The 43 Group
Prior to the start of the Second World War, fascists in the UK had been targeting working class areas with traditionally large Jewish populations, such as Hackney and London’s East End.
By Tahlia Coombs, Cultural Lead for Heritage
Headline from ‘On Guard’ September 1947 after events in Dalston. This was the 43 Group’s anti-racist newspaper reporting on all forms of racism.
These attacks took place in the political sphere as well as on the streets. Notorious anti-semitic orator William Joyce stood as a candidate for the British Unionist Party in Shoreditch in 1934, but was unsuccessful.
Known as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, he was to become a leading Nazi propaganda broadcaster during the Second World War (1939-1945).
There were also protests across the East End, which culminated in the violent ‘Battle of Cable Street’ in nearby Tower Hamlets in 1936.
In 1939 Britain declared war against Nazi Germany and their fascist allies – and fascist parties in Britain were banned and known fascist encamped.
After the war, the horrors of the Nazi ‘final solution’ against Jewish people in concentration camps was exposed. The final solution was the deliberate and systematic mass murder of European Jews. The Nazis also sought to eradicate other ethnic groups, such as Gypsy and Roma communities, as well as people who were homosexual or disabled.
British soldiers were present at the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. One such serviceman was Morris Beckman, born in 1921 on Amhurst Road, E8.
Witnessing these atrocities, he pledged that such horrors should never be repeated. However, when he returned home to his Jewish family in Hackney he found that British fascists were again on the rise, resulting in violent attacks on Jewish people and properties.
The authorities seemed more keen to police resurgent fascist meetings from disturbances due to the Public Order Act of 1936, than investigate attacks against Jewish businesses and people.
A group of mainly Jewish, British ex-servicemen and women decided to stop the dangers of fascism by actively stopping meetings ‘by any means necessary’.
Having successfully stopped one such meeting, in April 1946, by charging the speaker off the platform, the 43 Group was formed.
The objective of the 43 Group was to get fascists off the streets by whatever means possible. 43 Group’s name is believed to represent the number of people who attended their first meeting.
Morris Beckman was one of the founding members of the group. He published a book on the topic in 1993 through the Centerprise local history series (a reference copy is available at Hackney Archives).
Membership was open to all, united by the desire to defeat fascism and included trade unionists and communists, yet discussion of politics was banned allowing the membership to be inclusive and open to al with no specific political allegiance.
The 43 Group did not stop at disrupting public meetings, they also had a group of spies that informed its newspaper ‘On Guard’, published between 1947 and 1949, starting with recording the weekly battles in Dalston in 1947.
The actions of the 43 Group stopped the public platforms of the fascist organisations. It disbanded in 1950.
Although Mosley’s Union Movement remained active throughout the 1950s, it was not until 1962, when the unrelated 62 Group was formed in the 43 Group’s image, that British fascists again encountered significant privately organised street-level resistance.
