
Nobody counted properly, and every figure from that day is disputed. The ranges above are what you'll find across the London Museum, the police files at the National Archives and the newspapers of the time. The News Chronicle, for what it's worth, said 310,000.
Who Was Oswald Mosley?
Sir Oswald Mosley was a baronet who'd been both a Conservative and a Labour MP and was once talked about as a future prime minister. He walked out of mainstream politics and in 1932 founded the British Union of Fascists, modelled on Mussolini's movement and partly paid for by it. He wasn't the first, though. Britain's first openly fascist party had been set up nine years earlier by a decorated war veteran, Rotha Lintorn-Orman.
For a while it looked as if it might take off. The Daily Mail ran its "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" headline in January 1934, and membership reached somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000. Then came a rally at Olympia in June 1934, where Blackshirt stewards beat up hecklers in front of the press. Respectable support drained away and the Mail dropped him.
Mosley's answer was to go harder on the one thing that still drew a crowd. From 1934 the BUF became openly antisemitic and concentrated its efforts on east London. It wasn't the first time his meetings had ended in violence, and a brick to the head in Liverpool wouldn't be the last.
Why Stepney?
London had about 183,000 Jews in the 1930s, and some 60,000 of them lived in Stepney. Most were the children and grandchildren of people who'd fled the pogroms of the Russian empire between 1881 and 1914. They'd settled in some of the poorest, most crowded streets in the country, the same ones Jack London had photographed in 1902. They worked in tailoring and furniture workshops, ran small shops and market stalls and lived cheek by jowl with Irish dock families.
By 1936 the BUF had branches ringed around them in Bethnal Green, Shoreditch and Limehouse. Its street-corner speakers blamed Jews for unemployment, bad housing and high rents. Jewish shops had their windows broken and people were beaten up on their way home.
The wider world wasn't reassuring either. In the previous twelve months Mussolini had conquered Abyssinia, Hitler had marched into the Rhineland and Franco had launched his revolt in Spain. So when Mosley announced a march through Stepney to mark the BUF's fourth birthday, nobody there mistook it for a parade.
The Week Before
Mosley announced the march on 26 September, giving the East End eight days. The plan was for the Blackshirts to assemble in Royal Mint Street, by the Tower, at 2.30pm, march through Stepney and split up for four open-air meetings in Limehouse, Bow, Bethnal Green and Shoreditch.
The opposition was already organised. That July, 86 local organisations had come together as the Jewish People's Council Against Fascism and Antisemitism. In two days it collected about 100,000 signatures on a petition asking for the march to be banned. East London's mayors went to the Home Office in person, and the Mayor of Stepney warned that the march would be "provocative of disturbance". The Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, said no.
Here's a part of the story that often gets tidied away. The Jewish establishment told people to stay at home. The Board of Deputies put out a notice urging Jews to keep away from the route. The Jewish Chronicle told its readers that anyone who got involved in disorder would be helping the antisemites. George Lansbury, the much-loved local Labour MP, gave the same advice.
The Communist Party wasn't keen at first either. It had a rally for Spain booked in Trafalgar Square that afternoon. Party leaders are quoted as saying that "Spain was more important than Mosley", and members were told to hold orderly meetings and avoid trouble.
Stepney's communists were appalled. Their branch secretary, Joe Jacobs, warned head office what local people would make of it: "the CP would be finished in Stepney if this was allowed to go through". The leadership gave in a couple of days before the march. Leaflets already printed for Trafalgar Square were stamped with a correction: "Alteration: Rally to Aldgate 2pm".
Once the party had changed its mind it threw everything at it. Word went round by knocks on doors, notes through letterboxes and slogans chalked and whitewashed on walls all over London. Reg Weston, then a young branch secretary in Southgate, chalked his outside a factory gate that 10,000 workers passed every morning.
In Stepney, Phil Piratin turned his house in New Road into a headquarters. He had spotters on the routes, messengers to carry word between them and first-aid posts set up in cafes. The plan covered four places Mosley might try to get through: Gardiner's Corner, Leman Street, Cable Street and St George's, down by the docks.
So the people who actually stopped Mosley were, to a large degree, acting against the advice of their own leaders, at least until the last minute.
Sunday Morning
Sunday 4 October was sunny, with a chill in the air. Loudspeaker vans were out early, touring the route. The Young Communist League marched through with banners. Trains brought in supporters from Manchester and Leeds.
One of the first clashes involved neither fascists nor communists. The Jewish Ex-Servicemen's Association held a disciplined march of its own that morning, with men wearing their Great War medals behind a British Legion standard. Mounted police stopped them at the corner of Whitechapel Road and New Road, charged them and, in Piratin's telling, tore their Union Jack to shreds.
People came, in the historian Bill Fishman's memory, out of every court and alleyway. By mid-morning the crowd at Aldgate was so thick that traffic had stopped. Joe Jacobs said he'd never seen anything like the mood.
Gardiner's Corner
The centre of it was Gardiner's Corner, the big junction named after the department store that stood on it and known locally as the gateway to the East End. Every route Mosley might take ran through or near it.
The slogan on the walls and in the chants was "They shall not pass". It was borrowed from Madrid, where "No pasarán" was the cry of the Spanish Republic. The war in Spain was less than three months old, and many in the crowd saw the two fights as the same one.
Who was there? Jewish tailors and cabinet makers, Irish dockers, communists, Labour and Independent Labour Party members, busmen, trade unionists and a lot of people who simply lived nearby. The London Museum also lists Somali seamen from the docks. Weston, arriving with about 40 people from north London, found Aldgate High Street packed solid.
The police had brought 6,000 men on foot, the whole of the mounted division and an observation aircraft that circled overhead all afternoon. They baton-charged again and again to open the junction. Piratin wrote that they came at the crowd time after time. Shop windows went in, including one of Gardiner's great plate-glass panes.
It didn't work, partly because of the trams. A driver who sympathised with the crowd stopped his tram in the middle of the crossing and walked away from it. By some accounts four were left there. They made a very good wall, and they broke up the mounted charges.
Most of the crowd at Gardiner's Corner simply stood its ground. Fenner Brockway of the Independent Labour Party, who was there for two and a half hours, said afterwards that in all that time he'd seen one apple thrown. At about half past three he found a telephone and rang the Home Office to demand that the march be stopped or sent another way.
Cable Street
With Aldgate blocked, the police tried the back way. Cable Street ran east from Royal Mint Street towards the docks. It was narrow, lined with shops with flats above, and home to both Irish and Jewish families.
The locals had seen that coming. A lorry was dragged out and tipped on its side across the road near Christian Street. Timber, corrugated iron and bricks came out of a builder's yard. Mattresses and furniture came out of houses. Paving stones were prised up and broken into pieces small enough to throw. There were several barricades, one behind another, so that taking the first only brought the police up against the next.
When the mounted police charged, children's marbles and broken glass went under the horses' hooves. One man who was there, Michael Sherbourne, remembered every horse going down as its hooves touched the marbles. From the upstairs windows and rooftops, women dropped milk bottles and rotten vegetables and emptied chamber pots onto the officers below.
A young man called Charlie Goodman climbed a lamp post to urge the crowd on. What struck him, looking down, was the company he was keeping. He saw "a silk-coated Orthodox Jew standing next to an Irish docker with a grappling iron". Bill Fishman, who was 15 that day and later became the East End's great historian, said the sight of bearded Jews and Catholic dockers side by side moved him to tears.
It wasn't only the people in the road. One Jewish family who kept a shop on the street remembered their non-Jewish neighbours coming round to tell them they were nice families and that Mosley wouldn't be getting through to them.
The police did take the first barricade. They got no further, and some who pushed too far were cut off. Piratin recorded what happened next with obvious relish: "Police surrendered. This had never happened before". The crowd kept their helmets and truncheons as souvenirs and let the men go.
Where Was Mosley?
In Royal Mint Street, waiting. His column was half a mile long, in uniform, with a women's section and cadets. Some had come by coach and had their windows put in on the way. They passed the time chanting antisemitic slogans, and the crowd beyond the police lines chanted back that they wanted Mosley too, dead or alive.
Mosley himself turned up about an hour and a half late, in an open car with an escort of Blackshirt motorcyclists. Piratin says a brick went through the car window. He walked down the ranks taking the salute and was then steered into a side street, where Sir Philip Game, the Police Commissioner, was waiting with his senior officers.
Game had seen enough. He told Mosley the march into the East End was forbidden and that the column could go west instead. The official statement that evening said the Commissioner had acted because of the very large crowds and the likelihood of further breaches of the peace.
So the Blackshirts turned round and marched the other way, through the empty Sunday streets of the City and along the Embankment, where they broke up. There were scuffles near Westminster Bridge. The Manchester Guardian noted drily the next morning that the fascists had marched in London, just not in the East End.
One of the men due to speak that evening was William Joyce, who'd end the next war broadcasting for the Nazis as Lord Haw-Haw.
Mosley had other plans that week in any case. Two days later, on 6 October, he married Diana Mitford in Berlin. The ceremony was held at the home of Joseph Goebbels. Adolf Hitler was a guest.
The Evening
In Stepney the news spread fast and a victory march formed more or less by itself. It set off from Cable Street for Victoria Park, where Mosley had meant to finish. Weston remembered hundreds joining in and thousands lining the pavements to clap as they went past, singing.
Not everybody clapped. As the march passed through Bethnal Green, Weston says, some people on the pavement jeered and gave the fascist salute. Mosley had supporters in the East End too, and they hadn't gone anywhere.
By nightfall the police had withdrawn and people drifted into the pubs and cafes. The Mayor of Stepney, Helena Roberts, said she had never seen the people of the East End so roused and angry. Broken glass and rubble lay in the streets for weeks.
In the Cells
The police files record 85 arrests. Six were fascists, picked up later in the West End. The rest were anti-fascists, among them eight women and two juveniles, mostly charged with insulting behaviour or obstructing the police. About 175 people were hurt, 73 of them police officers. Fifteen went to the London Hospital, including a boy of 14.
What happened inside the police stations was ugly. A witness called Freddy Shaw described young constables with their sleeves rolled up laying into prisoners with fists and truncheons and calling every one of them a Jewish bastard, whether they were Jewish or not. Charlie Goodman, the lad from the lamp post, came through the station doors head first, used, as a friend put it, like a battering ram.
One woman was dragged in with her blouse torn off. When a policeman raised his truncheon to her face, she told him she wasn't afraid of him. Father John Groser, an Anglican priest who'd joined the crowd, went home with his nose broken by a police baton.
The courts were not gentle. Jack Shaw got three months for throwing a brick that broke a policeman's nose. Others got hard labour.
Three of those young men turn up again a few months later. Shaw jumped ship at Alicante in March 1937 and made his way to the International Brigade base at Albacete, where he found Charlie Goodman and another Cable Street veteran, Joe Garber, already there. They'd gone to fight in the Spanish Civil War. About one in ten of the British volunteers in Spain was Jewish.
What Happened Next Is the Part That Gets Left Out
The legend says the East End beat fascism in an afternoon. It didn't, and the people who paid for that were the Jews of Stepney. One of the BUF's local organisers, Mick Clarke, warned publicly that London's pogrom was not far away.
The following Sunday, 11 October, a gang of between 150 and 200 young fascists ran down the Mile End Road smashing the windows of Jewish shops and attacking anyone who looked Jewish. An elderly man and a seven-year-old girl were thrown through a plate glass window. It's remembered as the Mile End Pogrom, and historians call it the worst antisemitic violence in Britain between the wars. There were attacks in Manchester and Leeds too.
Mosley, meanwhile, played the victim, and it worked. The police files show the BUF gaining about 2,000 members by 27 October, most of them in its East End branches. Special Branch reported that "the fascist movement has been steadily gaining ground" there, and that the BUF had just held its most successful run of meetings since it was founded.
At the London County Council elections in March 1937, six BUF candidates stood in East End seats. They took about 7,000 votes between them, roughly 18 per cent, and as much as 23 per cent in their best ward. They won nothing, but that's still nearly one voter in five.
This is why some historians have little patience with the legend. Martin Pugh wrote that Cable Street went down as a decisive check to fascism, and added: "In reality it was nothing of the sort." Daniel Tilles goes further and argues that the day made life worse for East End Jews by handing Mosley a grievance.
What Actually Beat the Blackshirts
Three things, and only one of them was passed by parliament.
The first was the Public Order Act. Sir Philip Game pressed for it after Cable Street, it went through parliament that November and it came into force on 1 January 1937. It banned political uniforms, which took away the black shirts, and gave the police power to ban marches. An order keeping processions out of the East End was renewed every three months until 1940.
The second was patient, unglamorous work. Phil Piratin had argued all along that you couldn't beat Mosley just by fighting him in the street. You had to deal with the reasons his supporters were angry. He helped set up the Stepney Tenants Defence League, which took on slum landlords on behalf of anyone, including BUF members. It grew to about 11,000 members and won some 20 rent strikes before the war. Fascists who'd been helped to keep their homes tore up their membership cards.
Piratin also left the best description of what Cable Street did achieve. Nothing in Stepney had changed physically, he wrote, but people held their heads higher, and "the 'terror' had lost its meaning". In 1945 Mile End elected him as a Communist MP.
The third was the war. Mussolini had already cut off the money. In May 1940, with France falling, the BUF was banned and Mosley and Diana were locked up without trial.
So Was It a Victory?
Yes, but not the one in the legend. Cable Street didn't destroy British fascism, and it was followed by a bad year for the people it was meant to protect.
What it did was show that the Blackshirts could be faced down, and that Jewish and Irish neighbours who'd been told they were rivals would stand in the same road. That mattered to the people who were there for the rest of their lives. It also frightened the government into passing a law it had been avoiding. Both versions are true at once, and an honest account needs both.
The Cable Street Mural
The name itself is newer than you'd think. It only settled as the usual label for the day after a BBC documentary in 1970.
The mural followed. In 1976 Dan Jones of the Tower Hamlets Trades Council approached the artist Dave Binnington about painting the west wall of St George's Town Hall at 236 Cable Street. Work began in 1979 on a wall of about 330 square metres.
While it was still unfinished, far-right vandals climbed the scaffolding and daubed racist slogans across the lower part. Binnington, worn down, walked away. Paul Butler, Ray Walker and Desmond Rochfort finished it, and it was unveiled in May 1983. It's been attacked and repaired several times since and now has a protective varnish. It was restored most thoroughly for the 75th anniversary in 2011.
Look closely and you'll find the details from this article in it: the overturned lorry, the marbles, a chamber pot being emptied from a window and the police aircraft overhead.
Cable Street at 90
The East End that turned out in 1936 has changed. The Jewish community has largely moved on and Bengali families live in many of the same streets. They've had their own fights with the far right, including the one that followed the murder of Altab Ali in 1978.
The 90th anniversary fell on Sunday 4 October 2026. It was marked by a march and rally that assembled outside Tower Hamlets Town Hall in Whitechapel. A ten-day festival, Cable Street 90, ran from 1 to 11 October with talks, walks and a film installation projected onto Toynbee Hall.
That festival was organised by the Board of Deputies, the same body that in 1936 advised Jews to keep away.
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Sources
The National Archives blog: 'No pasarán', the Battle of Cable Street
TUC: The Battle of Cable Street, They Shall Not Pass (booklet)
Reg Weston: Fascists and police routed, the battle of Cable Street
Labour Hub: An eyewitness account from Cable Street (Phil Piratin)
The Jewish Chronicle: Why victory at Cable Street really belonged to Mosley's fascists
Jewish News: After Cable Street, victory made way for violence
Patrick Comerford: Remembering the Battle of Cable Street and its significance 90 years later
Jewish News: London marks 90 years since Battle of Cable Street
Unite the Union: The Battle of Cable Street 90th anniversary
