By 1936, Europe was fracturing. Mass unemployment, economic collapse, and the rise of fascist dictators in Germany, Italy, and Romania had reshaped the continent. In Britain, that instability found a face: Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF). On Sunday, 4 October 1936, Mosley’s plan to march thousands of his uniformed Blackshirts through the heavily Jewish East End of London set off one of the most dramatic street confrontations in British history.
Mosley had long admired Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. When he founded the BUF in 1932, he deliberately modeled its paramilitary wing — the Blackshirts — on Mussolini’s Squadrismo. The group became notorious for violence early on, most visibly when they attacked a left-wing meeting at Olympia in June 1934. By the mid-1930s, the BUF had grown into a serious street force, and Mosley was growing bolder.
The East End of London was home to a large, established Jewish community, many of whose families had arrived as refugees in the early 1900s. Irish workers also lived and labored in the same neighborhoods. When Mosley announced his intention to march through Stepney, Whitechapel, and Cable Street — the heart of this community — the response was immediate. A Jewish council gathered a petition of 100,000 signatures and delivered it to the Home Secretary, urging him to ban the march outright. The Home Secretary refused.
The community was not unified on how to respond. The Jewish Chronicle advised its readers to stay home and avoid the confrontation. The Communist Party newspaper, the Daily Worker, took the opposite position, calling people into the streets to physically block the march. Trade unionists, communists, and ordinary East Enders answered that call in enormous numbers.
On the morning of 4 October, approximately 3,000 BUF Blackshirts assembled in Royal Mint Street, ready to march. Mosley arrived to inspect his ranks. Facing them, however, were tens of thousands of antifascist demonstrators — estimates place the crowd at anywhere between 20,000 and 100,000 people. Stepney was not going to let them pass without a fight.
The Metropolitan Police deployed 6,000 officers that day — one of the largest police mobilizations London had seen. Their task was not to stop the fascists but to clear a path for them. Demonstrators responded by building barricades across Cable Street and surrounding roads. Four tram drivers deliberately abandoned their vehicles at key points in the road to help block the route. Protesters ripped up paving stones and dragged furniture, timber, and an overturned lorry into position.
When police charged the barricades, the crowd fought back hard. Demonstrators wielded sticks, rocks, and chair legs. Women in the houses lining Cable Street leaned from their windows and hurled rubbish, rotten vegetables, and the contents of chamber pots down onto the officers below. The fighting was fierce and sustained.
Police arrested around 150 demonstrators over the course of the day, though some were pulled free by the crowd before they could be taken away. Six fascists were also arrested. By the end of the fighting, 175 people had been injured — demonstrators, police officers, women, and children among them.
The Blackshirts never made it through. Faced with an immovable crowd and streets blocked at every turn, the police commissioner advised Mosley to abandon the march. Mosley ordered his men to stand down. The East End had held.
The scenes in Cable Street were chaotic and prolonged. Anti-fascists scattered and regrouped as police dismantled barricade after barricade, only for new ones to appear further down the road.
In the days following the battle, the British government moved quickly. Parliament passed the Public Order Act of 1936, which required march organizers to get prior permission from the police — a direct legislative response to what had happened in Stepney. The act also gave authorities new powers to ban political uniforms in public.
Two days after the battle, on 6 October, Mosley was married in Germany at the home of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Adolf Hitler attended as a guest. In 1940, after Britain entered the Second World War, Mosley and other senior BUF figures were imprisoned under Defence Regulation 18B, which allowed the government to detain without trial anyone believed to be a threat to national security.
