The Box Office Hit

The people

The East End of London in the 1930s was crowded with slums. In Stepney, for example, the population stood at around 200,000 — a similar number to, say, Leicester at the time — but the area was a fraction of the size of the Midlands town.

It was a different place from the one Erasmus had pictured in the 16th century when he wrote to the vicar of St Dunstan’s, Stepney: 'I come to drink your fresh air, to drink yet deeper of your rural peace.' Labourers had flooded in to the docks on the River Thames, and the population spread east from the City.

Housing was thrown up in an unplanned way, and the poor conditions were exacerbated because many of the new arrivals were impoverished immigrants often escaping from starvation or persecution elsewhere. It was Irish, Germans and French Huguenots in the 17th and 18th centuries, but in the 19th and early 20th century it was mainly eastern European Jews coming to escape pogroms in their own countries. The site of a Huguenot Church in Spitalfields became one of the largest synagogues in Stepney.

In 1934, the area’s industry was in crisis, with more than 11,000 unemployed in Stepney alone. And political manipulators were lighting a fire under this mass of mixed cultures and dire conditions. The British Union of Fascists (BUF), under its charismatic but unscrupulous leader Oswald Mosley, spread its poisonous anti-Semitism, declaring that the Jews were the cause of the problems.

The BUF marched through Jewish areas dressed in their black uniforms, copying their European counterparts in Italy and Germany, deliberately antagonising and attacking residents. Local opposition grew, organised in the main by the Communist Party. In his book Our Flag Stays Red, activist Phil Piratin, who after the war became one of only two Communist Party MPs in Parliament, described the pivotal march in 1936 that spelled the beginning of the end of the local fascists.

'The epic fight was 4 October 1936. Propaganda against the fascists had 'caught on' in east London. The Jewish People’s Council Against Fascism and anti-Semitism collected 100,000 signatures in the course of a few days, calling on the Home Secretary to forbid the demonstration. He refused. East London was in ferment.'

A huge confrontation followed, with vehicles used as barricades and police charging on horseback. Echoing the parliamentary forces in the Spanish Civil War, locals battled to prevent the march, to the chant 'The fascists shall not pass'. And the BUF was beaten back.

There were other non-political criminals at work. In Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens had described Spitalfields in the East End as the hangout of rogues and thieves and this remained true for many parts of the area in the 1930s.

The key local gangster was Jack Spot, whose real name was Comer. He was born in an East End tenement in 1912. Through the poverty and brutality he developed a reputation for fighting hard and progressed to organising other crooks in protection rackets. He exploited the political threat to Jews to extort more money and he also had bookie scams running at many racecourses. The cut throat razor decided the inevitable turf wars with other local hoods, the result for one 'Mad Frankie' Fraser being a seven year prison sentence for cutting 'Spot'.

Today, many of the Jews have left and synagogues have become mosques and temples. Poverty is still widespread, and new immigrants suffer similar racist attacks to those meted out to the Jews. But pockets of the East End have been transformed into trendy art-focused studios and homes.

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