Obituary: Beatty Orwell, Labour's oldest member

One year ago Beatty Orwell received flowers on her 105th birthday from both Sir Keir Starmer and Sir Tony Blair.

They were celebrating the oldest member of the Labour Party, its former Mayoress and councillor, and the oldest living witness to the Battle of Cable Street. Beatty, who has died two weeks short of her 106th birthday, lived in the East End of London all her life.

Her history spanned two world wars. She was born in Aldgate, the youngest of three sisters, as Zeppelin bombs dropped around her, one landing just a mile from her home. She was bombed out again during the Second World War.

The inter-war years were a time of great conflict and transition. There was a worldwide economic slump caused by the stock market crash; thousands were out of work, particularly in deprived areas such as the East End of London.

Poverty and deprivation made the Jewish community scapegoats, blamed for “taking our jobs”, driving down labour costs and being unscrupulous landlords. Whitechapel in the East End became a volatile and dangerous place for young Jewish women like Beatty Orwell.

Beatty at NO. 10

Beatty visiting No10 Downing Street (Photo: Handout)

Beatty’s father died when she was 13. Her mother’s message to the girls to be strong and independent reinforced her avid political instincts. After leaving school at 14, she worked in the men’s tailoring trade, meeting young socialists in her local Victoria Park.

In 1932, when she was 15, Oswald Moseley formed the far-right nationalist British Union of Fascists (BUF), which encouraged his supporters to attack Jews.

After Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, antisemitic attacks intensified in Britain.

The following year Beatty protested outside a violent fascist rally in Olympia.

The fascists’ thuggery resulted in hundreds of protesters being seriously injured. Beatty remembered that day: “The Blackshirts were really spiteful. I knew it was dangerous. I was clever. I did not get hurt, no way.”

Like many young women of her time, Beatty was frustrated by antisemitism and lack of opportunity.

Interviewed by the JC on her 100th birthday, she said how impressed she had been by the suffragettes. Politics had been in her blood since her teens. And now another war in Europe loomed. Many East End communities feared for their relatives in Germany.

Aged 16 she took part in a 20,000-strong protest march to Hyde Park against Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany. She went to Communist Party socials off Cable Street and joined the Labour League of Youth.

The regular meeting hub for anti fascist groups was Curly’s Café in Spitalfields. Photos of local Jewish boxers adorned the walls and posters called on people to raise funds for communist causes in Russia. Many of Beatty’s friends joined the International Brigades and went to fight in the Spanish Civil War of 1936. Deeply moved by events in Spain, she recalled with sadness the many who did not return.

It was while sitting in Curly’s Café that Beatty heard about the planned Blackshirt march to Cable Street. On the morning of October 4, 1936, Communist Party vans came out with loudhailers urging everyone to join the protest, just as Arnold Wesker powerfully recalled in his play Chicken Soup with Barley.

Beattie and her friend Ginnie joined the protest and saw “millions of people there”, all of them shouting. They saw police on horseback, Irish and Jews but no fascists. “They came from everywhere to join us in the fight, along with women, men, children, just loads of people”.

Nearly 300,000 people protested. At the meeting point near Aldgate pump “a forest of red flags and banners arose from the crowds, proclaiming: “They shall not pass!” Irish dockers in their thousands joined in sympathy with the Jews who had supported their strike in 1912.
But the mood changed when mounted police charged into the protesters, indiscriminately attacking them with batons.

Beatty and Ginnie were wedged against a shop window which shattered under the impact, causing Ginnie to cut her hand.

At the hospital they found many others who had been injured in the fighting.

John and Beatty Orwell Mayor and Mayoress of Tower Hamlets with Prime Minister Harold Wilson

John and Beatty Orwell, Mayor and Mayoress of Tower Hamlets, with Prime Minister Harold Wilson (Photo: Handout)

But as the fascists assembled in their thousands, banging drums and giving the Nazi salute, skirmishes broke out everywhere. In Cable Street the girls faced a fierce battle between protesters and more than 6,000 police officers. Nearly 100 arrests were made.

There was an indelible moment for Beatty when the protesters began singing and the police announced over the loudspeaker: “They are not going to come. They will not pass.” The battle was won and celebrations continued into the night, in the pubs and streets of the East End.

A month after the Battle of Cable Street the government passed the 1936 Public Order Act, banning the wearing of political uniforms in public. In Victoria Park Beatty met Irish Catholic John Orwell.

“They called us the Kellys and the Cohens”, Beatty reflected. They married two years later. She was the first in her family to marry out, but her family accepted him and made them a small wedding, which included chicken soup and pickled herring,

“That’s how the East End was,” she said, “the Irish and the Jews together.” The same year, 1938, Beatty joined the Labour Party. During the Second World War she moved to Oxford and later Leeds, working in a munitions factory, and then in a men’s trouser factory making uniforms for soldiers. She returned to East London where she and John raised their three children.

In 1966 the couple became mayor and mayoress of Tower Hamlets, and they both worked hard to improve their local area. John was one of the first local politicians to lobby and campaign for the rights of the growing Bangladeshi community. When John died in 1972, Beatty became a councillor in her own right. She remained in her home until she was 99, before moving to a ground-floor flat in Spitalfields Housing Development.

In her eighties, she joined Jewish Care’s Brenner Stepney Community Centre, which supports the remaining members of the older Jewish East End community, and continued volunteering to help run the Friendship Club at Collingwood Estate until she was 99.

When she could no longer physically attend the centre, friends, staff and volunteers continued to visit her at home where she was supported by her children, June, Benny and Maureen, who all describe her as “absolutely fantastic”, an amazing and much-loved matriarch.

“We are immensely proud of our mum. She had a very eventful life. Born in humble surroundings in the East End of London, she worked hard all of her life, but along the way she met the Queen at Buckingham Palace and had tea at 10 Downing Street and met then prime minister Harold Wilson, which really isn’t bad for a girl from Petticoat Lane.”

Tributes came from Daniel Carmel-Brown, Jewish Care chief executive, who described Beatty “as a role model to us all… never afraid to stand up for what she believed in and to fight for others. She inspired an abundance of love, warmth and sense of community by all who knew her.”

According to Janet Foster, chair of the Friends of Stepney & Brenner Committee, “Beatty was the most open-minded and inspirational woman and I feel privileged to have known her all my life… she never lost her spirit of fairness, love of community and devotion to her family.

She also had a great sense of style and such a positive outlook on life.” Beatty is survived by her three children, 12 grandchildren, 21 great grandchildren and eight great-great-grandchildren.

Beatty Orwell; born: July 7, 1917. Died June 23, 2023.

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Obituary

Fascism