Max Levitas at a demonstration in 2015
On September 7, 1934 The Times ran a report about a 19-year-old who had been arrested in Trafalgar Square, London, at 4am and fined £5 for daubing “All out against fascism” (and variations thereof) on three sides of the plinth of Nelson’s Column. The graffiti artist was called Max Levitas and he was a member of the Young Communist League. He was only caught because he and his friend went back to admire their handiwork after they had had a cup of tea. His plea of innocence was undermined somewhat by the item he had sticking out of his overcoat pocket: a still-wet paintbrush.
There was more daubing to come, two years later on October 4, 1936, in what became known as the Battle of Cable Street. This time it was “No Pasaran” (“they shall not pass”) that Levitas chalked on the walls, a slogan borrowed from Republicans fighting in the recently begun Spanish Civil War. A number of British “reds”, including Max Levitas’s brother Morry, would go and fight with the International Brigades in Spain over the next three years, but for now the fight was closer to home.
Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, had announced that he was planning a march of about 5,000 of his Blackshirts through an area of the East End of London populated predominantly by Jews, including Levitas and his family. At the time Levitas was working with his father as a tailor’s presser on Commercial Street. When he heard Mosley’s plan, he thought: “If they do march, there will be deaths, because the people around here have had enough.”
The Jewish People’s Council Against Fascism and Anti-Semitism sprang into action, collecting a petition of 100,000 names calling on the home secretary, John Simon, to ban the march. Simon refused, but a secret arrangement was made whereby Mosley would re-route his march on the day at the “request” of the police commissioner and thereby score a propaganda victory. His Blackshirts had been getting a reputation for disorderly conduct and this would prove they were law-abiding.
The Blackshirts assembled in Royal Mint Street and Mosley arrived to inspect them in his open-topped Bentley. They were then, as arranged, escorted to Embankment and ordered to disperse.
Half a mile away, about 30,000 anti-fascists were massing behind barricades along Cable Street. When the mounted police charged them, the situation escalated quickly, with antifascists ripping up cobbles from the streets and throwing them, along with bottles and rotten vegetables. The ensuing riot lasted for three hours and resulted in hundreds of arrests.
Levitas, who served as one of the Communist Party’s messengers that day, recalled how anti-fascists threw marbles on to the ground to make police horses slip. “Mosley and his fascists wanted to take over the East End,” he said. “To run out the Jews and communists. We had to stop them. It was the people united, fighting together. When we heard that the march was disbanded, there was a hue and cry. The flags were going up wildly — the red flags and others — and people shouting ‘We have won!’ ”
To the extent that it looked as if the Blackshirts had run away from a fight with “the reds”, it did indeed seem as if the anti-fascists had won.
Max Samuel Levitas was born in 1915 in Dublin, in an area of Jewish settlement known as “Little Jerusalem”, the area that James Joyce chose as the home of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. His parents, Leah and Harry, were from Latvia and Lithuania respectively. Max, the eldest of five, attended St Peter’s School. In 1927, when he was 12, the family moved to Glasgow, and although he and his brother were accompanied by a letter of support from the headmaster of their Dublin school, this effectively marked the end of Max’s formal education and, when he joined the Young Communist League, the start of his life as a political activist. Four years later the family moved to Stepney in the heart of London’s East End. Their first lodging was so small that the two elder boys had to sleep at the house of an aunt near by.
Levitas worked in the tailoring trade with his father, but increasingly his real focus was politics. There are records of him speaking at a meeting of the Negro Welfare Association in 1934 in support of the Scottsboro boys, young black men falsely accused of rape in the US.
Levitas and his family moved into a tenement block in Brady Street. Here, in 1937, he helped to form the Stepney Tenants’ Defence League, intended to create mass collective resistance to the landlords of slum tenancies. Soon, the league had 7,500 members and a rash of rent strikes had spread across Stepney’s slum dwellings. Levitas led a 21-week rent strike. The rent was collected and banked, but kept from the landlord to prevent tenants falling into arrears.
It was here, during the strike, that he met his future wife Sarah (Sadie) Freedman, who lived with her parents on the floor below the Levitas family. “I put her on the picket line,” he recalled, “but I can’t imagine Sadie being put anywhere she didn’t choose to be.”
Levitas worked as a fire warden in the East End during the Blitz. One particularly horrific incident that he witnessed was the bombing of a school in Canning Town that was being used as an emergency refuge for bombed-out families. There were warnings of how dangerous this was, but on September 10, 1940 the school received a direct hit. The death toll was unknown.
Four days later, Levitas led a deputation invading the Savoy Hotel in protest at the absence of deep shelters for the population of London. “It was easy to ignore vulnerable working-class people,” he recalled, “if you were sitting in the basement of a very nice hotel. So we decided to march on one.”
With the help of sympathetic waiters, scores of protesters occupied the hotel’s air-raid shelter, with the group releasing a statement that “if it was good enough for the rich, it was good enough for Stepney workers and their families”. The news reports of the event triggered a spate of similar incidents — crowds of people surged past police lines and used crowbars to break into Underground stations during the German bombing raids. By the end of September 1940 the government had conceded, and it was estimated that 79 Underground stations were serving as shelters for approximately 177,000 people.
Like the “Battle of Cable Street” (which was against the police rather than the Blackshirts), the “occupation of the Savoy” amounted to a foundation myth for the British far-left, something to be romanticised and embellished with each telling.
Max and Sadie married in March 1941 and their son, Stephen, was born in 1943. He left school at 16, worked in the civil service until his retirement in 1965 and died of a cerebral haemorrhage in 2014. Sadie had died in 1988.
In 1945, when the British people were still feeling misty-eyed about “Uncle Joe” Stalin, Levitas was among ten communists who made headlines when they were elected as councillors in Stepney. He held the office for 17 years and then returned to working in the tailoring trade and as a market trader selling clothes in Dunstable Market, something that he continued doing until he was 80.
He remained an unreconstructed communist all his life. If challenged, he would say this was never about imposing a Soviet-style state, it was simply about pursuing “a decent life for ordinary working people”.
Barely 5ft tall, his energy was considerable. When asked in his late nineties about the reasons for his longevity, he said: “I go to the gym twice a week, I go to the Turkish bath twice a week, and I walk everywhere.” He also used to run up and down the stairs to his third-floor flat several times a day. There was no lift.
When the English Defence League attempted to march through the East End in 2013 in an attempt to stir up anti-Muslim disaffection, Levitas spoke to the crowd, telling them that the sight of thousands of young Bengalis turning out to confront the far right reminded him of his own youth.
He gave his last public speech at the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street in October 2016 when he shared a platform with Jeremy Corbyn, whose mother had been at the “battle” too. Levitas was by then in danger of becoming a national treasure, his communism considered almost quaint.
When far-right protesters invaded the socialist bookshop Bookmarks in August this year, he remarked “the struggle goes on”, adding, “it’s a long struggle”.
Max Levitas, British communist, was born on June 1, 1915. He died on November 2, 2018, aged 103
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