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An anti-fascist protester is dragged away by police |
‘They did not pass’
The Battle of Cable Street was a landmark event in the fight against fascism in Britain says playwright Bernard Kops. Dan Carrier spoke to him
PLAYWRIGHT Bernard Kops was a 10-year-old boy when Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts attempted to march down Cable Street in the East End of London. It was October 4, 1936; a date destined to become a landmark in the battle against fascism.
Mr Kops, who lives in West Hampstead, will be celebrating his 80th birthday at the end of November, and has marked this milestone by writing a specially commissioned new play for Radio 4. Called ‘The Lost Love of Phoebe Mayers’, it is loosely based on his own memories of the East End during World War II. And in the same month a new collection of his writings, about his memories of the East End called Kops’ East End is also published. And the events, 70 years ago this week, remain clear in his mind.
He recalls: “It was a Sunday and I remember going to Gardeners Corner. I had some marbles in my pocket – bring marbles, we were told – that was the word on the street. We would roll them along the street so the police horses would tread on them and go over.”
“The place was thick with people. It was very frightening – and very exciting, and very confusing. I remember people shouting ‘the dockers are with us!’”
Irish dockworkers joined the demonstrators to stop Mosley – and this gave protesters in Cable Street an important boost.
Mr Kops said: “It meant we felt we weren’t alone.”
Bernard Kops’ early experiences have forged him as a playwright. His father was from Holland and had travelled to London in search of a better life, but the capital was not his original destination.
Bernard recalls: “He bought a ticket for New York, but it said London on it. He was told to pick up the rest of the ticket when he got to Tilbury, so when he got off the boat, he went walking round asking for a Mr Smith, as he had been told to, for the next section of his passage. Of course, every one laughed at him – he had been diddled.”
Joel Kops settled in the East End, and Bernard was born into the Jewish community there.
He said: “I lived in one square mile. I was not allowed to go past Gardener’s Corner. Past there, we were told there were dragons waiting to gobble you up. The other side of Mile End Road was Bethnal Green. You would not dare to go there either because of anti-semitism.
“In my world there were Jews, and Jew-haters. But we had a funny sense of freedom within the ghetto.”
But as the 1930s progressed, the atmosphere among the Jewish community was heightened as the political situation across Europe worsened.
Bernard continues: “On Sundays Mosley and his Blackshirts would try and speak at Stepney Green. Which ever group got to the Green first in the morning, they would hold court for the rest of the day.”
Bernard and his young friends would do what they could to disrupt the fascists.
He said: “We’d bang together saucepans and shout ‘rats, rats,’ and ‘they shall not pass’.”
Bernard remembers there being an atmosphere of militancy that ran through the area, and reached his generation. He recalls that period in the East End as a constant churning of colourful demonstrators.
“There were so many different groups. Orange people, Green people, the Blue and White shirts, the Anarchists, and then the Reds – which we were.”
And this natural militancy was well formed by October 4, 1936.
He recalls: “We knew they were going to march, and we knew the police would let them – they were monsters as well. That day I remember, it was such an important day. A policeman came and hit my brother on the head with a truncheon. Someone got his number and the next day they went to the police station, and waited for him to come out. They spotted him, went up to him and did him over.
“We were not going to take it lying down. We were not victims – we were victims of circumstance but not as people.
“We were victims of sweat-shop labour and unemployment. When it came to fighting, we were not victims.”
It was from this background that Bernard Kops became a playwright. He told his father what he wanted to do but his father was not convinced and handed over his cutting tool.
He worked as a tailor and worked with leather, and he told Bernard he could always make a living with it.
Mr Kops said: “I told him I wanted to be a writer and he said to me a poor boy cannot be ambitious. He gave me his cutting tool and said he had always got by with it.”
After World War II, Bernard was selling second hand books from a stall in Cambridge Circus. But British theatre was about to change with John Osbourne’s Look Back In Anger.
Bernard had always thought he could write – so he sat down and penned his first hit, The Hamlet of Stepney Green.
And now, as he approaches his 80th year – “although I still feel and act like I am 18, and will only retire when I die” – Bernard has looked back at his roots, and how events like the Battle of Cable Street have influenced him in his writing.
He said: “What is memorable about the community was it was very vocal. You would walk down the road and hear people arguing about the Russian Revolution.
“The writers who emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, like Harold Wesker and Harold Pinter, 50 per cent of them were Jewish, and 25 per cent were from the East End – but none of them went to a university. It was all learnt in the streets of their childhood.
“The East End was a special place because of the vibrancy of people, desperate people trying to make a living and make a better life for their children. I went to Whitechapel Library and started writing poetry, prose and drama. This has made me quite proud to think I came out of this poor family. There was real poverty but that did not stop people achieving things.”
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