This year marks the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, which took place on Sunday October 4 1936.

At the Battle of Cable Street, the people of London’s East End rose to the challenge of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), which was planning to invade the communities either side of Gardiner’s Corner.

The corner was a thriving thoroughfare for the whole area, bridging Wapping and Shadwell Basin to the south, Tower Hill to the west, and Whitechapel and Stepney to the north.

Its capture for the fascists would have had strategic significance, allowing it to establish a headquarters in the area and send out its gangs to suppress opposition throughout the area.

The aim of the march was threefold: break the local spirit of defiance against fascism, demonstrate that the BUF was a significant political force so that it could attract greater foreign funding (the bulk of its finance came from Mussolini’s Italy) and allow it to earn a role in the strategy of the ruling class. Victory was equally important to both sides.

The communities into which BUF leader Oswald Mosley intruded were diverse and historical, but by the 1930s the area’s citizens, regardless of religion, politics or ethnicity, had begun to come together in tenants’ groups, trade unions and cultural centres.

There was a great spirit of tolerance, but the unity the community displayed on that day shifted the entire local political balance of forces.

Mosley deliberately chose to march on that date, because the communists, whose members were at the heart of the hundreds of street skirmishes with fascists in the East End, were engaged in a full mobilisation to support a Young Communist League rally in central London in support of the government of Spain, then fighting a Franco uprising.

At the last knocking, this pivotal force was able to run out special issues of its newspaper, the Daily Worker, and overprint handbills, with the legend, “Alteration — Rally to Aldgate 2pm.”

They echoed the slogan of the defenders of Madrid: “They shall not pass!” They also chanted: “One, two, three, four, five! We want Mosley dead or alive!” And those seeking to block Mosley’s path arrived a lot earlier than 2pm.

The communists brought a level of organisation to match that of Mosley and the police. According to local historian and participant Bill Fishman, “the Communist Party had a system of loudspeaker vans and a command post with a phone and team of messengers from which to co-ordinate the action … they also had a secret weapon — a spy named Michael Faulkner, who was a medical student and communist sympathiser. Faulkner had infiltrated the Blackshirts.” He was able to ring the command post and describe Mosley’s planned route.

Crowds massed at Gardiner’s Corner, Aldgate. A CP member bus driver abandoned his tram there to create a barricade. Others followed his example, and crowds surged around to make Mosley’s path impassable.

When loudspeakers announced: “All down to Cable Street,” groups began clashing with some of the 7,000 deployed police almost immediately. Medical groups organised by sympathetic health workers from the nearby giant London Hospital at Whitechapel were busy that day.

But Mosley did not pass. Instead, he took his gang, wheeled them round and marched them in the opposite direction.