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.

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.

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.