When Mosley's fascists took on East End London and lost: the Battle of Cable Street explained

Who were the British Union of Fascists, aka ‘the Blackshirts’?

Founded on 1 October 1932, the British Union of Fascists (BUF) was the brainchild of Sir Oswald Mosley, the eldest son of a baronet and disillusioned politician with far-right aspirations to be the next Benito Mussolini.

Mosley’s political journey to the far right had begun a decade earlier when, in 1918, he was elected as the youngest Conservative Member of Parliament at the age of 22, taking the safe seat of Harrow.

He later crossed the floor of the House of Commons to be an independent, before joining the Labour Party in 1924. Upon his father’s death in 1928, he inherited the Mosley Baronetcy of Ancoats.

With his charisma and oratory winning him many plaudits, he was widely perceived as a rising star among the Labour benches.

In his first election as the party’s candidate, he nearly defeated Neville Chamberlain, the future prime minister, losing by fewer than 100 votes.

Such was his reputation that following the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the ensuing economic crisis across the world, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald tasked the young Mosley with helping to tackle Britain’s rising unemployment.

However, his proposal of trade protectionism combined with an ambitious programme of public works and nationalisation of main industries – dubbed the ‘Mosley Memorandum’ – was deemed too risky. Mosley quit Labour, formed the New Party in 1931 (a hybrid of radical left and conservative right), and campaigned on his economic platform, although unsuccessfully.

Dejected by his election failure, Mosley ventured to Italy, where he became captivated by its dictator Benito Mussolini and his Fascist regime.

When he returned to Britain, Mosley transformed the New Party into an overtly authoritarian organisation modelled on Italian Fascism. He even had his own bodyguard, the ‘Biff Boys’.

By 1932, the New Party fused with other far right groups to become the BUF. And the Biff Boys took on a new, more intimidating, name inspired by their uniform: ‘the Blackshirts’. Mosley fashioned them after the Italian dictatorship’s paramilitary of the same name, and they were soon infamous for their thuggish behaviour and violent methods.

What did the Blackshirts believe in?

The Blackshirts believed in authoritarian nationalism under the total command of a single leader. They abhorred liberal democracy manifest in Britain’s parliamentary system, which they regarded as detrimental to national unity, and instead advocated for a one-party state. They lauded British imperialism, and the supremacy and purity of the ‘British race’, while opposing immigration, communism and capitalism.

As for the BUF leader, Mosley proposed a corporatist economic model in the vein of Mussolini’s Italy.

This aimed to reorganise society into state-controlled sectors, or corporations, representing various industries. It would end the class struggle and inspire national unity by aligning workers’ and employers’ interests under state supervision. And it would all be under his dictatorship.

As well as the black shirts, the BUF adopted a number of elements and iconography seen in Italian Fascism. They began using the extended-arm Roman salute – as did the Nazis in Germany – and held dramatic mass rallies under the thrall of Mosley’s fiery oratory.

Similarly, they utilised the fasces (a bundle of wooden rods with an axe in the middle, bound by leather throngs; a symbol of official power in ancient Rome and a favourite of the fascists). But they later embraced the lightning bolt cutting across a circle as their symbol, alongside the red, white and blue of the British Flag.

Both Mussolini’s Italy and Adolf Hitler’s Germany funded the BUF to bolster their influence in Britain and to promote fascism across Europe. As the economic turmoil of the Great Depression deepened, Europe’s liberal democracies found themselves on the backfoot amid a rising fascist and authoritarian surge.

The BUF’s dynamism dazzled the press baron Lord Rothermere, whose Daily Mail newspaper headlined with “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!” in January 1934. However, just a few months later figures like Rothermere withdrew their support after a notorious rally at the Olympia Exhibition Centre in Kensington, West London, on 7 June.

Anti-fascists infiltrated and disrupted the BUF event, attended by more than 10,000 people, and the Blackshirts met their catcalls and boos with physical assault and coercion. The violence led to widespread condemnation.

The BUF vision of a fascist Britain was designed to appeal directly to working-class communities devastated by the Depression. Leading this effort was Tommy Moran, a former miner and Mosley’s right-hand man.

But at many BUF events, like at Olympia, there was fierce resistance. At one notable rally in Tonypandy in Wales in June 1936, Moran was forcibly driven from the stage, an event remembered as the Battle of De Winton Field.

With the BUF’s popularity declining in the wake of the Olympia violence, Mosley leaned more and more into militancy, rabble-rousing and public affray, centred on a campaign of virulent antisemitism. As the Nazis grew in power in Germany, so did their spell over the BUF in Britain.

Why the Blackshirts marched through Cable Street

During the late 19th century, London’s East End became home to Jewish refugees fleeing the violent pogroms sweeping the Russian empire. By the 1930s, the area was welcoming German Jews as they escaped the tyranny of the Nazi regime.

As their numbers grew, however, the safety of this haven became increasingly precarious as far right populism gained traction within Britain itself.

In autumn 1936, menacing posters appeared in the East End announcing a series of BUF events to mark the anniversary of its inception. Some members were even calling this the start of a “pogrom”, which galvanised a strong response within the community.

The Mayor of Stepney, mindful of his Jewish constituents, denounced an upcoming fascist march planned for 4 October as “provocative of disturbance and possible riot and danger to persons and property”.

The Jewish People’s Council accrued over 100,000 signatures urging the Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, to ban the BUF march. Simon refused to yield and around 6,000 to 7,000 officers from the Metropolitan Police, under the command of Sir Philip Game, were dispatched to ensure that the Blackshirts’ passage through the East End was carried out peacefully.

The clash at Cable Street

When the day arrived, upwards of 5,000 Blackshirts, the majority of whom were under 18 years old, and the police presence were confronted by an enormous anti-fascist demonstration blocking their access. Estimates range from 100,000 to more than 310,000 demonstrators. Drivers abandoned their trams to impede the march.

As the Met beat back the crowd, the BUF’s original plan to march from Tower Hill and split into four columns headed towards Shoreditch, Limehouse, Bow and Bethnal Green was abandoned and the police redirected them down Cable Street. There, they walked straight into a pitched battle.

Jews, communists, trade unionists, socialists, Irish dockers and other East Enders formed barricades along the thoroughfare and its side streets. All the while, the anti-fascists were fervently chanting the rallying cry of the Spanish Republicans: “//¡No pasarán!//” (“They shall not pass”). The Spanish Civil War had been triggered less than three months earlier by a right-wing military coup backed by Hitler and Mussolini.

Objects were thrown, from rotten vegetables and bottles to bricks and paving stones. Even the contents of chamber pots were dropped from windows onto the police below, and children bowled their marbles under the hooves of mounted constables.

Mobile medical stations erected throughout the district tended to the injured, which counted Moran among those hurt – he sustained cuts to his head.

Shortly before 3.30pm, Mosley arrived at Tower Hill and the police ordered him to divert the march towards the West End along the Embankment and end it at Hyde Park. The East End had faced down the fascists.

What Cable Street meant for Mosley

Of the thousands involved, 85 arrests were made. Only six were from the BUF. Yet the battle of Cable Street was celebrated as a victory over the fascists and their bid to intimidate East End residents.

“The people were changed. Their heads seemed to be held higher, and their shoulders were squarer,” reflected Phil Piratin, a Jewish organiser for the Communist Party of Great Britain and one of the coordinators of the resistance that day. “[They] knew that fascism could be defeated if they organised themselves to do so”.

Mosley, however, was not defeated. Two days after the battle, he was in Berlin to marry Diana Mitford. She was one of the celebrity Mitford sisters: six aristocratic socialites who made headlines for their controversial political views, including Diana’s overt fascism. She and Mosley were wed in the home of Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, no less, with Adolf Hitler as the couple’s guest of honour.

Then, in early 1937, the Public Order Act came into force. Among its stipulations was the prohibition of political uniforms, such as the black shirts worn by the BUF.

British fascists had been humiliated by the battle of Cable Street, although the BUF membership actually rose slightly in the weeks afterwards, and despite continued provocations and canvassing their political fortunes waned. But when the threat of conflict with Nazi Germany became more likely, and then inevitable, the BUF were done.

Following the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, the Blackshirts were seen as a potential ‘fifth column’ aiding the Nazis from within Britain. By July 1940, the BUF was declared unlawful and banned.

Mosley advocated for peace terms with the Third Reich. This went nowhere, and barely two weeks after Winston Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, Mosley was interned under Defence Regulation 18B. This authorised the British government to detain those suspected of undermining the nation’s war effort without trial.

Hundreds of fascists met the same fate as Mosley, among them his wife Diana, a fanatical supporter of the Nazis. She was incarcerated 11 weeks after giving birth to their second son, Max, and the couple spent much of the war behind bars at Holloway Prison.

After the war, Mosley attempted to revive his political career and the fascist cause through the Union Movement, which replaced a need of country-based nationalism with a European nationalism. Mosley’s new party remained extremely antisemitic, denying the atrocities of the Holocaust, but it was unsuccessful. He eventually resettled outside Paris and died in 1980, aged 84.

Cable Street's legacy today

In London’s East End, the memory of the Battle of Cable Street endured. Between 1979 and 1983, a large mural depicting scenes from that dramatic day in October 1936 could be seen on the side of St George’s Town Hall, just off Cable Street.

The anti-fascist message taken up by tens of thousands of people against Mosley and his Blackshirts stands as a significant moment in the history of Britain between the two world wars. It continues to serve as a touchstone for all those united in the struggle against racism to this day.