On 4 October 1936, five thousand men in black shirts assembled to march through the East End of London. It was a deliberate provocation, aimed squarely at the Jewish community living there and it had been advertised well in advance so that nobody could miss the point. Six thousand police were sent to make sure the march went ahead. That was the plan, and everybody involved in making the plan was confident of it.
It did not go ahead. Somewhere around one hundred thousand people came out to stop it, and stop it they did, in an afternoon, with barricades and a lorry and a slogan borrowed from Madrid. Sunday 4 October is the ninetieth anniversary, and there will be a march and it will be nothing like the one that was planned.
It is the best afternoon in modern British political history and a startling number of British people have never heard of it. I include myself until embarrassingly late. I grew up two hours from Cable Street, did history to A level and came across it for the first time on a mural, on a wall, on a day out and stood there reading it twice because I assumed it must be about somewhere else.
It was not about somewhere else. It was about here, and it is about now and it is worth telling properly, because the version that gets told is usually the sentimental one and the sentimental one leaves out everything useful.
Who was actually there
The crowd was not one organisation, and this matters more than anything else in the story. It was Jewish East Enders, whose street it was. It was Irish dockers, whose street it also was and who had their own history with people in uniforms telling them where they could and could not go.
It was communists, who had organised the barricades. It was trade unionists, socialists and a very large number of people who simply lived there and did not fancy five thousand men in uniform coming through with police protection.
That combination is the whole lesson. The version where one heroic group did it is both wrong and much less useful, because it lets everybody else off. The Jewish community could not have stopped five thousand men and six thousand police on its own. Neither could the dockers.
Neither could the Communist Party, which at the time was arguing with itself about whether to turn up at all. It took all of them, and it took people who did not belong to anything, and the people who did not belong to anything were the majority.
The Jewish People's Council had petitioned the Home Secretary to ban the march and collected a hundred thousand signatures in two days. The Home Secretary declined. So the hundred thousand signatures turned up in person.
What actually happened
They built barricades across Cable Street out of whatever was to hand. Paving stones, furniture, a builder's yard and an overturned lorry that has become the image of the day because it is the image of the day. Women in the houses above threw the contents of chamber pots onto the police below, which is the sort of detail that gets left out of the mural and should not be.
They took the slogan from Madrid, where the Spanish Republic had been using it for three months against Franco's advance. No pasarán. They shall not pass. It was painted on walls the night before and it was chanted all afternoon, and it has been the shortest political argument in the English language ever since.
The police tried to clear a path and could not. They tried for hours. Mounted police charged, batons were used and the barricade held.
Eventually the Commissioner told Mosley that the march could not proceed through the East End and he was redirected west, towards the Embankment, away from the people he had come to intimidate. He complied. For a man who had spent four years telling the country he was its future, that is not a small detail.
Fact box
Five thousand blackshirts. Six thousand police. Around one hundred thousand people in the way.
The Public Order Act 1936 followed within weeks, banning political uniforms in public and requiring police consent for marches. The black shirt itself became illegal. Mosley never recovered the momentum.
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What it changed
Within weeks Parliament passed the Public Order Act 1936. It banned the wearing of political uniforms in public and gave the police the power to control or ban marches. The black shirt, which was the entire visual identity of the movement, the thing that made it a movement rather than a meeting, was made illegal. Mosley's men went back to suits and lost the thing that had frightened people.
You can argue that the BUF was already fading, and you would have a point. Rothermere had pulled the Daily Mail away two years earlier after the violence at Olympia, and the money had thinned since. But Cable Street is the day it stopped being an argument about politics and became a fact about the street.
Facts about the street are what these movements actually run on. They need to be seen to own the ground. On 4 October 1936, in the one part of London they most wanted to be seen owning, they were sent home.
Mosley was told the march could not proceed, and was redirected west, away from the East End. He complied.
The bit that gets sentimentalised
Cable Street is often told as a lovely story about unity, which it partly is, and which is also how you drain it of everything useful. It was not a vigil. It was a large number of people physically preventing something from happening, in an era with no cameras to perform for, at genuine risk of a truncheon, against a police force that was there to protect the fascists and did its job.
Around one hundred and fifty people were injured. Roughly the same number were arrested, and most of the arrested were anti-fascists rather than fascists, because that is how public order policing has always worked and still does. Nobody who was there described it as inspiring at the time. They described it as a long day, and then they went home and a good many of them did not talk about it for forty years.
That is a different kind of victory and it is the only kind that has ever worked on this particular enemy, which is worth remembering the next time somebody proposes a strongly worded open letter.
The people who stopped Mosley did not win an argument. They occupied a street.
Ninety years on
The anniversary march assembles at Whitechapel at midday on Sunday 4 October, and sets off from outside Tower Hamlets Town Hall at one. Unite are organising, there will be historians and musicians and a great many trade union banners and the whole thing will take a couple of hours and end somewhere with a bar.
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If you have never been to one of these, it is worth knowing that they are not frightening and they are not angry. They are mostly quite old, quite chatty and surprisingly well catered. There will be someone selling badges.
There will be a brass band that is slightly out of tune. There will be a man of about eighty whose father was on the barricade, and if you find him, buy him a drink and let him talk.
Ninety years ago the people who lived on that street were told that five thousand men in uniform were coming through, and that the police would be escorting them. They decided otherwise, and they were right and it took an afternoon. Bring a flask.
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