Moved to tears by anti-fascist fight “I was moved to tears to see bearded Jews and Irish Catholic dockers standing up to stop Mosley. I shall never forget how working class people could get together to oppose fascism.” bill fishman History Got a story to tell? If you have a tale about East End history, write to John Rennie or email him at johnrennie@gmail.com www.eastlondonhistory.com Bill Fishman: the man who gave history back to the people He loved to tell stories, to talk. It made him a fine lecturer, but he always wanted to bring London history out of academe and back to the streets, and for years led hugely popular walks around the East End. BY JOHN RENNIE STANDING on Cable Street, on October 4, 1936, the 15-year-old William Fishman was already a year out of school, a working man. But the sights he saw that day, as East Enders resisted Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists, would stay with him forever. “I was moved to tears to see bearded Jews and Irish Catholic dockers standing up to stop Mosley. I shall never forget that as long as I live, how working-class people could get together to oppose the evil of fascism,” he said. Those memories would later fire his career as an academic, a writer and one of the most compelling chroniclers of 20th century working class life in the East End of London. Bill Fishman, who died three days before Christmas, seems to have been with us forever. Indeed, the many generations of grateful readers, and those he mentored and helped, probably thought and hoped he would go on forever. Of course living so long (he was 93 when he died), and being born into a working class, East End immigrant family gave Fishman a unique view denied to academics from more rarified backgrounds. His father Simon had been born in Russia, his mother Annie was descended from immigrants from the Ukraine. Bill himself was born in Whitechapel, but then in the early Thirties, the Fishman family (dad was a tailor) moved near to the docks and found themselves amid Irish neighbours. It was an early lesson in the importance of immigrants living and working together. Just a few years after that he would witness that solidarity resisting the Blackshirts (and indeed the Metropolitan police) during the Battle of Cable Street. A bright boy, William won a place at the Central Foundation grammar school, but brains didn’t outrank the need to earn money for the family in those days and at 14 he was working as a clerk. He was already politicised, joining the Labour League of Youth that same year. After military service in the Far East during World War II, Fishman returned to the East End, teaching history and English at Bethnal Green’s Morpeth School, then moving on to head up Tower Hamlets Further Education College in 1954. At the same time, he was studying at the London School of Economics, then in 1965 took up a student fellowship at Oxford’s Balliol College. In 1970, Methuen published his first book, The Insurrectionists, a relatively compact yet ambitious attempt to trace revolution from Jacobin France in the 18th century, to the Bolshevism of early 20th century Russia. And in 1972 he returned to the East End, to take up a research fellowship in labour studies at Queen Mary – appropriately so, given the college’s roots in Barber Beaumont’s People’s Palace technical schools, a self-improving ground for working class men and women. By now he was also much in demand at other universities – making visits to Columbia University in New York, and to Wisconsin Madison. Coming back to his roots perhaps focused his attention, for his next work zeroed in on the East End itself. East End Jewish Radicals 1875-1914 was a more successful book. It sold well for a niche publication, but more importantly it remains an enthralling read, taking us from the oppression and pogroms of the Jews in Tsarist Russia, to the playing out of the politics born in Eastern Europe on the streets of the East End. We see the spread of libertarian and socialist ideas among the Jewish settlers of Whitechapel, and witness their great flowering in the major strikes of 1889 and 1912. This is the East End of Rudolf Rocker and Peter Kropotkin, and it’s here that Fishman starts to display his customary stamp. Previous histories had tended to see the ‘East End anarchists’, perhaps East Enders as a whole, as a mass, a mob. Fishman, while showing superb research and attention to detail, put names and faces into the story… it made the work riveting to read. East End 1888: A Year in a London Borough among the Labouring Poor, published in 1988, was even better. It does what the title says, putting us down among the real East Enders. So we walk with the author eastward (and downwind) from the respectability of the Mansion House, descending quickly into the stew of Whitechapel… where precious few of the bankers and businessmen of the City ever trod. There is an all-pervading stench in the air of rendered fat, of sugar baking, brewing, factory smoke, excrement and poverty. The people stepping through the filth on the street “too poor to afford underclothes” weave their way around the kerb acrobats, the organ grinders and the fire swallowers. Has anyone ever done a better job of educating us through entertainment? It’s the best sort of novel… one where all the stories are true. In Streets of East London, published in 1992, we get another colourful picture of the mix that made us. It’s a heady stew of music halls, Jewish steam baths, Huguenot shops becoming Bengali shops, churches mutating into mosques. Kropotkin and the Krays rub shoulders (not literally) and William Booth and Lenin have walk-on parts. Less lauded, but worth a read, is one of Fishman’s latter works, Into The Abyss: The Life and Work of G R Sims. Fishman rescues Sims from his stereotyped image – the archetypal do-gooding Victorian journalist, chronicling the horrors of working class life (and also the author of the unintentionally hilarious In the Workhouse: Christmas Day) – and rediscovers Sims the man. He is revealed as “an enthusiastic gambler, a frequenter of clubs, lover of the theatre, successful playwright, something of a drinker”. Beryl Bainbridge writes a suitably entertaining preface to the book. This, above all, was a man interested in people, not just dry facts. His fascination and love of people shines through every page of his books. Ross Bradshaw, his publisher at Five Leaves, remembered: “He always bought a copy of The Big Issue even if he’d just bought a copy around the corner.” It evoked Fishman’s own grandfather, who was incapable of passing a beggar without offering him a coin – and then thanking the beggar for asking. And he loved to communicate, to tell stories, to talk. It made him a fine lecturer, but he always wanted to bring London history out of academe and back to the streets and the people, and for years led hugely popular walks around the East End. One of his fellow guides was renowned East End author Rachel Lichtenstein. The East End Walks are continued today by David Rosenberg. So we have a tradition starting with Bill and stretching back to the 1920s… hopefully long to continue. Bill Fishman was born on April 1, 1921 and died on December 22, 2014. He is survived by his widow Doris, and sons Barry and Michael. Bill’s books The Insurrectionists (1970), Publ: Methuen; East End Jewish Radicals 1875-1914 (1974), Publ: Duckworth; East End 1888: Life in a London Borough Among the Labouring Poor (1988), Publ: Duckworth; Streets of East London (1992) (with photographs by Nicholas Breach); Into The Abyss: The Life and Work of G. R. Sims (2008), Publ: Elliott & Thompson. Bill Fishman at the opening of the council’s archive strongroom in 1988 Fishman rescued GR Sims from his stereotyped image 12 – 18 JANUARY 2015 N E W S F R O M TOWER HAMLETS COUNCIL AND YOUR COMMUNITY 15
East_End_Life_12Jan2015
To see the actual publication please follow the link above