The Cable Street cinema

My 2×great-grandfather was born in 1877 in Lubień Kujawski, a small shtetl in Russian-ruled Poland, and came to London's East End in the great wave that followed the 1881 pogroms and the May Laws. The East End the family landed in — Whitechapel, St George in the East — was crowded, poor, Yiddish-speaking, and ferociously ambitious for its children.

In 1912, in the first boom years of the cinema, he opened the Cable Picture Palace on Cable Street — a picture house for an audience of dockers and tailors and their families, in a street that was then simply a poor East End thoroughfare and not yet a name in history books. An immigrant from a Polish village, eleven years off the boat, owned a cinema.

He died young, in 1923, in St George in the East. His widow — Warsaw-born, herself of the post-1881 generation — kept the cinema going for another eighteen years: through the Depression, through the October day in 1936 when the East End barricaded Cable Street itself and turned back Mosley's fascists at the family's front door, and into the war.

On one of the last and heaviest nights of the Blitz, a raid destroyed the Cable Picture Palace. No one rebuilt it; within a generation the East End the cinema had served was dispersing to the suburbs. The widow lived on until 1959, in Westcliff-on-Sea, like half of Jewish East London. The cinema survives in licensing records, in trade directories — and here.