My friend and mentor Max Levitas, who has died aged 103, took part in the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 and was a lifelong communist who served as a councillor in the East End of London for many years.

Max was 21 when he took part in the 1936 blockade that prevented Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists marching into Cable Street and Whitechapel, acting as a runner by passing messages between leaders of the demonstration.

He was born in the Portobello area of Dublin, one of three children of Harry Levitas, a tailor, and his wife, Leah (nee Rick), Jewish immigrants from Latvia and Lithuania who met and married in Ireland after escaping Tsarist pogroms. He went to St Peter’s school in the city, but his education stopped when the family moved in 1927 to Glasgow, from where they subsequently went to London in 1931. In the East End Max followed his father into the tailoring trade and became involved in communist politics.

Frustrated with unfair rent increases in his local area, he led a four-month rent strike in 1939, a campaign that led him to meet Sadie Freedman, a seamstress. They married in 1941.

During the second world war Max was a fire warden during the worst ravages of the blitz and in 1945 he was elected as a Communist party councillor for Stepney, serving in that role for almost 15 years.

Even after he stopped being a councillor he continued as a community organiser, speaking at rallies, mobilising the local community to protest against big rent hikes, supporting anti-racism campaigns and working with various tenants’ associations and pensioner groups.

He continued working until the age of 80, latterly as a market trader, travelling up to Dunstable market in Bedfordshire from his home in Whitechapel.

In his leisure time he was a keen Tottenham Hotspur fan, and was also a regular visitor to under-12 team matches at Stepney FC, the football club of which I am chair.

At the age of 101 he became the world’s oldest Dementia Friend, helping people with the condition.

Sadie died in 1988 and their son, Steve, also predeceased him.