Alex Daley @thealexdaley Historian & author
WHITECHAPEL, east London, 1931. A large throng of working-class men – their heads mostly covered by cloth caps – listens intently to a smartly dressed man with battered features. His Cockney voice booms through the crowd and is clearly audible in the British Movietone newsreel clip I am studying via YouTube 89 years on. “Today, my friends, I want to tell you why I have joined the New Party,” he says before extolling the merits of the party’s leader, the notorious fascist and anti- Semite Sir Oswald Mosley. The puzzling thing about this clip is that the speaker is none other than East End boxing legend Ted Kid Lewis, a Jewish former world champion who was an idol to Jewish people everywhere.