‘I order you to remove these barricades!’ his amplified voice boomed out. ‘This is a legal procession. You have no right to stop it!’
The reply came in the form of a roar of abuse and a hail of stones and vegetables, mainly potatoes. The marchers recoiled instinctively and backed away a few yards down White Horse Street.
I heard the sound of running feet and turned to see more blackshirts streaming out of an alleyway. There were many more policemen as well — clearly everyone had been expecting trouble — and they began to back the march further away from the Matlock Street barricade and then turned left up Salmon Lane. I looked at my map, torn from my gazetteer. The aim was to outflank the barricade and march everyone down Maroon Street to St Dunstan’s Hall. So Maroon Street was the place to be, I thought, and decided to make my own roundabout way there so I could see the march approach down it. I ran into Belgrave Street to find people — men and women — streaming out of the houses carrying rudimentary clubs — chair legs and pickaxe handles, spindles from banisters — all racing for Maroon Street to stop the marchers before they could progress down it. I snapped a photograph of a young man in a singlet with a slingshot and a bag of marbles — no one spotted me — and ran on to St Dunstan’s.
Astonishingly, Maroon Street was already blocked by a requisitioned tram and kerbstones were being dug up and hammered to pieces to provide potential missiles. Furniture was being hurled from the upper windows of the terraced houses as impromptu barricades were built. However, it was clear that the anti-fascist Stepneyites were now going to have to fight the police, not the blackshirt stewards. Huge reinforcements had appeared from somewhere — and there were now dozens and dozens of police constables, a thick dark-blue line of them, at the head of the march. The BUF banner had disappeared and I hoped that Faith had made herself scarce.
The march began to move forward steadily down Maroon Street and the police constables in the front line linked arms. In the row behind them truncheons were ostentatiously raised. Heads were going to be broken. The strange thing was, I realised, as I took my photos of the police line, that all the blackshirt stewards had suddenly disappeared.
I assumed there was going to be another flanking movement. The blackshirts were going to secure and surround the meeting hall before the march arrived, I reasoned. I ran up Ocean Street to Ben Jonson Road, paused at the junction and peered round the corner.
About fifty blackshirts carrying leather whips and clubs were being spoken to urgently by a man in a pale grey suit. He was issuing instructions, pointing up streets, gesticulating.
I eased myself round the corner, raised my camera and took, in quick succession, five photographs. Then one of the blackshirts saw me — shouted and pointed.
‘Get her!’ the man in the pale grey suit yelled hoarsely, furious. ‘Get her, now!’
I didn’t stop to see how many came after me, I turned and fled away round the back of St Dunstan’s and into a little quadrangle of sooty streets called Spring Garden Square.
That was my mistake. Or rather: that was my bad luck.
I think I would have escaped but, in Spring Garden Square, about thirty blackshirts were standing around waiting for orders. I ran right into them, camera still in my hand, and stopped. They all turned as one to stare at me. I slipped my camera into my bag.
‘She’s Red press!’ somebody shouted from behind.
‘No, I’m not!’ I shouted back as the blackshirts quickly surrounded me, hemming me in as the first pursuers from Ben Jonson Road now arrived. My gaze flicked here and there — I saw the man in the pale grey suit for an instant — and I had a horrid moment of recall, thinking back to Berlin, of that night when Hanna and I ran into that group of drunken Brownshirts. Brownshirts and now blackshirts. But I had no Hanna with me today.
Again I saw the man in the pale grey suit and I shouted over to him.
‘Hey! Listen! I work for an American magazine!’
I realised almost as soon as I’d spoken that, as far as these men were concerned, I might as well have said, ‘I work for a Jewish magazine.’
‘Get the fucking camera!’ the man in the pale grey suit ordered.
One of the young blackshirts grabbed my arm. He had a snub nose and flushed pink cheeks, excited, angry.
‘Gimme the camera, Jewish bitch!’
‘No!’ I shouted back. ‘Let me go!’
I flung a glance behind me, looking for the man in the pale grey suit as if he were some potential source of reason amongst all this unreasoning anger, but he seemed to have disappeared. From beyond St Dunstan’s I could hear the baying of voices on Maroon Street as the march advanced.
Then three of the blackshirts seized me. My bag was snatched, my camera found, opened, the film ripped out and exposed.
Snub-Nose slapped my face, hard, enough to make my hat fall off, snapping my head round, and I cried out in pain.
‘Jewish Red whore!’ he shouted at me and I felt his spittle fleck my cheeks.
I was thrown to the ground. I saw boots stamping on my camera, crushing it to pieces. I could hear police whistles, now, loud and shrill above the clamorous low baying of the mob in Maroon Street, and, ringed as I was by these young men standing above me, looking down on me, I could sense their uncertainty, their anxiety. Police were drawing near, they didn’t control the streets yet, these blackshirts, unlike the Nazis in Berlin — law and order still prevailed in London in a fragile way. I sensed their urge to turn and run, saw them look this way and that, uneasily.
‘Teach her a lesson, lads!’ Snub-Nose shouted as the crowd around me began to thin and drift away, seeking safety. He spat at me. Then one of his friends, almost as an afterthought, kicked me in the arm. That first kick unleashed something in the others and half a dozen or so began to hit at me with their fists as I lay on the ground, thwacking me with their clubs. I rolled into a protective ball, folding my arms around my head — don’t kick me in the head was the chant keening in my brain, don’t kick my head — but I left my back exposed, curved and defenceless and a blow to the kidney made me unfold reflexively, arching in pain and, just at that moment — vulnerable, supine — Snub-Nose kicked me in the stomach, low and very hard, and I felt something crack and give in me. I couldn’t ‘roll with the punch’ as I was worried about the spearing pain in my back and when the toe of his jackboot connected with my lower abdomen I felt it sink in deep and do its damage.
I was now semi-conscious and blood was beginning to flow across my face from a cut above my eye. I clutched at my belly with both hands — my wounded belly — and screamed an atavistic howl of agony. It made them recoil and back away as if I had the plague.
‘You done it now, Lenny,’ I heard someone dimly say as the world went dark and blurry. Then there were police whistles, like shrill violent birdsong, until, all of a sudden, I was aware of Lockwood’s voice in my ear saying, ‘You’re safe, Amory, you’re safe. Don’t worry, we’re going to take you to hospital.’ And that was that.
*
THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977
The Maroon Street Riot — or Skirmish, or Affray, as it was variously referred to — was overshadowed two months later by the famous ‘Battle of Cable Street’ in October when thousands of Eastenders blocked and then repelled a huge march by Mosley’s blackshirts and some thousands of BUF supporters. Six thousand police were in attendance that day and fought the anti-fascist crowd. The blackshirts, thwarted, turned away from the East End of London and were ruefully dismissed by Mosley at Charing Cross Bridge and that rebuff, that defeat, it can be argued, saw the end of any real continental-style fascist movement in Britain. However virulent the message that continued to be delivered by Mosley and his acolytes, the fact was that the British Union of Fascists never won control of the streets in London and perhaps that’s what sapped their morale and saved us.