Clifford Thurlow explores his family's links to anti-fascism and what inspired him to write the novel ‘We Shall Pass’, set during the Spanish Civil War … 

When the Blackshirts marched on Cable Street in the mainly Jewish quarter of East London on Sunday 4 October 1936, the people from the poor modest houses along the way built barricades to keep the invaders out.

When the police tried to dismantle the wall of dustbins, hand carts and old furniture, the people of Cable Street raised their fists and fought back. Women in the upstairs bedrooms pelted the intruders with everything they could lay their hands on – even the contents of the chamber pots under the bed.

Blackshirts’ leader Sir Oswald Mosley arrived in an open-top sports car with an escort of motorcycle outriders wearing black uniforms, leather belts and plus fours tucked into knee boots. The fighting continued for two hours. More than 150 people were arrested, dozens were taken to hospital, but the barricades remained firm and the Blackshirts never entered Cable Street.

One of the men who had organised the defence that day was my grandfather, Ted Lazarus, a print union official, Labour councillor in Wapping for thirty years, a man following developments in Spain and rightly terrified of the rise of right-wing parties across Europe.

Ten weeks before, on 17 July 1936, the twice-elected Spanish Republic had come under siege from a coalition of the old rich, the Church and a brutal military led by General Franco. The Republic put out a call for volunteers to fight fascism in what became known as the International Brigade. Funds were needed to help the men and women who planned to travel to Spain and Ted Lazarus coordinated collections at political meetings in every borough in London.

Author Clifford Thurlow at the London Book Fair.

Ted Lazarus was born with a belief in social justice in the blood. His father, Amia Lazarus, had been a history professor and Marxist at the University of Warsaw. In 1881, when Tsar Alexander II was assassinated, the Jews were falsely blamed. The riots, rapes and killings that followed led to almost two million Polish Jews immigrating across the world.

Amia Lazarus landed in East London. He worked as a printer, became known as Harry Lazarus and was a prominent community organiser and Labour councillor. Harry, an atheist, married an Irish woman who made a living playing the piano for silent movies.

I never knew my great-grandfather but spent the first ten years of my life living under the roof of Grandfather Ted. In 1944, a stray buzz bomb had landed on Riverside Mansions, their block of flats in Wapping. Everything they owned was destroyed. Luckily, no one was home at the time and they moved 10 miles north into a big old house in the relative safety of Edmonton.

With my grandparents, parents and Mum’s younger brother, Teddy, I grew up to the soundtrack of Old Granny playing the piano in the living room surrounded by an endless stream of visitors, men in suits with polished shoes who talked philosophy and politics in loud voices. I delivered leaflets for Labour candidates in local elections and, at age 14, was given a copy of ‘Homage to Catalonia,’ George Orwell’s moving account of his time in Spain fighting Franco as a volunteer with POUM, the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification.

It was Orwell’s book that lit my interest in the Spanish Civil War. One summer, I travelled through Spain visiting the battlegrounds where British volunteers in the International Brigade had fought. It was that journey that inspired me to write the novel ‘We Shall Pass’ – its themes my attempt to capture the passions and courage of those men and women who stood up to fascism in the 1930s – an epidemic spreading again across the world almost a century later. 

'We Shall Pass' by Clifford Thurlow will be published by Luath Press on May Day.