Jim Jump draws out the links between the Battle of Cable Street in London’s East End and the Spanish Civil War. 

They shall not pass! ¡No pasarán! The cry of the anti-fascists at Cable Street on 4 October 1936 was the same as the one used by the defenders of Madrid. 

The Battle of Cable Street, which took place 90 years ago in London’s East End, was not an isolated confrontation between anti-fascist protesters, the police and the Blackshirts of the British Union of Fascists. 

There had been several such battles up and down the country. The first was in 1933 in Stockton-on-Tees, when anti-fascists ambushed Blackshirts making their way to a rally in the town centre. 

There had been clashes in Aberdeen, and just a week before the events at Cable Street there was the Battle of Holbeck Moor, near Leeds. A month later came the Battle of Carfax in Oxford. 

What made the Battle of Cable Street exceptional was not just its scale – about 100,000 protesters are estimated to have taken part – but the fact that Sir Oswald Mosley’s antisemitic Blackshirts were planning to march through the heart of London’s Jewish community in Whitechapel. 

The battle also led to the 1936 Public Order Act, which banned paramilitary political organisations and uniforms. 

Part of the Cable Street Mural (Morning Star).

For the IBMT, what happened at Cable Street has a special significance. This is because the people of the East End drew inspiration from those Spaniards resisting Franco’s fascist-backed rebellion. 

And many of those who took part in the Battle of Cable Street went on to travel to Spain to join the International Brigades. 

The Spanish Civil War had been raging for nearly three months. With troops, airplanes and arms from Hitler and Mussolini, Franco expected the Spanish Republic to crumble – especially when Britain and France turned a blind eye to German and Italian involvement in the war, while preventing the Spanish Republic from buying arms to defend itself. 

For East Enders, among them Britain’s largest concentration of Jews, the need to stop the fascists, with their toxic credo of antisemitism and ethno-racial superiority, had special urgency. 

From Stepney, over 60 volunteers joined the International Brigades. A similar number came from Bethnal Green, Poplar and adjoining boroughs. Recognising the exceptional threat posed by Nazism, many were Jewish. Between 10 and 15 per cent of all the British volunteers were Jewish – at a time when they accounted for barely one per cent of the general population. 

The IBMT has identified more than 30 volunteers who took part in events at Cable Street before travelling to Spain. The actual number is probably much higher. 

Richard Baxell’s seminal study of the British volunteers in Spain, ‘Unlikely Warriors’ (2012), gives voice to the Jewish East Enders who made the journey from Cable Street to Spain. 

Among the Brigaders who took part in the Battle of Cable Street (clockwise from top left): Lou Kenton, Jack Shaw, Tony Gilbert and Alf Salisbury.

Lou Kenton’s parents had escaped the pogroms in Ukraine in 1905. He left school at 14, took various factory jobs and joined the Young Communist League, which gave him ‘a totally new outlook on life’. 

On 4 October 1936 he deployed his party branch members to rooftop lookouts in the area around Aldgate station. Then by motorbike he sped from section to section to gather and relay news of police movements. 

Lou later rode through France on his flat-twin Douglas. In Spain he worked as a despatch rider, taking messages to and from the fronts. 

The Battle of Cable Street is called a battle for good reason. With the police trying to clear the way for the Blackshirts to march through Whitechapel and with thousands of anti-fascists equally determined to stop them, it was inevitable there would be trouble. There were about 150 arrests, most of them protesters, many of them young Jewish men who went on to join the International Brigades. 

Future International Brigader Charlie Goodman being arrested during the Battle of Cable Street (Marx Memorial Library). 

One of them was Charlie Goodman, an East End silversmith. A photographer recorded his arrest, creating an iconic image (see previous page). What the photographer didn’t capture is what came next. He was ‘clubbed, punched and kicked’ all the way to Leman Street police station. 

As soon as Goodman was released after four months’ hard labour, he made his way to Spain. With the British Battalion, he took part in the fighting south-east of Madrid by the River Jarama in February 1937. He was lucky to survive with just an injury. About 150 of his comrades fell in the battle. 

Also arrested on 4 October was Jack Shaw. After serving three months’ hard labour, he signed up for a ship bound for Spain, where he was a runner with the British Battalion. 

For Tony Gilbert, another young Jewish activist who joined the International Brigades, the Battle of Cable Street saw the best traditions of East London’s militant past. ‘On that day the working class of London scored a tremendous victory against the forces of reaction.’ 

Stepney’s Alf Salisbury pointed to Hitler and the spread of fascist aggression as the motivation for going to Spain. ‘I was just one of a number of people who, as a result of what happened at Cable Street, felt we had to do something to defeat fascism,’ he said. ‘Otherwise there would not only be many dead, but they would also throw us back a thousand years.’ 

Alf’s later life was dedicated to fighting for social justice and peace. As secretary of the Stepney Branch of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, he organised several protests, among them ordering tea at the Ritz and refusing to pay. 

He became an active trade unionist as well as a prominent supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Greater London Pensioners & Trade Union Action Group. 

Arnold Wesker’s landmark play ‘Chicken Soup with Barley’, written 20 years after the Battle of Cable Street, opens with a loudspeaker on Cable Street repeating the slogan ‘Madrid today – London tomorrow’. 

Similarly, the volunteers in the International Brigades warned that fascism had to be stopped in Spain or there would be another world war. Sadly, they were proved right. 

Their warning went unheeded by a Tory-led government intent on appeasing the fascist dictators and enabling them to crush a progressive government in Spain. There remain many lessons for us today. 

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The IBMT will be marking the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street on Sunday (4 October) with placards remembering the anti-fascist protesters who went on to join the International Brigades.

Thirty-four placards have been created and will be carried on the march and rally, along with the IBMT banner. They have been created with the help of the Marx Memorial Library and Unite’s London and Eastern Region.

To join the IBMT contingent – and volunteer to carry a placard – assemble at 12pm at Tower Hamlets Town Hall (160 Whitechapel Road, London E1 1BJ), where speakers at a pre-march rally will include IBMT Secretary Megan Dobney. The march will set off at 1pm and end at St George’s Gardens on Cable Street, where there will be more speakers and music.