This scene from a TV drams shows the BUF's Fourth Anniversary demonstration, which was to take place in East London which was to become the media's 'Battle of Cable Street.' Several thousand Blackshirts were to march from the Royal Mint to Limehouse, Shoreditch, Bow and Bethnal Green in each of which Mosley would speak.
For weeks Communists agitated to prevent it taking place and on the day, October 4th, they erected barricades in Cable Street and other nearby streets, and fierce battles developed with the police who went in to clear them. To prevent further disorder, the Police Commissioner, Sir Philip Game, after securing the Home Secretary's approval, ordered the march to be called off, and Mosley, lined up with his Blackshirts half-a-mile away, and whose maxim was 'uphold the law until we change it,' marched with his thousands in the opposite direction to be finally dismissed on the Thames Embankment at Westminster.
The mass of Mosley's men had not been involved in the fighting except for a small number who were early arrivals at the meeting place where they were met by hundreds of Reds armed with a variety of weapons.
After dismissal on the Embankment many Blackshirts made their way to the BUF National Headquarters in Gt. Smith Street where Mosley from an upstairs window spoke to them in these words;
"We never surrender" he said. "We shall triumph over the parties of corruption because our faith is greater than their faith, our will is stronger than their will, and within us the flame that shall light this country and shall later light the world."
The Communists and their left-wing allies portrayed it as 'great rising of East London workers against Mosley' but the truth was that the mobs had been gathered from all over Britain and this proved to be the catalyst which created massive support for Mosley and British Union in traditionally patriotic working class East London.
Two weeks later Mosley addressed cheering thousands at several massive street meetings in East London. Called at a few hours notice there was not a sign of those that 'stopped' Mosley at Cable Street and six months later Blackshirt candidates polled nearly 20 per cent of the votes in the LCC elections in those boroughs through which he had been prevented from marching on October 4th.
As a consequence of the Communist organised street disorder, Parliament passed the Public Order Act making it illegal after the end of 1936 to wear political uniforms in public.
Former Labour Cabinet Minister, R. H. S. Crossman wrote (New Statesman, 27 October 1961):
"Mosley was spurned by Whitehall, Fleet Street, and every party leader at Westminster, simply and solely because he was right."
