Content area
Full Text
William Fishman, universally known as Bill, who has died aged 93, was one of the pioneers of history from below, unearthing the stories of ordinary people's lives. He focused on the impoverished and marginalised communities of London's East End in the 19th and early 20th centuries, illuminating the remarkable political movements that emerged from within them through books, lectures and walking tours. A rigorous researcher, Fishman was also eloquent, humorous and entertaining, and a passionate advocate of social justice.
The anarchist writer John Henry Mackay had branded the East End "the empire of hunger", and Friedrich Engels lamented that its inhabitants passively submitted to their fate. But Fishman cast the local population in a different light. In East End Jewish Radicals 1875-1914 (1975) and East End 1888 (1988) the area's underclass are no longer hopeless victims to be pitied or sentimentalised. Instead, the immigrant sweatshop workers slaving for 14 hours a day, matchmakers paid a pittance by "enlightened" Quaker employers, and dockers who handle the world's riches but struggle to pay the rent, are agents of change. They have names and families, and through self-organisation and collective action they win significant victories.
Born in the East End into an immigrant tailoring family, Bill was the son of the Russian-born Simon, and Annie (nee Orloff), whose forebears had come from Ukraine. When Bill was 11, his family moved from the heart of the Jewish immigrant area to a more mixed one closer to the docks,...