The Mosley Riots - Professor Clive Bloom

thank you very much and thank you very much for giving up your lunch hours for coming to watch the lecture i i'm sorry i've got a bit of feedback here so i try and avoid that i'm going to um talk today about um oswald obviously everybody knows who oswald mosley is give you a little bit of background a few maybe bits of facts that you might not remember and afterwards hopefully we'll have enough time for some questions and answers it'd be nice to have a chat and i've been told i have to sign books so at the end rather than a crowd around here i'm very happy to have long chat at the bookstore because then you can buy the books as well so that makes it even easier i'll show you some pictures first just to sort of get you into the the mostly mood as it were and um see if i can work this properly so let's see let's try that yes first one that's um oswald mosley in 1933 with little duchess um he's uh i think um he he wanted to prove he'd been to uh italy before and this is the visit where he undertook to introduce to britain what's called the corporate state which is uh the state essentially under privatized but under government control and i think this has been doctored this picture to make him closer to il duchess so to make him if you look at it he doesn't look right he's the corner here is not quite right so i think it's been docked to the picture but it is interesting this is him shouting and screaming um he's wearing his he's very handsome as you can see uh he was born in 1896 um very very wealthy he wasn't born sir oswald mosley um that was his father's title which he inherited born oswald mosley and i noticed rather bizarrely i'm not a fascist but i wrote no other he has my belt on so um so that's a bit bit worrying um but if you look at he's wearing the black black shirt and the black trousers which were finally banned of course and if you look at him he looks like something out of a modernist painting this is very modernist uh his uniform is extremely modernist he's very interesting sartorial sartorially he's very interesting we'll do about that in a minute this is um william joyce who is lord haha this was his head of propaganda i believe there's a scar oh i think you press that button yes there's a scar here can you see the scar there that came from fighting he had a degree from university college london hated just about everybody actually but hated uh jewish people more and communists too and he had he got this at a fight and he said of course a jewish comey had done it but there was no no proof one way or the other um he was irish um he hanged of course he shouldn't have done um but i guess he deserved it anyway um his very last speech by the way which you can hear at the important war museum he actually impersonates uh he was completely drunk completely rolling drunk and he impersonates churchill while he's doing it's quite funny this is john beckett who was the publicist and um editor of the black shirt for um moseley's organization buf um he uh carried on right the way through he was an anti-communist really um but he uh adopted um uh anti-semitism and indeed uh interestingly enough his grandson uh lives in israel this is the uh the famous poster well a poster i don't know if it's famous but the poster nevertheless this is mosley speaks um in east london uh sunday the 4th of october 1936 there were going to be four marching columns four great meetings uh there's beckett there's joyce there's some other speakers and that they were going to come together and march along heroically of course none of this happened at all the march never took place we'll talk about that in a minute and this is where the thing took place so give you an orientation here's lehman street there's that's where the black shirts gathered their royal mint street they stopped there and this is cable street and this is here and that's gardener's corner which doesn't exist of course anymore it's all been knocked down uh those of you that are familiar with the east end will know that uh gardner's corner uh burnt down and then it was demolished and uh rebuilt and so there's nothing really to see um again just to tell you that's where they they paraded this is um gardner's corner and this is where the barricades went up just there so it gives you some sense of what we're talking about so notice cable street is actually on the edge of the jewish area which is up here it's not where you think it is if you're not used to the area it's not quite where you think it is now have we got another picture i can't remember yes we have now this is um phil paratin who wrote our flag stays red he was one of the leaders of the resistance as they sort of called it uh they shall not pass um and um i'm sorry about that it's a getty uh picture and here he's actually winning the election i don't think it's the election i think here is winning um the uh the ticket for the council but uh after the war of course he became one of the last of the communist mps for mile end which doesn't exist anymore as a constituency and that's phil paratin and he wrote our flags which is mostly the most famous record of the the event this is mosley marching notice the flashes they've already got the ss type flashes on their sleeves this i think is william joyce next to him but it's not entirely sure and here is marching towards the uh the actual event again as i say this is probably along royal mint street this is the crowds these are the police obviously uh trying to stop things going on uh police car there completely disorder and there's lots of these pictures notice here here is it's not all men it looks like all men but here is a lady and there's a number of women in the shots if you look carefully so women did take pla take take part this is the very famous shot this is cable street that's one of the barricades these are the shops along here which were shuttered and many of them had don't attack this shop it's jewish or don't take the shop we belong to the trade union movement or the communist party or whatever and above which i'll tell you about later women uh attacked the police from above and throwing um like chamber pots of wee and stuff on their heads and things so it was a a real quite exciting stuff notice the crowd well worth noticing the crowd because i want to say something about the crowd these are young relatively well-dressed men these are not the sort of people that philip game who was the commissioner of police accused of rioting philip game essentially told a little bit of a naughty fib these are the people clearing up afterwards unfortunately you always have to clear up after a riot and here is the uh the uh just the uh the poster at the end the daily herald announcing the information and that's it so that's my little slideshow so i'm not going to show you any more um so then i think just gives you a sense of what people look like how it went on what it what the day actually physically looked like you can of course see films of it if you're a youtube fan then you can go on that and watch films etc all right i just want to start then with what exactly is fascism i mean it's an obvious thing to say but british fascism is not the same as other countries fascism and it develops slightly differently the first thing to say is that um in the 19th century go back to the 19th century a famous um jurist a writer on legal history called av dicey divided the the 19th century into three parts and the last movement of the 19th century that divided into was collectivism and interesting what he meant by that was the rise of communism and marxism the rise of the trade union movement things of that nature people coming together as a collective but interestingly enough against that were a number of writers especially people like oscar wilde etc who believed in the rise of the individual who believed in the importance of the individual the centrality of individualism and the revolt and this is an important word the revolt of individuals against the mass that the one man against the whole mass of the the joined together people that were coming together at that time and um this is quite significant for mosley it characterizes what he's about he comes to represent the single man who is in charge of the mass now interestingly enough this was meant to be a contradiction the mass mass mass of people in the 19th century were meant to be more and more concentrated laws being made in the 19th century were more and more about concentration the individual was being squeezed out so mostly as a lot of people in the fascist organization tends to be a contradiction and it's that contradiction partially which actually destroys him so it's not necessarily the opposition to him that destroys him straightforwardly it's also inconsistencies and incoherences within his own theoretical system and he did have quite a complicated well straightforward but uh intellectually valid system uh of working out what he stood for and why he stood for it pre-war if we go to just before the first world war what we have is a number of the movements and ideas which emerged after the first world war in the fascist movements which rose just before mosley came on the scene between 1919 and roughly 1930 there are a very large number of fascist organizations mostly patriotic mostly traditional mostly king and country mostly uh sort of eastbourne ex indian majors and a very large number of very very seriously strange ladies who came together uh to bring together fascist ideology mostly to do with anti-semitism nevertheless that was not the case of mosley and i want to show how mosley sort of developed various strands of thought and they come to fruition in him i'm not saying that mosley was a person who consciously thought these through i think he was an opportunist however it's clear that there does become a pattern in his thought so for instance in the first world war just before the first world war we talked about 1913. we're talking about this sort of language this is a language that you got in many writers crusades many um of the churches in the um pre-first world war period were talking about having a blood crusade something to wipe away they talked about white slavery and male infidelity and all the rest of it so a purity crusade dictatorship interestingly enough the suffragettes at this point who are very frustrated with what had gone on decided emily pankhurst decided she would become dictator that's her the word the use that she put the actual word she used dictator of the movement and a lot of people left sylvia included who was very concerned that her mother was going a little bit the crackers cleansing the idea of cleansing the idea of bringing the nation back clean and beautiful again was another idea that uh very often came up the most famous blood idea of course is the return to blood sacrifice which was 1916 in ireland but in england and in london especially you get a lot of crusades church crusades suffragette crusades communist union and other crusades which used the word blood and i have to say interestingly enough quite a large number of academics peddled this blood argument in fact many of them peddled the blood argument and added to that the idea of carbolic somehow we had to scrub the nation with carbolic to clean us of all our sins so when we went into the first world war this language already existed it wasn't something that was made up by oswald mosley or invented even by adolf hitler as it's a as it goes it already existed wyndham lewis had taken up the ideas of destructiveness from people like marinetti and wyndham lewis believed that it wasn't going to be the civilized people that saved the world it was going to be the barbarians the barbarians needed to be the ones the aryan races needed to be the ones uh who saved rome from itself rather than the italians as with marinette because the italians saving themselves from themselves the watchword was action action and art these were the two ideas art was going to cleanse things and even the pacifists use the same arguments pacifism use the same arguments about renewing the world through getting rid of capitalism getting rid of bankers getting rid of exploitation so that even though they were pacifists there was dirty war and there was clean war and clean war will be the one as it were that was fought by the pacifists on behalf of a cleaner better and more peaceful and cooperative world so this language existed right the way through the period we're talking about and it emerges again uh at the other end it comes out um once the world was finished it emerges with the language of fascism and the ideas that come together through fascism so if we go back to the end of the first world war um what we have is disillusionment the first thing that they capitalize on is disillusionment a lot of the anti-semitic organizations were all in fact all of them were anti-communist the anti-communist crusade was much more significant than the anti-jewish crusade until the mid-30s and then it changes but certainly the anti-communist crusade was very important indeed and all the national um national fascisti and other organizations many of which were either sort of lower middle class girl guide type organizations or were were upper crust aristocratic sort of country house type downton abbey type fascists these two groups often intermixed and they've often belonged to each other's each other's groups the other thing to put in the mix is the one lot of people who encouraged fascism was mi5 because mi5 wanted to remove from the british industrial scene communism altogether and mi5 spent a large number a large amount of money and quite a long amount of time mixing with fascist groups who fed them information fascist strong-armed men work for instance for the cunard family et cetera anything to break up the unions anything to break up um the communist party people getting involved communist party starts in oops starts in uh summer of um 1920. so these groups are coming together what they're looking for is a type of transcendental leader they're looking for a sort of mystical leader someone who can bring it all together who can focus what's going on they didn't find this they didn't find this for a long time and then it suddenly occurred when mosley is slowly coming through the parties remember he swaps parties he creates his own party he creates new pain the new party which um which uh he has with him at that point he starts to realize the idea of authoritarianism and he has with him uh the biff boys and the biff boys were the guys who used their fists these were the heroes of if you if you like um 1920s and 30s thrillers um john buckin type stuff and sapper and all these people everyone is full of biff boys always punching the enemy on the nose on behalf of the british empire the biff boys the biff boys of course were led by a jewish a jewish boxer who finally left the organisation when it became authoritarian um kid lewis but nevertheless the biff boys and this is the point when the daily mail lord rothermere uh starts to back hurrah for the biff boys and all the rest of it starts to back the organization and say really this is where we want to go this is the direction we need to go he's looking all the time all the time mosley is looking for a way into the political system that allows him two things one his he's extremely egotistical you saw the picture on there in his black uniform and strutting around he's extremely egotistical he's looking for a place to intervene in the system so that he will become the leader interestingly enough there's none i won't read it but interesting enough there are a number of groups looking for what they consider in language very similar to looking for christ they're looking for the fascist christ and ak chesterton who is of course the cousin of gk chesterton and anchor chesterton formed the national front uh part of the national front in 1960s 1970s he was part of this organization and he talks about uh mosley as if he's christ if he is transcend transcendental leader now uh he he talks about him in these terms so mosley is aware that he has the power of ego he has the power to push his ego forward he has the power in other words to impose his will and he is in a situation where enough people are willing to agree with his uh his ideas his prognosis of the future and the future was very simple remember we're looking at a period when there is huge mass unemployment when there is communist agitation and when there is huge poverty he said he could cure unemployment with the corporate state people will become richer and there will be requirements for people to be employed he would cure poverty because people's money would go up therefore they will be able to afford better things and he would impose his will on democracy which was the problem the problem was democracy because the problem allowed communism to flourish and communism was the enemy of democracy and he would simply wipe communism away so he starts off as an authoritarian he's a singular authoritarian figure now if you remember what i said at the 19th century he brings these two things together he brings on the one hand he brings centralization single figure but at the same time he's bringing the mass around the single figure almost to worship him so he knows he understands very clearly that communism has the right propaganda and that communism is the correct social idea what he needs to add to that is something that's nothing to do with communism which is the transcendental mystic individual who will lead the masses forward and protect private property and protect british interests he was always a patriot i don't think we can accuse him of being anything other but but nevertheless it's british interest that he believes britain of course is going to be the major the major player uh in the future so one of the things he brings to the table is the idea of revolutionary politics fascism is essentially revolutionary politics and it's emphasized again and again it's patriotism and revolution so in 1932 he forms um the buf which changes its name every now and then um but 1932 he he starts to be uf he sets himself up um and he prepares to go with this new organization the first thing he chooses is a black uniform now the black uniform of course is taken from the italians but the black uniform is very interesting because he understands that communism has a very simple idea and that's egalitarianism and he says if we're all wearing black he of course was a very wealthy aristocrat he had um at his first marriage not his second marriage i'll talk about that a bit later but his first marriage uh he had three crowned heads of europe and two princes or something at the marriage it was hugely important so very very wealthy very very important sort of aristocratic type person but black shirts means that everybody is equal so he wears a black shirt and his left hands were a black shirt everybody looks equal so first of all he takes the communist idea of equality get rid of the class space war class war and this is what he's indulging in class war has to get rid of the class space if you're going to go to war on behalf of equality on behalf of full employment etc etc he has to find some way of making communism look tordry and the way he does this is to say that communism is internationalism and internationalism belongs to passivism and pacifism undermined the effort in the first world war pacifism is essentially feminist pacifism is essentially anti-imperial so he he fights this argument on a patriotic score now no one had thought of doing this he fights the argument for fascism on the idea that patriotism and revolution go together now of course these are complete contradictions no one has ever thought that the revolution goes together with patriotism the only people that ever did that uh was the french revolution and that's a very long time ago and that has nothing really to do with ottawa mosley however the 19th century is the history of revolutions all of which are determined by international affiliations even the hungarian polish and other revolutions are essentially affiliated to international movements here he says no we're going to have the revolution it's going to be specific to britain now just very quickly i'm not going to read you anything else but just very quickly read you a little quote from one of his first pamphlets which is the ten points of fascism which i have to say should you be so daring as to go on ebay and um the only way to buy this pamphlet is by the way is to talk to the fascists so fascism has got a few bob of my money um [Music] p.o box ramsgate um so if you want this information it does release this it's all re reproduces lots of nasty people in the world who still love this stuff so it is interesting but it's interesting to get into it because it's interesting to see what the nitty-gritty from the inside rather than just point your finger at the faces and say well they were bad then the inside is quite interesting so he says this is the little paragraph i read this is the first point of his creed fascism is a creed of patriotism and revolution for the first time a strong movement emerges which on the one hand is loyal to king and country and on the other hand stands for far-reaching and revolutionary changes in government in economics and in life itself hitherto patriotism has been associated with those who wish to keep things as they are revolution has been associated with a flabby internationalism that's a very fascist word flabby you're if you don't like them you're flabby uh flabby internationalism uh which sets the interest of foreign countries before those of britain the watchword of fascism is britain first we love our country but we are determined to build a country worthy of that love so the country has to give something back to fascists as the fascists give something to the country what we are to uh things cannot remain as they are this is this is very interesting this idea that the after after the first world war that things had reached melting point things cannot remain as they are we must have great changes to adapt modern britain to modern fact true patriotism finds expression for the first time in the revolution of fascism so here we can see quite clearly that what is building up here is this idea that fascism will save the country fascism is not designed and of course it was of course it was designed to join up with italy spain uh the japanese eventually and germany and all the rest of these fascist countries of course it was but he dresses it up to say this is a patriotic movement to protect the empire from the incursions of foreigners and the foreigners are communists and jews they're the two groups that are the essential foreigners and what people will follow is the will of the technocratic nation because once they're voted in he says we'll have democratic elections but once mosley is voted in he will abolish democracy and when he's voted in he will bring in instead the corporate state and all of the politicians will then become technocrats who will manage the corporate state for the future it's interesting that if you read this without realizing it's about communism half of what he says sounds like 2013 it's very scary um but there we go um he he even suggests that we should go back to merry old england merry old england he says that's what he really wants he wants us to go back to dinglard and that sounds very strange now but it's not strange because one of the areas and i'll probably get into terrible trouble for saying this but i'm going to say anyway one of the areas that he copied as of course it has completely different ideological base is a group called kibbo kift now kimbo kift were um green coated militant boy scouts um there there's lots of stuff if you go downstairs there's some bits and pieces and cabinets on kevok were all green uh they believed in sort of tolkien-esque world and they had and this is the important thing they had a hierarchy they wore green they all wore green and they had a uniform very similar to this but it was a green uniform sort of a bit like robin hood they did woodcraft hence the woodcraft folk that followed but they also more importantly had a an all-green marching drum section and this was what the buf copied they had a drum section which went in front of them so interestingly enough this merry england thing is not some weird aberration but actually looks to what's going on at the present moment when things are going on he wants to have the idea of youth action vitality revolution the end of capitalism as he sees it he wants to channel the energies of people into this new world and just to carry on um the first thing he does is unite all of the fascist groups all the fascist groups either come together through the buf are completely you know just just vanished because they no longer belong or um they they are even more right-wing one of the most uh right-wing people was a camel uh camel doctor called arnold lease um he was a veterinarian and he was a camel doctor in the first world war and he was one of the the most virulent anti-semites uh from this period he reemerges after the second world war and uh he wouldn't join mosley because he said they weren't fascist enough um so even william joyce who i think was a psychopath um what wasn't even fascist enough of people like arnold lease they bring these groups together they decide to hold meetings they hold a series of meetings which culminates in olympia the famous olympia meeting uh twelve thousand guests invited most of um the you know the aristocrats of england turn up because they want to see what's going on it's floodlit it's huge there are twelve thousand people turn up 1934. twelve thousand people turn up uh it is um of course infiltrated by communist and jewish people uh there's fighting breaks out it becomes a complete lunatic asylum he is standing as soon as he stands to make his speech the fighting starts and it carries on for most of it um it's it's one of the very first riots and it's the most disturbing because it's it's so disturbing to people watching it they didn't realize that the buf might create this sort of tension not that they were particularly pro-communist or pro-jewish or anything like that but it was clear that these people in these uniforms had stirred up this new agitation which didn't seem to have existed before of course the end result was that um a large number of people were arrested not as many as you think it's only in the tens but people were arrested lots of people you know had knuckle dusters confiscated and all the rest of it there was fighting people ejected a lot and of course the cameras were there this is the first not televised but cinema i think pathe news was there to take the picture so this is the first great media event this is what he wanted to do as goebbels did this sort of thing so well in in nazi germany and this is his sort of nuremberg rally and it failed dismal it was a total disaster in fact he was banned from appearing on the bbc until 1968 because of it so that's quite a long ban so that everything fell apart of course that didn't discourage the black shirts they carried on they marched on and they again appeared in hyde park a high park occurs just about the same time and this is very interesting because they were opposed by about 10 000 trade unionists and this is the first time i found obviously the police have always stood between the two groups and tried to keep one group and another group apart from you know from the 18th century almost from the well certainly from the 19th century but this the first time anybody openly said that the police were state fascists state-sponsored fascists and that's that's so in other words it's it's they're the pigs you know the the 1960s idea and this was a communist leader called john mcgovern and he said that the police were state-sponsored fascists and it's the very f i mean i'm very happy to be corrected but it's the very first time i've found these words so it's that 1934 that they're starting to be the police are starting to be seen as in cahoots with the black shirts which is interesting i think about 60-70 people were arrested they had a continuous meetings afterwards and these meetings went on and on of course until 1936 and now i'm going to finish i'm not sure what the hell the time is so i'm just going to yak away and then we'll have questions um and get on to cable street imagine the east end the east end is jewish it's also irish um there's lots of people uh multi-ethnic from from the boats et cetera around limehouse and those areas but essentially it's a largely jewish area that's where uh the buf wants to march now after 1934 although it was coalescing before then oswald mosley had not necessary sorry prior to 93 bipolars prior to 1934 mosley had not felt it necessary to openly disparage jewish people he had no reason to do so he he believed in a corporate state on the italian fascist lines and that was about it but he was i think pushed into and he was an opportunist as i believe i i said before he was pushed into this position and i've no doubt he he bought into it so i'm not saying he wasn't an anti-semite by any means but he bought into it by people like john beckett and william joyce and other people who said this has to be a platform at the buf ak chesterton et cetera so slowly but surely in by from 1934 onwards there's the equation of communist and jewish so communist equals jewish the two equations which fascists have always used all around the world is communist equals jewish and capitalist equals jewish and communist jews always manipulate capitalist jews to manipulate all of everybody else and this is a paranoid fantasy that's existed for a long time um it still exists in the 21st century so i'm not going to deal with that today but nevertheless this is one of the first times it really comes to a head and mosley decides that this is a good idea to push as soon as he starts to push this he offends large numbers of uh jewish advertisers uh not least of which was the head of the odeon cinema chain who refused to show anything to do with mosley and of course he became one of the great hate figures of of the buf and um so people like the daily mail had their pockets severely uh uh shortened by a lack of money so they said we're not going to support you anymore rothermere i do not believe for one second became any less a liker of jewish people he just wanted the money so the advertising dried up and of course therefore the support dried up people didn't like also the rather crude um aggressive nature of these black shirts people were finding that a bit difficult having said that um in 1934 they had roughly 40 000 paid up members after 1934 because of the distaste for them they had roughly five thousand paid up members so it really went downhill he had to revive something now he had 5 000 members he was getting good votes in various areas of the east end different parts of the world he had a good support he had very good support in places like epping for instance in essex um which you know still is quite right winging a number of ways so these areas these different areas still had little pockets like sort of the bnp i suppose nowadays and nevertheless he couldn't concentrate those votes in one particular place so it was decided that they would march along cable street and he would take the salute of roughly 1 900 black shirt troopers they came from the black house which was the place in kensington which was their headquarters and i don't know if they all marched there or got the underground but nevertheless uh the black shirts by the way when they got there i have a lovely anecdote in the book one black shirt getting a ticket for somewhere or other in his black uniform and as he was getting the ticket he complained because the ticket seller sang the red flag as he got the ticket ready for him so which i think is great um anyway they gathered in royal mint street as we saw and by this time they had a marching band they had their full fascist uniforms with the jack boots they had the flash on their uh sleeve and they had um uh the whole uniform the whole military look they also had loud speaker vans one of which the the last loudspeaker van actually only vanished in 1968 so they they lasted a very long time and they gathered there the other side however uh was determined to stop them of course and uh the watchword was um the they shall not pass from the spanish civil war and um by this point a very large number of groups had coalesced to put a stop uh as they saw it to fascist incursions remember there were british people fighting in spain the tuc and other people had policies on this so they were gathering slowly together and deciding that you know the black shirts had to stop what happens of course is a myth but nevertheless important one so if we can imagine cable street and we can imagine those streets that i pointed out at the beginning of the talk they're filling up over the over the day with jewish and trade union leaders and with dockers and most of the dockers are irish and the dockers to a large extent do not like jewish people but here the dockers and the jewish people allegedly and it's very difficult to prove are standing together against fascism the person in between all this is philip game now philip game was the chief commissioner of metropolitan police and he he was actually in charge of right way through the second world war as well and he had to stop the two ties coming together so we said to mosley wait until we have cleared the jewish and other groups on the streets and you can march through and that will be the end of it so imagine the suggestion is a hundred thousand i want to talk about this a little bit later but a hundred thousand protesters turned up uh around cable street uh around gardner's corner and they're milling and they're waiting they start to turn over lorries they break into the lockups which are all where of course the costa mongers kept their stuff for petticoat lane and they break and hessel street market and they break into those and take very well i don't know if they're broken or we'll let him but anyway they take the stuff out and they put it across the road this is very rare in british history they actually built barricades and it's interesting to note if you look at the information about the the battle of cable street it's called the battle of cable street not the communist revolution um there's lots of mythological language arrives around this event but anyway they put barriers up they um commandeered a tram uh they turned over four lorries some of which you can see in pictures but there wasn't a huge amount of damage done lots of chalking on walls weeks before come together this is going to happen et cetera and of course the mosleys groups uh the buf are putting up invitations all around the east end uh to come to their meeting too so moseley is waiting he's lined up he had he's in his rolls royce to take the salute um he has 1 900 men standing there in black shirts he probably has about three and a half thousand people just gaurping at them absolutely nothing happens it's irrelevant they're completely irrelevant to the story the story concerns the police and the anti-fascist groups anti-fascists don't fight with fascists anti-fascists fight with the police and they always have done uh if you think of blair peach and all these people or you know goes back to southall and the red lion square and all the rest of it they fight with the police and the police sent their entire mounted division and their rolls royces because they had a few too and turned up on the spot to hold the crowd back the interesting thing is they could not hold the crowd back the crowd was much more violent i mean we always hear about the violence of the anarchists and the you know the anti-capitalist protesters these people make these people look like mickey mouse this is this is much more violent we're talking about east end working class people and east end working class people were not upper class or middle class west end people they were people that were used to fighting people that we used to the black market people used to pinching things off stalls people you know fly-by-night life so there's an awful lot of people who live a tough hard not necessarily grinding life but a life on the edge of violence and other things they are standing in the way the dockers are standing in the way unlike when the dockers marched for enoch powell the dockers are on the right side this time and they're not doing that they're standing there they're waiting for the the enemy as they see it these are the terms they use the enemy to turn up a large number of women have turned up women from the communist party um women just interested and a large number of women are in the upper upper house the upper rooms of the houses looking out the windows watching what's going on lots of crowds watching what's going on the police tried to shift the crowd the crowd bunk shift the shift uh the crowds start to throw marbles at the horses so the horses can't stand up of course they start falling down uh the police go actually it's a police riot actually if the truth be told it's a police riot the police go absolutely bonkers and there's lots of accounts of blood everywhere people being here amazingly no one died and no one even got badly injured bizarrely but a very large number of accounts of people getting hit people getting beaten up and the huge amounts of fights breaking out sporadically the police run the crowd and the crowd runs somewhere else there's no idea of kettling in those days the plea the crowd just retreats somewhere else and that carries on for most of the afternoon it starts about 2 13 and so there's running battles running skirmishes about 2 30. the police break into cable street and a famous guy who writes about this i think dead now called joe jacobs writes that uh women throw chamber pots and rubbish on top of their heads as the police are running down the police uh don't like of course all this stuff falling on their heads so they run into the nearest lock up that's open and shelter and they're taken prisoner by the communist party who to prove they've taken them prisoner take their hats take their their helmets as trophies and kick them out and say go home and don't start on us again there are sufficient witnesses i think to suggest the police were largely of many of them anyway were not just neutral but they were sympathetic to the black shirts when the police turned up there's records of them doing z kyle salutes um in the car in the lorries the the buses they turned up in and um though there were a large number of jewish policemen from the sorry policemen from the area who were pro-jewish because they understood jewish ways they understood communist ways they understood the mix of the the of the um east of london east london there was sufficient from outside the area not to be so sympathetic so the police very much wanted to um to mix it if you want to put it in in colloquial language uh with the people they were they were fighting the fight goes on for most of the afternoon and by six o'clock um they are um they're dispersing um the philip gang goes to i was almost and says look you'll have to disperse we can't allow you down cable street the police at this point have lost control of the streets and oswald mosley takes the salute and takes the march somewhere else and that's the end of the march the end result is roughly 90 people got charged 90 charges 70 people got arrested so there's 90 charges one or two people have more than one charge four vehicles got damaged so this is very minor stuff actually it's not very it's significant in terms of its its outpouring but quite minor in other ways and a number of people obviously got hurt and went home grazed and bruised and all the rest of it and were dead cheerful they'd had a fight with the police because of course the police were seen as the enemy by the communists they were seen as the enemy by many trade unionists and they were seen as the enemy by many jewish people of course who felt that um the policemen were very often anti-semitic so they had their victory if you like cable street had been a victory against state fascism as much as it had been a victory about stopping fascism itself marching down the street lots of people have asked why oswald moseley didn't push it why didn't he say look my stormtroopers will march their way through cable street and smash these due boys on the head and get through and to hell with them simple answer he was getting married on the 6th of october to diana medford diana guinness the witness was adolf hitler and he got married in goebbels house he wasn't going to ruin that one um so he had to acquiesce whether he liked it or not he had no choice he had to say all right well i'll go with what what you say so philip game uh the reports on um the um the events are quite interesting um i just i just finish on this the myth doesn't really start till the 1970s the the idea of beating fascism uh was of course central to jewish ideas and to many communist ideas but the second world war intervened and that's somewhat more important so the idea of beating communism as a mythological subject as standing firm the anti-nazi league and these things really starts much later in the 1970s with the rise of the nf and people like that starts to come back immediately the week after the events the buf increased their vote in their membership excuse me by double they doubled their vote in bethnal green they doubled their membership everywhere else because people were offended that they couldn't be allowed to march in this free country so they actually didn't do too badly out of the march mostly wasn't there of course but nevertheless people people sent them um you know money to join the buf the government was so horrified it brought in the public order act 1936 and banned uniforms so that was the first thing so that's why you don't see people marching through the anywhere in uniform anymore they brought that in so the government was already concerned and and worried the jewish rioters and they wasn't right the jewish rioters or the jewish battlers i suppose who felt they had defeated fascism um divided i think interestingly into those who went with what's called the board of deputies the board of deputies looks after the interests of jewish people in england who went with the board of deputies who really didn't want to get involved they really didn't want to intervene and the more working class jewish people who were more communistic and less jewish less less religiously jewish who became more stronger in in their self-belief so interestingly it split the jewish community in ways that i think still exists and that split i think still goes across north west london and east london still today and that's interesting i think so if it did anything it actually affected the jewish community mon affected the vuf who were after all uh vanished for the second world war anyway philip game and remember i pointed out the reasonably well-dressed people that sunday they're reasonably well-dressed they've got suits and ties on the people that were on the march the anti-fascist march were all relatively well-educated working-class boys and girls philip game to avoid the problem of accusing home-grown jewish people or communists or tuc people of being the troublemakers said it was all the fault of those dirty foreign jewish immigrants there weren't any dirty foreign jewish immigrants it was just a myth but it was a way of avoiding the problem very similar to some of the language we get to do with immigration nowadays they avoided the income as rather than the people that actually were there how many people were there let's just go back over that just very quickly my father was there he was about 10 years old 11 years old my father was there he came from a family of of nine and all his brothers and sisters are much older than him he never said that his brothers and sisters went so he's one in nine people he lived in the east end i think the numbers who went to uh cable street were much smaller than a hundred thousand i've come to the conclusion that much smaller than a hundred thousand i think they were probably near a forty thirty thousand or maybe forty thousand tops and the reason i come to this is because philip gain the number a hundred thousand comes from the police record two things to say here one philip game lost control of the streets you wouldn't say you've lost control of the streets if there's only 5 000 people against you you'd say we were overwhelmed absolutely overwhelmed our brave boys were fighting for their lives so he he emphasizes the bravery of the metropolitan police while emphasizing the cowardice of the protesters so i think there was probably less although it certainly looks pretty much i mean you see these huge numbers but a hundred thousand people on the street is very very hard to organize and working on my little bit of information about the people i know who were there uh it seems that the proportions don't seem to line up the fascists yes because we know their numbers because it's the numbers of the people that were in the black shirts who actually would belong so that's not too problematic and we have records of their life just to finish off were the fascists defeated yes they were did they go away no they didn't the week after blackshirt ran a newspaper it runs a newspaper called blackshirt and it had why the jews hate us edited by beckett who i told you about and the article was written by chesterton why the jews hate us a great long diatribe again about jewish people et cetera et cetera and at the bottom in the little corner you can get the the actual um paper is here because i looked it up at the museum of london um the at the bottom of the paper it has a little note of where the speakers had been that week this is only two weeks after the event mosley had been somewhere william joyce had been somewhere chesterton have been somewhere beckett have been somewhere in other words the speakers continued they continued right up until internment and of course mosley changed his argument he was out of uniform by this time he changed his argument to let's not get involved that was his new argument he dumped the anti-semitism let's not get involved this is all a zionist plot and we don't need to get involved in the european war that failed of course as well 13b they all went to prison for a short while they came out diana moseley wrote for tatler when she came out of prison nothing ever happened to her mosley of course lived in the south of france every now and then he came back to england to try and get back into power he's was now had other fascists this is immediately after the second world war he other fascists jeffrey hamm and other people stood for fascism in the east end and these old uh stomping areas that they'd been to before it was never the same again but interestingly and importantly the virus i think it is the virus of fascism has never gone away cable street is the most important mythological event it's a myth because it says you can stand up to these people it's not necessarily factually true in any of its particulars but it says that that riots and that protests and that defending your area remember these are jewish people and trade unionists and doctors defending the area they lived in does work if you stand up to the bullies and thugs of this world thank you you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 24,555

Keywords: anti-semitism, black shirt, black shirts, east end, east london, eastend, fascism, fascist, grubb street, working class, working-class, world war ii, British History, English History, History of Fascism, UK History, East End London, Battle Of Cable Street, London History, History of London, British Fascism, UK Fascism, English Fascists, English Fascism, London Fascists, London Fascism, British Fascists

Id: Fu9pLbKhrC8

Length: 53min 2sec (3182 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 18 2013