Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

threatened Butler. ‘I had my tyres slashed and white paint poured all over
my car,’ he says. ‘We had to have a police guard. You felt very vulnerable
up the scaffolding. You could be shaken off it like an apple on a tree.’
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Butler’s further restoration experience in 2011 was less fraught. Local
teachers brought students – most of Bengali and Somali heritage – to
see the mural and question Butler and Mills. Butler enthuses about how
strongly these young people identified with the narrative. Last year, Rachel
Burns, a Jewish teacher whose grandparents inhabited the volatile East
End of the 1930s, worked on a project centred on the mural, involving
four schools, with Jewish and Muslim schools working together. The
students, she says, ‘realised it was not only about racism but also about
solidarity’.
Rushanara Ali was 12 when she first visited the mural with her history
teacher, but its potency stayed with her. As a student at Oxford, she wrote
her first article for the student magazine about the mural. Though it
depicts the struggles of Jewish immigrants, she is emphatic that it ‘belongs
to everybody. It is part of us, part of our community’s local heritage.’
Jones, whose Jewish mother was an anti-fascist activist in the 1930s,
remembers proudly that the mural project was championed by two of
Tower Hamlets’ first Asian councillors.
Cable Street forms the boundary of Ali’s constituency. The south side,
including the mural, is the territory of Jim Fitzpatrick MP. He marvels at
the power of art to communicate ‘to people who might not be interested
in reading history’ its central message: that ‘collective political action,
bringing people together, is the antidote against the far right’s poison’.
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 16