Today is as good a day as any to look back at how the city once faced up to dangerous extremists. Our populist eviction correspondent Angus Young reports.
It’s gone down in local political folklore as the Battle of Corporation Field. The date was July 1936 and the location was where the entrance to the Tesco car park at St Stephen’s shopping centre is today. So what happened when Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, arrived in Hull to attend a rally there?
Wherever Mosley and his black-shirt supporters went in those days there was trouble and this occasion proved no exception. Several venues, including the City Hall, a swimming baths and the Astoria cinema in Holderness Road, had refused requests from BUF officials to stage the event. Eventually, Corporation Field off Park Street was used and the open-air site, once the home of Hull Fair, ensured a large crowd.
Some estimates put the figure at 10,000 and contemporary reports suggest the majority were present to voice their opposition to Mosley and his party’s embrace of Nazi-style fascism. Local trades unions had ensured their members were out in force to stage a counter-protest as had the small but active local branch of the Communist Party. The BUF was also active in Hull at the time and its members arrived at the site by marching along Park Street to the sound of beating drums.
They were heavily outnumbered but formed a circle around a makeshift stage. Just before 8pm, Mosley arrived with a bodyguard. Wearing his trademark black shirt, he stepped up to the microphone to the sound of jeers from the crowd and Nazi salutes from his supporters.
Within a few seconds it became clear the loudspeaker system installed earlier that afternoon wasn’t working. The jeers turned to whistles and cat-calls while bricks started flying through the air. One brick narrowly missed Mosley and crashed into a wall behind him. “Red hooligans!” he was heard to shout. More bricks followed and he gave up trying to speak. Fights broke out in the crowd. At one point, a BUF official ordered his members to use their belts while the police eventually recovered a small arsenal of weapons, including iron bars, bicycle chains and even potatoes containing razor blades. According to one report, 20 BUF supporters ended up in hospital along with 100 others.
The fighting lasted an hour and as Mosley was driven away from the scene, a side window in his car was smashed leading to speculation that a shot had been fired at the vehicle as it approached Park Street bridge. No bullet was ever found.
Three months later another clash between the BUF anti-fascists and 6,000 police officers in London’s East End made national headlines and was dubbed the Battle of Cable Street.
A postscript to the violence in Hull was added 31 years later in a letter published by Hull Daily Mail from an anonymous writer called “Unrepentant”. In the letter, the writer belatedly revealed he had bribed two schoolboys to cut the loudspeaker cable before Mosley’s address, instructing them to attach a length of string between the severed ends before placing it out of sight on a nearby shed roof. “On returning I gave them the largest ice cream cornets available, thus completing their adventures, and I looked forward to seeing the events at the meeting which I am sure the boys themselves would enjoy.”
Mosley would probably never know he was undone that night by two young lads eager to get their hands on some free ice cream.
Angus Young