The shocking events in the Canadian Parliament in recent days certainly touched a nerve for me. On the day that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed Canada’s MPs, and a wider audience in the public galleries, the Speaker of the House called on the parliament to honour, with an ovation, a 98-year-old Ukrainian military veteran, Yaroslav Hunka of the “First Ukrainian Division” who came to live in Canada.
Another name for the First Ukrainian Division was 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, 1st Galicia. It was a volunteer unit of Ukrainians that pledged allegiance to Adolf Hitler during the Second World War and operated as a military wing of the Nazis. They were trained by the Nazis and fought for them.
The Speaker of the House, Anthony Rota, had introduced Hunka as a resident of his own district who had fought for Ukrainian independence from Russia and later immigrated to Canada. He has since expressed great regret for his action in honouring this 98-year-old Nazi collaborator and has acknowledged that, by doing so, he brought shame to Canada’s parliament and caused considerable pain to Jewish communities in Canada and beyond. He resigned from his post on Tuesday. President Zelenskyy, who took part in the ovation with enthusiasm, has so far not commented publicly on the matter. He really should have done.
Canada has the second largest Ukrainian population in the world outside of Ukraine, the bulk of them settling as farmers in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, both before World War One and especially in the inter-war period, after the Russian Revolution.
Canada has a big place in my heart. I was born in London, but my late father, Alvin, was born in the impoverished cosmopolitan Kensington Market area of downtown Toronto. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and Poland who arrived in Canada in the 1910s. I have many cousins and other relatives there today (a number of whom, I’m pleased to say, are pretty left wing). Yet articles on the history of Ukrainians in Canada make no reference to Ukrainian Jews. The assumption is that Ukrainian Canadians are all Christians. But Ukrainian-born Jews formed a significant part of the pre-World War One Jewish migration from the Tsarist and Austro-Hungarian empires.
The first Chief Rabbi of Toronto, Yosef Weinreb, was born in Western Ukraine. William Shatner, of Star Trek fame, is descended from Ukrainian and Lithuanian Jews who settled in Montreal. Baruch Ramilevich Mendelson was born in Cherkassy, Ukraine in 1910. He came with his parents to Alberta as a 12 year old. In the 1930s he fought in Spain against Franco as part of the Canadian battalion in the International Brigades. He later settled in Britain, in Leeds. With his name anglicised to Bert Ramelson, became the industrial organiser of Britain’s Communist Party from the mid-1960s.
I never knew my Canadian grandfather, Isser. He died in Toronto the year I was born in London, but I do know that the Ukraine he left behind as a young man was a place of both substantial Yiddish cultural creativity but also terrible suffering; not only because of poverty, but also because of widespread and murderous antisemitism. And, of course, the poverty and antisemitism were linked by Tsarist dictats that forced Jews to live in certain designated areas (the Pale of Settlement), closed off many employment and educational facilities to Jews, and blamed them for any social and economic and political problems in the Tsarist Empire. Isser was indeed fortunate to leave Ukraine before the horrific pogroms that took place there during the wider Russian Civil War.
I remember my dad telling me about his own involvement as a teenager in the 1930s, in anti-fascist fights in the local park against Canada’s home-grown Nazi movement of that time. They were known as the Blueshirts (similar to their counterparts in Britain – Mosley’s Blackshirts.) My dad used to joke about how he was more scared of the leader of the Jewish gang of anti-fascists – a real shtarker (tough guy) – than he was of the fascists!
Born in 1924, Alvin was too young to take part in a bigger battle in Toronto in August 1933 which has gone down in history as the Christy Pits Riot, provoked by far right activists of a “Swastika Club”. When I was in Canada for a Socialist Studies conference in 2017 I visited a plaque memorialising the Christy Pits Riot and praising the solidarity that many young Italian immigrants gave their Jewish neighbours who were being targeted by those wielding Swastika flags and popularising Nazi slogans.
At a grander political level, Canada’s record towards the Jews in the 1930s, especially to Jewish refugees from Nazism, was poor. On 7 June 1939, more than 900 German Jewish refugees aboard a ship, the St Louis, were denied entry to Canada (and then the USA). The ship returned to Europe and it is estimated that at least 250 of those refugees perished in the Holocaust. That year, a Canadian government official, when asked how many Jews should be let in to Canada, told reporters “none is too many”.
Many Austrian and German Jewish refugees to Britain in the late 1930s that our own government regarded as “undesirable”, and were targeted for anti-refugee hate campaigns in the right-wing press, were redirected to Canada and Australia. In 1940 More than 2,000 of them, who were taken in by Canada, found themselves in internment camps in Quebec, Ontario and New Brunswick, classed as “enemy aliens”, often sharing these facilities with Nazi prisoners of war. When the guards at these camps became more aware of how unsafe the Jewish refugees felt, they were not freed but were interned in separate new camps established especially for them. They continued to be regarded as “enemy aliens” until 1943.
Canada’s record on these questions immediately post-war was a curious mixture. On the one hand, after taking in just 5,000 Jewish refugees between 1933-48, they eventually took in many times more Holocaust survivors than were given refuge in Britain. But during the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Canadian authorities also gave entry to many individuals from Eastern Europe who had collaborated with the Nazis. Estimates by Jewish and other organisations in the 1980s put that figure between 2,000-3,000. That included a significant number from the Waffen SS division that Yaroslav Hunka was part of.
As the Cold War set in, it became easier for Nazi collaborators to enter Canada. In the late 1990s, a professor of Canadian Jewish history, the late Irving Abella, told a CBS news programme that one way of getting into post-war Canada “was by showing the SS tattoo. This proved that you were an anti-Communist.” Those who came in from Eastern Europe after World War Two, including Nazi collaborators, were usually described more blandly in Canada’s mainstream media as “political refugees” or “displaced persons”.
Among the Ukrainians who gained entry in 1948 was a journalist called Michael Chomiak. During the war, he fled from advancing Russian forces, first to Krakow where he edited a virulently antisemitic pro-Nazi newspaper Krakivski Visti, and later Vienna. His newspapers enthusiastically welcomed the formation of the 14th Waffen SS division of Ukranian volunteers (that Yaroslav Hunka served in.)
Chomiak’s granddaughter, Chrystia Freeland, is the Deputy Prime Minister in Trudeau’s government. People cannot be blamed for their parents or grandparents but neither should they be dishonest about the past. A few years ago she was at pains to dismiss stories that emerged about her grandfather, as “Russian disinformation” but dogged work by mainstream Canadian journalists has since confirmed the veracity of the claims about Chomiak. Another reason perhaps for the political class to be more careful about whom they choose to honour in their Parliament today.
I’ve visited Canada twice, the first time on a family holiday in the late 1990s. At the beginning and end of the holiday we met up with cousins, uncles and aunts there. In between we travelled within Ontario and also in Montreal, where we visited a friend who was a Bundist (Jewish socialist) Holocaust survivor. We really enjoyed being in Canada, and felt warmly welcomed by the people, except in one place. We stopped for a couple of days in a village called Eganville, west of Ottawa, which had had significant post-war East European immigration.
We felt strangely uncomfortable there. I flicked through the free local paper which had a very right wing stance, clearly prone to conspiracy theories and obsessed with gun control laws that were allegedly taking away “freedoms”. We saw an advert for a gun show taking place the next day that also promised there would be sales of wartime memorabilia. We speculated about which side’s memorabilia would be on show. That question was answered almost as soon as we entered the event. There were plenty of stalls selling Nazi memorabilia. Beneath the calm, stable and civil vibe we saw and felt in Canada, there was a less wholesome underbelly that revealed itself too. The annual gun shows continue in Eganville to this day.
And what of the First Ukrainian/Waffen SS division in Ukraine today? Are they remembered? Or are they forgotten as an embarrassment in the decades since Ukraine freed itself from being part of the USSR, and concentrated on its renewed nation-building era. Ukraine remains socially, politically and economically diverse, and in the years before the Russian invasion of February 2022, far-right forces have not been shy about showing themselves.
On 28 April, 2021, during the presidency of Zelenskyy, a Jew who lost family in the Holocaust, hundreds of Ukrainian citizens marched through Kiev proudly displaying flags to remember the First Ukraine Division. Jewish community organisations in Ukraine, alarmed about the prospect of such a march taking place, made their strong feelings known, but the march was nevertheless permitted to take place.
Even if I feel distinctly uneasy about Zelenskyy’s politics (not just on escalating the war but also on his treatment of trade unions), I absolutely stand with the Ukrainian people against the Russian invasion; I stand with those in Russia facing repression from their authoritarian regime for the “crime” of calling for Russia’s war to end; and I weep for the young people conscripted on both sides in a war that has no foreseeable end at present, with leaders and foreign governments, like ours, committed to escalation.
Representatives of both the Ukrainian and Russian regimes accuse each other of harbouring or tolerating Nazis. Both of them are right, but this conflict, in which several different agendas are being played out, does not take place in a vacuum. The world political map is changing, and not for the better, as far-right ideas and movements are advancing in many countries and several continents. We can add our names and energies to campaigns to attempt to influence what happens there. But we can also be very mindful of what is happening in our political contexts closer to home, and closer to the places where we have family connections and history, and we can speak out.
That’s why I express my outrage at what happened in Canada in the past week. I cannot understand why the Speaker of Canada’s parliament did not undertake due diligence before his action to honour Hunka, a Nazi collaborator, but I respect the courage and sincerity of his apology (and subsequent resignation). I very much regret that Zelensky has not shown the same moral courage after what was revealed about Hunka, but simply stayed silent on the matter. As someone who has joint British and Canadian citizenship, and as an anti-fascist I cannot and will not stay silent.
Opening speech by David Rosenberg at the commemoration of the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Stocktonof 1933.
I am honoured to be here on the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Stockton. I bring greetings especially from the Jewish Socialists’ Group, an organisation founded in 1974 in Manchester by older working-class Jews who cut their teeth politically in the 1930s, as teenagers, fighting poverty and fascism in their workplaces, tenements and on the streets. I joined in 1976, in my late teens, and co-founded our London branch. Many of us in London had close relatives who took part in anti-fascist struggles in London’s 1930s East End.
10th September 1933 was an incredible day. In a region ravaged by mass unemployment and hunger, people here showed they were not fooled by Oswald Mosley’s persuasive rhetoric, that they would not become fodder for a fascist movement that wanted to exploit their misery, but decided instead to resist. They sent the fascists packing.
By September 1933 the British Union of Fascists, led by a charismatic aristocrat, the 6th baron of Ancoats, had hundreds of branches around the country. In the North East they had branches in Newcastle, Sunderland, Gateshead, Durham and Stockton.
But on that day, a 2000-strong, working class, anti-fascist alliance drove them off the streets. By doing so they set an example followed in the next couple of years when the fascists tried build in Manchester and Liverpool, and then in September 1936 on Holbeck Moor in Leeds, followed by the Battle of Cable Street in east London; and once more in south London, in the lesser known Battle of Bermondsey.
in October 1932, Mosley had closed down his short-lived New Party and rebranded it the British Union of Fascists, complete with Blackshirt uniforms, and a book The Greater Britain. From day one he told his footsoldiers that they were invincible; the streets belonged to them. But by their unity, solidarity and courage, your grandparents and great grandparents were the first ones to prove the fascists wrong.
The enormous setbacks the fascists suffered in street clashes here in Stockton, and elsewhere, were crucial to defeating British fascism in the 1930s, at a time when fascist movements were advancing rapidly in many European countries and had already established dictatorships in Italy and Germany.
What fills me with dread today is the evolving political map of Europe, including Britain, where Far Right politicians and movements promoting Islamophobia, anti-Black and anti-Roma racism, antisemitism, are making real advances and the lines between the conventional Conservative right and the fascist Right are it seems becoming deliberately blurred. And beyond Europe too – in Modi’s India and Netanyahu’s Israel
Defeating fascists here in the 1930s and in the 1970s, though, required more than physically battling for the streets. It needed a coherent, compelling, dynamic and inclusive anti-fascist politics, that found expression in social and cultural arenas too. I will return to that.
If Mosley would have succeeded we would not have a “Greater Britain”, but an infinitely worse Britain for all but a few, dominated by hatred, fear, oppression and exploitation, with wealth and comfort ring-fenced for the privileged few. The people of Stockton helped the wider anti-fascist movement understand that Mosley was on the side of the millionaires not of the millions, as he claimed.
Let’s turn the clock back further. In 1914, a recently-ordained Australian-born churchman, Father john Groser, began work in All Saints parish in Newcastle. Before then, by his own admission, his political outlook was Conservative and imperialist. His short stay in the North East turned that on its head. He saw real poverty, and disdain for poor people’s situation by those who could have ameliorated it. Groser became a fighter for social change. When he settled a few years later in in London’s East End he acknowledged it was his work in Newcastle that opened his eyes and prepared him for the challenges he would meet.
Embittered and hopeless
In 1932 Groser called a conference on unemployment. He listed the impacts on people whose situations were rapidly deteriorating, who felt no one was on their side: “the frustration of personality, the loss of proper self-respect, the creation of an embittered and hopeless section of the community”.
Unknowingly, he described the key characteristics that prepared those people for recruitment by fascists, who would promise to restore their dignity, put them back to work, make Britain great again, and empower them with a renewed sense of identity and purpose.
The late Tony Benn identified two ingredients for social change: “hope and anger”. In the 1930s, fascists offered that cocktail more convincingly than the political mainstream, including Labour.
Fast forward to the big cities and depressed smaller towns of Foodbank Britain 2023. The ranks of today’s hopeless and embittered grow daily and are being whipped into a frenzy by the Tories who have no ideas how to solve to people’s real problems and no intention to either. Day by day the Tories adapting to the ultra-nationalist, authoritarian and racist themes of the Far Right that diverts genuine anger and frustration on to soft targets – refugees.
The Labour opposition, meanwhile, thinks it sufficient to call the Tory party chaotic and incompetent, and berate them for not stopping the boats quickly enough. This is not what we need. A serious politics of anti-racism and anti-fascism has to be based on the desire to treat all human beings with dignity and generosity, especially those that have already experienced oppression, violence and loss.
Two aspects of Mosley’s appeal
Returning to the 1930s, but with obvious lessons today, I want to focus on two aspects of Mosley’s appeal – one local, one national.
The local one was especially potent in London’s East End, home of Britain’s largest, overwhelmingly working-class, Jewish community. This played out also in Manchester and Leeds who had relatively large and struggling Jewish communities.
In its first two years Mosley’s party focused on the economic and political crisis, but by Autumn 1934 Mosley’s scapegoating shifted towards a particular minority – the Jews. In his propaganda, Jews were blamed for every social, economic and political problem. The fascists concentrate their efforts on the areas with large Jewish populations, using a confected hate campaign against a visible target to recruit from the surrounding population.
In London’s East End the biggest minorities were the Irish who came through the 19th century, especially after the 1840s crop failure and hunger; and Jewish migrants and refugees came mainly between 1881 and 1905. Other smaller minorities were present, but this was no melting pot. Communities kept largely to themselves, building up false fears of the other.
Solly Kaye was a Jewish anti-fascist activist. He spent his life fighting for progressive causes. He remembered Mosley’s efforts to win support from the impoverished Irish against impoverished Jews :
“They would involve people on the basis of envy and fear by saying ‘over there the Jews, they’ve got your houses, over there the Jews, they’ve got your jobs’, even though we were living in bloody poverty with bugs crawling all over us in the night.”
Some Irish East Enders became popular street-corner fascist speakers but the more trade unionised Irish workers – dockers and railwaymen – were joining the anti-fascist movement in which the Communist Party was very prominent. In several Communist and Young Communist League branches in east London, if you were neither Jewish nor Irish, you were in the minority.
This played out in Cable Street itself in October 1936, when Mosley chose to invade the most densely populated East End Jewish streets with thousands of uniformed, jackbooted fascists. Their chosen entry point was completely blockaded by thousands of anti-fascists, mobilised mainly by the Communist Party, Independent Labour Party, Labour League of Youth, and a radical local grassroots Jewish body called the Jewish People’s Council Against Fascism and antisemitism (JPC).
Mounted police could not clear a path, so police on the ground sought to bring them through a much narrower road further south closer to the fascists assembly point. Cable Street
The maths of Cable Street. The first two thirds of Cable Street was almost entirely Jewish, the final third almost entirely Irish. On that day, many Irish came down to the Jewish end to help Jews build barricades across the street. Police tried to dislodge the barricades but were strongly resisted. Many arrests were made, people injured, but eventually the police retreated and told the fascists they could not march through but would have to march far from the area and disperse.
The political strategy that made that possible owed much to the JPC. They sought to mobilise as many local Jews community as possible in active opposition to the fascists, but also to build links with non-Jewish anti-fascists in order to build an anti-fascist majority in the area.
Not just an expression of hate but a tool to win power
They understood that antisemitism was not simply an expression of hate but a tool the fascists would use to win power and close down democracy for all who opposed them. The JPC argued that Jews and non-Jews therefore had a common interest in opposing both antisemitism and fascism.
Every one of the JPC’s main campaigning meetings, indoor or outdoor, had both Jewish and non-Jewish platform speakers. That inclusive strategy was increasingly adopted by the wider anti-fascist movement, who made serious personal efforts in more neutral arenas, such as sports clubs, to persuade those getting keen on the fascists, to rethink.
The Communist party undertook special work to undermine Mosley’s efforts to recruit Irish support. They produced model “speakers’ notes” for platforms in Irish areas of the East End, to counter the fascists’ lies over jobs, housing and Jews
Blowing apart the lies
Speakers reminded irish people how their grandparents had been called “job snatchers” and accused of “ruining conditions in Britain”. They explained that Jewish workers as well as non-Jewish workers were victims of unemployment, and that in Liverpool, Glasgow and Belfast old racial incitement was still being used to discriminate against Irish communities. They gave statistics that blew apart the claim that Jews were forcing non-Jews out of work. For instance, Liverpool had 7,000 Jews and 92,000 unemployed workers; Blackburn 200 Jews but 16,000 unemployed; and Hartlepool just 60 Jews but 9,000 people out of work.
A London-based Irish newspaper, The Irish Front, also promoted arguments for Irish-Jewish unity against fascism. It was edited by two young poets and writers – Charles Donnelly from Co Tyrone and Lesley Daiken from Dublin – of Catholic and Jewish Irish backgrounds respectively. (Donnelly was later killed in the Spanish civil war)
An equal stake
That was how solidarity was built. It’s more fashionable now to talk of “allyship” instead of solidarity. But I prefer “solidarity” which gives equal dignity and equal worth to each participant and an equal stake in fighting oppression.
The national aspect of the fascists appeal that I want to analyse concerns generational politics. When the fascists condemned leaders of mainstream political parties as the “Tired Old Gang”, who had no solutions to the economic crisis, Mosley defined his movement as a “party of youth, based on action, that would mobilise energy, vitality and manhood to save and rebuild the nation.” Within that you have gendered language, the saviour complex and other aspects but what did this appeal to youth really mean.
Mosley claimed that the fascists were the only party offering youth a chance to play their part for the nation in peace time, not just in war-time. A very powerful message, given that memories of the First World War, so many young lives sacrificed in a war that was essentially about empires and markets, were still felt viscerally.
Mosley’s appeal to youth
The fascists understood the beauty of generational politics: it obscures class politics and enhanced their cross-class appeal. They did try to recruit unemployed youth, and young street-fighters, but their more serious youth policy was played elsewhere. They formed fascist branches among students in 20 public schools grooming elite youth as future bearers of fascist politics.
I became an active anti-fascist at 16. I rejoice whenever I see young people becoming politically active but I worry that some progressive movements today place such emphasis on youth and disparage and blame older people/boomers rather than the cross-generational ruling class as responsible for younger people’s difficult lives today.
Last January I turned 65. I did not become a selfish, right-wing, bigot overnight. If anything I became an angrier, more radical, more militant, socialist and anti-fascist. Those who write off older generations kook at the well-to-do but don’t recognise that many of them in working class communities were the generation whose lives were decimated by Thatcherism. Let’s leave crude generational politics with the far right and keep class politics at the centre of our analysis, and our solutions. Let’s consciously bring older and younger people together for change that benefits us all.
The most successful campaigns I have been involved with have been cross-generational. In that regard I am so glad that our event here today started with a video message from my MP and friend, Jeremy Corbyn, several years older than me, who is still the most consistent and outspoken anti-racist, anti-fascist, pro-migrant, pro refugee politician in the House of Commons. I have been proud to share a platform with him especially at the 80th and 85th commemorations of Cable Street. I have a copy of the poster from the 50th commemoration of Cable Street in 1986. Jeremy is listed as the first guest speaker.
In the 1970s, Mosley’s political descendants in the National Front also focused heavily on recruiting youth, especially outside football grounds. But in the 1970s they were being countered not only by anti-fascists turning out to deny them their spaces, but also through a positive, visionary cultural intervention that turned many young people in an anti-racist political direction – this was Rock Against Racism – which organised gigs, events, carnivals, in the late 1970s, nationwide, uniting the growing audiences for punk and reggae in the same venues.
From 1979 to the early ‘80s this was enhanced through a remarkable musical genre that developed in the Midlands – 2-tone – whose innovation was individual bands which combined black and white musicians together, conveying powerful messages against racism and sexism and for multiculturalism
Touching people’s lives every day
Today we need to infuse our antiracist and anti-fascist politics again with innovative, progressive cultural initiatives that touch people’s lives every day and build more solid bonds between us, as diverse communities, with a joint imagined future, intertwined on so many levels. What I love about your events in Stockton is the way you unite culture and politics in your commemorations.
I want to finish by returning to my remark earlier that it was not physical opposition alone that stopped the fascists in their tracks from Stockton to Cable Street. The fascists built support on the lived experience of misery and deprivation in communities and offered communities the most simplistic racist answers. Our anti-fascist forebears understood that it was not enough to simply expose fascist lies – they needed to be part of movements that would make real differences in people’s lives especially on jobs and housing.
Anti-fascists made these efforts in many places. The one closest to home for me is what happened in London’s East End. The Stepney Tenants Defence League was a remarkable initiative that brought together the very communities the fascists tried to divide against each other, by uniting them in joint housing campaigns against their slum landlords, whether Jewish or non-Jewish. They deliberately focused on housing blocks on the borders Jewish and non-Jewish areas where people from both communities suffered similar deprivations in the same housing blocks. Activists went to these tenements and encouraged them to form tenants committees. When these committees felt strong enough they would put demands on their landlords. If nothing changed they prepare for a rent strike.
From late 1938 through 1939 there were 18 rent strikes in east London Each of them achieved successes: stopping evictions, wiping out arrears, winning rent controls, getting long overdue repairs started and commitments to more. These tenants committees were mainly women-led. They barricaded estates and beat off bailiffs and police, and when irish and Jewish tenants were uniting together, trusting and caring for each other in this work, their housing blocks became a hostile environment for fascists. Who was the honorary president of the Stepney Tenants Defence League? Father Groser who remembered very well the slum conditions he saw in the North East back in 1914 that oppressed and held back the lives of people there. He was deeply involved in the day by day work of the movement. In one of the last rent strikes by East End tenants before the Second World War, where tenants had barricaded the entrance, and several tenants had been arrested, Father Groser, and a rabbi, and the Bishop of Stepeny were inside the buildings with the landlord, arguing the tenants’ case for two hours until the landlord agreed to stop the eviction. We need to take inspiration from Father Groser, and other ordinary, yet extraordinary, people from that decade of the 1930s who understood that the fight against fascism was not just a defensive battle but also the fight for a new and better world. No Pasaran
Talk given by David Rosenberg at Four Corners Gallery, on 31 August 2023 on “Struggles for better housing in the East End and the Stepney Rent Strikes” (part of a series of events accompanying an exhibition “Conditions of Living: Home and Homelessness in London’s East End”, that ends today (2 September).
II want to start my talk with quotes from two 19th century journalists about London as a whole. The first is from John Hollingshead who, in 1861, published a book called Ragged London. It consisted of articles about the terrible housing conditions in different London locations that he had written in the Morning Post newspaper over the previous year. They are painful to read. He describes New Court, near Spitalfields Market:
“…a nest of thieves, filled with thick-lipped, broad-featured, rough haired ragged women and hulking, leering men who stand in knots… The houses present every conceivable aspect of filth and wretchedness; the broken windows are plastered with paper, which rise and fall when the doors of the room are opened… The faces that peer out of the narrow windows are yellow and repulsive; some are the faces of Jews, some of Irishwomen, and some of sickly looking infants… ashes lie in front of the houses; drainage is thrown out of the windows to swell the heap… There may be as many families as there are rooms… 40 people perhaps huddled together in a small dwelling”
He wrote Ragged London just as major developments in the railways were encouraging the rapid creation of many more industries and London’s outward expansion. He warned, though: “The spreading limbs of a great city may be healthy while its heart is choked up and decayed.”
London’s population grew quickly especially after the 1850s. People came from outside London and outside Britain seeking work and prosperity. Housing infrastructure lagged far behind population growth. Many new or old Londoners worked for starvation wages, living in overcrowded slums, ruled by slum landlords.
Hollingshead described Victorian inner-London in 5 words: “poverty, ignorance, dirt, immorality and crime”. (You can see why he was a journalist and not an estate agent!)
Two decades later Annie Besant wrote powerful articles for the small but growing readership of a socialist publication, Our Corner. In 1885 she described London as a city mired in conflict between the powerful and the marginalised, the exploiters and the exploited, and she decried the brazen sense of entitlement by those who were ravaging the lives of an underclass.
London was a city “with its unjustly rich and its unjustly poor, with its palaces and its slums, its millionaires and its paupers”. Unlike Hollingshead, her writing encouraged active resistance. She continued:
“Be it ours to declare that health, comfort, leisure, culture, plenty for every individual are far more desirable than the breathless struggle for existence, the furious trampling down of the weak by the strong.”
In the 1880s Annie Besant’s path crossed frequently with Charles Mowbray’s: an anarchist who came to London from the north east of England and settled with his family in one of London’s most impoverished slums – the Old Nichol. During that decade Mowbray and his close comrades put out a call in support of a “No Rent Campaign” – this leaflet explained this demand
There was plenty of interest but people feared failure – and eviction as punishment. Mowbray and his comrades couldn’t garner sufficient support.
But in August 1889 in the context of a wider struggle, a mass strike by East London’s dockers that spread to many dock-related factories, workshops and warehouses, there was a successful temporary rent strike action. Dockers’ wives organised rent strikes during the Dock Strike. As the strike entered its third week, the Evening News & Post reported under the heading “Raising the No Rent Banner”:
RAISING THE NO RENT BANNER The weekly rents fall due today for the labourers, but it is expected there will be some difficulty in collecting them. a white banner is stretched from Hungerford Street Commercial Road… ‘As we are on strike landlords need not call’. A similar banner hags at the top of Star Street, Commercial Road… ‘Our husbands are on strike; for the wives it is not honey, And we all think it is right not to pay the landlords money, Everyone is on strike so landlords do not be offended; the rent that’s due we’ll pay you when the strike is ended.’ (Evening News & Post 26 August 1889.)
A few months into 1914 a rent strike was being planned in the East End in the context of another campaign, the struggle by local suffragettes. Some of the earliest branches of London’s suffragette movement were formed by working class women in in Bow, Bethnal Green, Poplar, Canning Town, West Ham. Increasingly after 1912, and with one of the handful of better known middle class suffrage activists, Sylvia Pankhurst, playing a very significant role in East London, the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS) were looking for new ways to make their demands hit home.
In central London, suffragettes extended their stone throwing actions beyond government buildings to private shops aiming to grab headlines and create situations where government faced chaos. The ELFS were gathering a commitment from tenants to go on a rent strike (against their landlords) unless the government gave votes to women – an indirect but potentially explosive campaign. But as they built and publicised their plan through their weekly newspaper, Woman’s Dreadnought, WW1 broke out and the strike never materialised. (It would have been interesting to see how that would have panned out.)
In the early months of the war, food prices shot up and unemployment rose. Many businesses closed down as men volunteered for the war. Employers didn’t cotton on immediately that they could employ women in workplaces where only men had been employed before. Meanwhile unscrupulous landlords were trying to squeeze more rent money from tenants. (I should add here that a number of these local landlords enriching themselves were small fry compared with the big landlords in London. An octopus graphic published in 1909 showed a map of London with an octopus superimposed which had tentacles enclosing large parcels of land from which a set of named Lords and other aristocrats drew huge amounts in rents)
During 1914-1915 there were rent strikes in a several cities in Britain – especially Glasgow – but also Leeds and Sheffield – and a year before the war in Wolverhampton.
In the face of growing voices of protest, and to shore up working class support for the war, in 1915, the government legislated to prohibit landlords from imposing rent increases during the war. It was originally intended for just 6 months but lasted much longer. But by 1920 this began to be repealed. Landlords were allowed to increase rents up to 40% above pre-war rents.
More joy for landlords with the Rent Act 1923 which permitted landlords, when they gained control of a home for the first time, to evict existing tenants and charge what they wished to the next ones. But as the 1929 economic depression and unemployment hit families hard, voices of protest at injustices towards tenants grew louder. There was some pushback by government. The 1933 Rent Act stopped further decontrol of rents in a good deal of working class housing. but homes built after the war were exempted from restrictions.
Here is a description of one East End district in the mid 1930s:
“The narrow streets of Bethnal Green straggle across East London, hidden like a shameful secret behind the city’s facade of wealth. The tiny box-like houses were hastily put up years ago, without thought, without plan, without consideration for beauty or regard to health, to accommodate the unhappy population which manufactures the city’s goods.”
I’ll tell you who said that a bit later.
Eventually, in the late 1930s, a mass grassroots-based movement took up the cause that Mowbray had proclaimed 50 years earlier. It was called the Stepney Tenants Defence League (STDL). Formally inaugurated in autumn 1937, it grew out of local tenants’ committees in the East End that were being formed in blocks of private housing from the mid-1930s, especially by Communist Party activists, who had already led some sporadic and short lived rent strike actions, especially to try and stop evictions. By 1939 the STDL had more than 10,000 members whose weekly dues paid for office space for the campaign, legal support, and a number of full-time organisers.
The urgency of organising tenants was had been prompted especially by a different pressing concern locally – the growth of the fascist movement and the physical threat to the working-class Jewish community of the East End.
In a situation of mass unemployment and grinding poverty, the British Union of Fascists led by Sir Oswald Mosley attempted to make the East End its London working-class power base. By 1936 it had established four large branches in Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Bow and Limehouse, which formed a horseshoe around the Jewish enclave between Aldgate and Whitechapel.
From autumn 1934, Mosley’s central message on every social, economic and political problem was that it was the fault of the Jews. The fascists made a special pitch to win support from the Irish Catholic community telling them that their community were suffering when it came to housing and jobs because of the Jews. here is a quote from local Jewish anti-fascist activist, Solly Kaye:
“The fascists had their strongholds in places which were on the edge of Stepney where the large Jewish population lived… they would involve people on the basis of envy and fear by saying ‘over there the Jews, they’ve got your houses, over there the Jews, they’ve got your jobs’, even though we were living in bloody poverty with bugs crawling all over us in the night.”
In truth, both Jewish and Irish communities suffered great poverty and hardship and a crisis of housing, as they lived in overcrowded sub-standard dwellings.
So who wrote those perceptive comments I read out earlier about box-like housing in Bethnal Green? It was Anne Cutmore, a leading propagandist of the British Union of Fascists, and drama critic for their weekly newspaper, The Blackshirt. The fascists understood well how housing issues impacted on people’s consciousness.
The clashes between fascist and anti-fascism came to a head in an iconic confrontation in October 1936 which went down in history as the Battle of Cable Street. And although the fascists recruited a segment of supporters/members from the local irish communities, on that day many Irish helped Jews build barricades in Cable Street to repel the fascists. It was an enormous setback for the fascists, but they still had lots of supporters locally. It was in the battles to bring communities together over housing against the common enemy of slum landlordism that the victory over the fascists was cemented, and cemented in a way that really benefited both of the biggest minorities of the East End – Jews and Irish.
It was anti-fascists (especially those involved in the Communist Party, plus some Labour Party members and supporters) who created and broadened the STDL. This included a significant number of politically radicalised Jews. The STDL deliberately targeted its work on estates on the borders of the Jewish/non-Jewish areas where you could find Jews and Irish in the same housing blocks.
Activists came to these buildings to talk to the tenants and ask them what problems they faced with their housing. The tenants told them: rent hikes, repairs not done, lighting, hygiene, damp, vermin… and more. They encouraged tenants to form a committee and shared with them information about tenants’ rights. As a tenants’ committees grew in confidence they reached a point where they could collectively put demands to the landlord.
When they felt strong enough they could call a rent strike until their demands were met. They would collect the rent themselves and store it with a trusted member of the committee, then tell the landlord that the rent is ready to be paid once the changes have been made. In the course of these struggles around housing, the communities that the fascists were trying to set against each other – the Irish and the Jews – were united against a common enemy, their landlords. Sometimes the landlords were Jews sometimes non-Jews but the tenants understood that the enemy was landlordism, not the religion/ethnicity of the landlord. The more these communities worked together, the more these blocks of housing were immunised from the propagandist lies of the fascists.
Between 1938-39, 18 rent strikes took place. They wiped out arrears, got evictions halted, got repairs done and commitments to further repairs. When landlords tried to evict “trouble makers” they met solid resistance from tenants barricading the estate to bailiffs and police.
I want to focus on a few of these rent actions and some of the individuals involved, such as Phil Piratin, born into a Ukrainian Jewish family. As a child he had an ambition to become an architect and won a place at a sought-after school locally, but was withdrawn by his family at 14 to work in the struggling family business. He never became an architect but did became involved in the struggle for better housing!
He joined the antifascist movement and then the Communist Party in 1934, and was the most significant local anti-fascist strategist. He understood early on that people in poor communities in the East End were flocking to the fascists for inspiration and help because nobody seemed to be standing up for them. Piratin identified two spheres crucial to undermining the attraction to fascism: work and housing. If people could see the anti-fascist forces making progress for ordinary people in these spheres they would be less likely to look towards the fascists.
He was centrally involved in what happened in June 1937 on a tenement block called Paragon mansions (between Whitechapel and Stepney Green) and wrote about it in his book published in 1948: Our Flag Stays Red.
“A tenants committee had already been formed and it was learnt that two families [one with 5 children , one with 6] were about to be evicted. Piratin went along to see them:
I was curious to know why the people themselves had done nothing in the matter, and why they had not referred the matter to the Tenants Committee. I discovered that in both cases they were members of the British Union of Fascists and obviously wanted no truck with us. One family would have nothing to do with us whatsoever that evening. The other was prepared to listen.
The only way to stop the eviction was to fight. The BUF was not prepared to do anything to help their own members, despite their ‘radical’ rhetoric. A defence was organised, and after a battle with the bailiffs and the police the notice to quit was withdrawn. It was a small victory, but it showed what could be done
The lessons did not require to be pressed home. BUF membership cards were destroyed voluntarily and in disgust … We were now supplementing our propaganda with positive action. The kind of people who would never come to our meetings, and had strange ideas about Communists and Jews, learned the facts overnight and learned the real meaning of the class struggle.”
More local to where we are this evening was the housing struggle in Quinn Square, on Russia Lane, (half a mile from here), in 1938.
Quinn Square was a block of 246 flats 6 stories high built in 1882, with one water tap per four families. one lavatory per two families. Originally there was a large courtyard between the buildings in which children could play. That was filled with more flats leaving only a narrow pathway around the buildings. By 1938 the flats were in great need of repairs – broken steps and handrails, lavatory doors with no locks, wash-houses on the roof so dilapidated that no one could uses them. The conditions inside included falling ceilings and damp walls.
Of the 246 flats, 90 had controlled rents on an agreed scale, the rest were uncontrolled. Those tenants suffered random rent hikes. In June 1938 there was an attempted eviction. The landlord said she owed arrears, but an investigation by her neighbours found she was on a controlled rent and landlord had been overcharging her. There was another attempted eviction, of an unemployed worker. The tenants rallied round. Local Communist activist, Bob Graves appealed for help, and together tenants prevented the landlord’s agent and bailiffs accompanied by a caretaker and five policemen from carrying out the eviction.
A few days later, a meeting at nearby Oxford Hall, Victoria Park Square, elected a tenants committee. They found out that 70 of the 90 controlled rents households were being overcharged, and families on decontrolled rents were paying a third more than those with controlled rents for similar housing. The Tenants Association put to the property owners a suggested maximum scale of rent.
In response to this level of organisation the landlord’s agent ran round the building reducing rents on the spot by a small amount, but it wasn’t enough, and the tenants organised a rent strike.
When the landlord’s agent next came to collect the rent, no one paid. and there were people holding placards: “We refuse to pay high rents”; “Our landlord has made a huge fortune at our expense”; “Quinn Square wants a fair deal”; “less rent, more repairs”. As well as picketing the flats, women marched around the borough with these placards.
Meetings were held every day and the Estate Office picketed from morning till night. When the Landlord’s agent tried to collect rent he was followed round by a huge crowd of women and children and booed.
the tenants were supported by the local Labour MP, local Labour councillors, plus some communist activists. Within two weeks the tenants recorded a complete victory.
There was only one group of people who could be recruited to help the landlord – the local branch of the British Union of Fascists. They tried to break up the tenants’ meetings by hooliganism, but the pamphlet written after the rent strike confirms: “…local tenants showed the fascists they were not wanted in Russia Lane”!
What did the Quinn Square residents win?
• Recognition by the landlord of their association
• An understanding that necessary repairs will be carried out
• No legal or other action again tenants without consulting the Tenant’s Association
• A scale of maximum rents beyond which the landlord cannot charge
•Cases of overpayment by controlled tenants will be taken up individually.
The majority of the East End rent strikes in 1938/39 were in Stepney rather than Bethnal Green, and followed similar patterns around similar goals helping tenants to organise, giving them advice and information to determine their legal rights, and developing ways of fighting landlords in a collective, disciplined and effective manner. Tenants’ committees were usually headed by women representing a block of flats or a street
When the STDL started, its moving force was Michael Shapiro. He was later replaced as by another activist ‘Tubby’ Rosen and two full time organisers Ella Donovan and Harry Conn. Its honorary president was Father Groser, a radical churchman, supporter of the labour Party, and close friend of Labour MP George Lansbury. Groser settled in the East End in the mid-1920s, and was experienced in helping many people individually with their housing and employment problems.
Piratin writes of the grassroots structure of the organisation in his memoir and notes it was the women who did most of the picketing – including in the rent strike at Brunswick Buildings in February 1939. The strike there lasted for eleven weeks during a severely cold winter. Fires were lit in the streets to keep the women warm.
A Canadian historian, Henry Srebrnik, has done the most extensive writing about this campaign, and also focuses on women’s involvement, which he finds particularly striking, as less than 20% of the key organisation involved – the Communist party – were women. He describes the STDL as a “gender-integrated, mass movement of social protest… these strikes nonetheless exemplified in particular the organized political activity of Jewish women at the neighbourhood level. Women chaired most of the tenants’ committees formed in specific tenement blocks, organized opposition to eviction attempts, were in the forefront of demonstrations, and even picketed shoppers in the West End of London to draw attention to the plight of east London slum-dwellers at the mercy of ‘slumlords’.”
And although the rent strikes brought Jewish and Irish women together in joint activity Srebrnik felt that numerically the Jewish women were more strongly involved.
Nevertheless, in March 1939 a conference took place in St Georges Town Hall called “Better housing in Stepney”, looking to the future. The Town Hall was located halfway down Cable Street. Today the Cable Street mural adorns its side wall. Keynote speakers that day were Michael Shapiro and Ella Dononvan respectively from Jewish and Irish backgrounds, symbolic of the alliance that was being created in an area where Mosley’s fascists had sought to turn communities against each other.
In April 1939 rent strikes were taking place in nine locations in Stepney. The STDL called a march on 30 April to Stepney Green just before May Day. 10,000 tenants converged on Stepney Green from five feeder marches. There were bands, and singing of songs created through the League’s activities
In February that year Brady Street Mansions (located between Whitechapel Road and Bethnal Green Road) and Langdale Mansions (located between Commercial Road and Cable Street) simultaneously began rent strikes. These turned out to be the longest running of all the rent strikes – 21 weeks, against the landlords that owned both estates: two clothing manufacturers who rejoiced in the names Craps and Gold. During that dispute the strikers took the struggle directly to them, parading with placards outside their private homes in north west London.
One day In late June, 84 police broke through barricades at Langdale Street – there were accusations of police brutality. A mass demonstration of 15,000 people took place that same night. At the end of that week the landlords reached an agreement with the tenants that met the tenants’ key demands.
And like Shapiro and Donovan at the housing conference, one couple in Langdale Mansions very involved in the strike were an Irish tailoring worker, Frank Whipple, who worked for a Jewish-owned workshop, and his Jewish wife, a banjo player and dancer called Lily Kosky.
Two of the key organisers in Brady Street Mansions were Max Levitas and Hetty Donnelly. If you think I am going to point out another instance of Jewish and Irish people working in harmony – it’s more complex – Max Levitas, whose Jewish parents were born in Lithuania, grew up in Dublin! He came to the East End in 1931.
Father Groser stepped down from the presidency of the STDL later in 1939 – he had had something of a falling out over some decisions that he was not part of, and other disagreements, but looking back on what the STDL achieved he said that he remained “astonished at the speed with which people came together, organised, and threw up their own leaders”. He commented particularly on the deep sense of solidarity, and how even those on controlled rents took risks in “coming out to defend those on uncontrolled rents at the mercy of the landlords”.
Together, he said: “we have beaten back the landlords who have for years sucked the lifeblood of the people of Stepney.”
When war broke out in 1939 the government froze rents and incorporated into law the lower rents the tenants had won in the East End through collective action.
Those collective struggles for better housing, for affordable housing that I’ve highlighted, especially in the 1930s, should inspire us today. These were people from different communities, different backgrounds, of many different opinions, but coming together in the most practical ways – unity in action.
And the gains they made were cemented by the push for more council housing that, post WW2, significantly shifted the balance between public and private housing.
I was especially touched to see some new council housing erected in Tower Hamlets for 24 families in 2020, given the name “Max Levitas House”. Max was an anti-fascist, STDL activist, clothing machinist, local councillor, a lifelong fighter for social justice, whom I was privileged to know and share speaking platforms with, who died in 2018 at the age of 103.
But look at the agenda of housing issues facing people right now in London and many cities beyond evictions, demolitions, disrepair, homelessness, dangerous cladding, overcrowding, slumlords, privatisation, corruption, broken planning, unaffordable rents, Grenfell, empty homes, gentrification, food-banks, poverty, ill-health… you realise how much we need to do. One umbrella campaign – Homes For All – demands: “Housing for all, in the homes we need”.
We are in a situation where the leaders of the largest political parties nationally, promise dreams of more home ownership, but seem incapable of saying the words: “council housing” – the issue that actually affects the bulk of the population, and especially its most impoverished sectors.
The pressure for comfortable, secure, safe, truly affordable, good quality housing will have to come from below, from grassroots campaigns, that can follow in the footsteps of the ordinary, yet extraordinary, people I have been speaking to you about this evening.
rebel notes 
