Created between 1979 and 1983 by Dave Binnington, Paul Butler, Ray Walker, and Desmond Rochfort. (detail)
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/
On 4 October 1936, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists set out to march through Cable Street, the predominantly Jewish quarter of East London.
My grandfather, Ted Lazarus, a printer and Labour councillor, was one of the men who organised the barricades – closing the streets with, overturned carts, paving stones, old iron bed frames and furniture.
The police did not prevent Mosley’s Blackshirts from attacking the defences, but the workers never gave an inch. They chanted “¡No pasarán!” – They shall not pass! – in imitation and solidarity with those who had erected the barricades in Barcelona in July that same year to hold back the tide of General Franco’s Nationalist army.
Hundreds of men and women were arrested. Hundreds were rushed to hospital. The fascists never broke through the defences in what became known as the Battle of Cable Street.
To commemorate that small victory exactly 90 years later, I was among the 7,000 people who marched through East London on Sunday 4 October to Cable Street. It was an unusually warm autumn day. The sky was thick with waving banners, and we kept time with a drum band. The people chanted “¡No pasarán!” and it must have gone through the minds of every person in the street that day, as it went through mine, that ninety years after the Battle of Cable Street we are again marching against fascism.
