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During the summer of 1962, a demonstration organized by the British National Socialist Movement (NSM) was held in Trafalgar Square, in central London. Nazi activists are supervised by police officers present to ensure that freedom of expression is respected. As soon as the clashes escalate with anti-fascist supporters who come to respond to racist and anti-Semitic slogans, the police intervene, most often to place the counter-protesters in custody.
In Ridley Road, a BBC mini-series broadcast since February 7 on Canal+, this mobilization is both replayed and supplemented by archive images, to better remind us that when the British capital was about to become the “Swinging London”, between the revival of cinema, the eruption of the Beatles, the explosion of fashion and rock, this festive era had its dark side. The NSM held up swastikas and placards that read: “Free Britain from Jewish power.” Its leader, Colin Jordan, who passed through Cambridge, viewed Oswald Mosley, then leader of the fascist Union Movement party, as a “fascist hide”, very good “delicate”, according to him, with regard to British Jewish citizens.
“Campaign of Terror”
Sarah Solemani, the showrunner of Ridley Road, was well aware of this sad revival of the early 1960s. His father grew up during this period in an Orthodox Jewish family in Stamford Hill, north London, where he witnessed several anti-Semitic attacks. But it was after reading the eponymous novel by Jo Bloom, unpublished in France, that she took the measure of the neo-Nazi threat then weighing on Great Britain and found the narrative framework to bring it to the screen.
“To protect themselves from this violence, a militant branch of the Jewish community created the 62 Group, inspired by the anti-fascist resistance movement of Cable Street in the 1930s. The further I got into my research, the more I took the extent of the campaign of terror orchestrated by the Nazi movement. Synagogues were burned. A Molotov cocktail had killed a young Jewish boy. Despite testimonies telling law enforcement that NSM members had long targeted the Cazenove Road synagogue, police concluded it was a party gone wrong, not a bombing, which did not warrant any further investigation. »
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