During the period of this study, lascars could always be found in Britain’s deep-water home ports – a familiar part of everyday life in these towns. Most were between voyages and waiting to ship out again, possibly back to an Indian port where they were legally permitted to be paid off. A minority had, like Rasool Khan, decided to forfeit their wages, desert and take their chances in Britain. For both these groups, boarding houses and cafes operated by South Asians, such as that of the Nairoollas, were often their primary destination. Balachandran has noted that some lascar crews due to spend an extended spell in London or other British ports were lodged by shipping companies in boarding houses. There, ‘they had relative freedom and opportunity to explore their surroundings, acquire or deepen new experiences, and consolidate old relationships and make new ones.’267 Time spent in shore-based social spaces enabled new arrivals to develop a rudimentary working knowledge of the requirements and restrictions imposed by the authorities, where to locate potential work or opportunities for petty trade and the various likely responses of British natives to them. Haider Khan recalled he and his lascar comrades being mocked by some ‘civilized’ Londoners while dressed in their ‘scant Punjabi attire’. In West Hartlepool in the north-east of England, however, they found a more hospitable atmosphere:
The next evening we went into town to purchase some soap and other essentials and have a look around. The town, I recall, was neat and tidy, and the people seemed healthy and amiable. The attendants at the stores were mostly women, as all able bodied men were either serving with the fighting forces or working in industry. The shop attendants were polite and courteous, a refreshing change from the less-than-gracious Londoners. We would point out to the attendants what seemed to be what we were looking for, and they would bring the items to us for our approval or rejection, since we did not know enough English to tell them what we wanted.268
The forays of lascar seafarers into the districts surrounding the immediate dockside provided them with invaluable intercultural experience beyond that represented by their exploitation in the stokehold. As some pioneers, like Haider Khan and Naqibullah Nairoolla, jumped ship during their forays, they were well positioned to contribute to the early development of a rudimentary cultural infrastructure, which included the provision and preparation of suitable foodstuffs and spaces for prayer. This afforded later sojourners greater opportunity to make their way successfully in Britain and provided them with the opportunity to extend their stay, even to the point of facilitating long-term settlement in Britain. For example, in 1909, a ‘human-interest’ article in the Hull Daily Mail described an incident when ‘a couple of Lascars… arrived… at the slaughter-house of J. Fisher, Sewer-lane’ in the city. The men, from a vessel moored in the city’s Alexandra Dock, were there to purchase and to slaughter
267 Balachandran, Globalizing Labour?, 149–150. 268 Khan, Chains to Lose, 108–109.
sheep according to Islamic rites for consumption by the Muslim crew. After the halal
slaughter was concluded the carcasses were taken to the ship, ‘there to be cut up, mixed with rice, and made into Oriental hotch-potch.’269 No doubt, once such knowledge of obtaining livestock in Britain, and the means to slaughter it, had been obtained by lascars, it was a relatively straightforward step, upon desertion, to supply
halal meat as an independent petty trader in Britain. For business-minded South Asians, the step from responsibility for helping provision a lascar-crewed ship, docked in Hull or London, to provisioning a small but growing community of their compatriots and kinsmen may have been simply a matter of sufficient acumen and a decision of when, and where, to desert. Twenty years later, the popular weekly magazine John Bull published an article which, although sensationalist in tone, referred to ‘Moslems’ secret cellar slaughter houses’. These were apparently ad hoc facilities housed in the cellars of boarding houses for ‘Asiatic seamen’. Here, the article claimed, the unlicensed slaughter of beasts was performed according to Islamic rites in unsanitary conditions to supply the demand for halal meat from Muslim seafarers. Notwithstanding the tone of this report, the article, clipped and filed by a civil servant of the India Office in Whitehall, provides us with a clue that the development of a basic Muslim cultural infrastructure, capable of supporting further immigration, was underway by the inter-war period.270
Others lascars planned their desertion and had prepared for that moment financially. In the accumulation of cash by means of petty trade in their ports of call, they developed a skillset that aided their transition from lascar seafarer to sojourning worker or trader. Reports and letters in the newspapers of Britain’s empire-facing home ports demonstrate that the trading activities of serving lascars, together with a small number of their former colleagues, had been established well before the First World War. This is underscored by the 1911 census which records Joe Abdula, a 52 year old single man boarding in Campbell Street, Kingston-Upon-Hull, a couple of hundred yards from the city’s Albert Docks.271 His occupation is noted as ‘fisherman - hawker’ and his birthplace as Calcutta. Abdula was a particularly early settler, but from the few details the census furnishes, we can reasonably infer the reason he appears at this time and place. Born in Calcutta he had most probably signed on as a lascar under Asiatic articles. After learning his trade he had at some point decided to jump ship at a British port and continued to work as a seafarer out of Hull with its, then booming, fishing industry. He lodged with Arthur McCailey, a seaman, his wife Fanny and their daughter, just off the Hessle Road, the centre of Hull’s trawling community. His lodgings were also a short walk away from St Andrew’s Dock, the centre of the city’s fish trade. However, Abdula’s occupation is additionally listed as ‘hawker’ and his employer as a fish merchants. It therefore appears that he was flexible in his approach toward his principal occupation of fishing. Like many of the
269Daily Mail (Hull), 22 April 1909, p.7.
270John Bull (London), 28 September 1929, filed within BL IOR: L/E/953/350 – Treatment by Home Office of Coloured Seamen as Aliens.
271 TNA, 1911 Census For England & Wales, McCailey household, 1 Wilberforce Terrace, Campbell St., Kingston Upon Hull.
South Asian men in this study, he undertook one of many possible shore-based occupations when seafaring work was either unavailable or unappealing.
While Joe Abdula either fished or hawked his wares on the streets of Hull as a resident, other Indian traders were visible on the streets of Yorkshire’s imperial port as visitors. These individuals have been traced through local press reports of lascar activity and, through the types of goods for sale on British streets during this early period, it is possible to piece together the development of this important strand in Indian men’s employment strategies. As an example of this nascent trade, the letters page of an August 1887 edition of the Hull Daily Mail featured a reader’s letter complaining that he frequently witnessed ‘lascars in Hull streets offering for sale bottles of currie [sic] powder and such like stuff, without interference of the police’.272
The following year, the same paper report a trial of ‘five Lascars and four Panjaubees’, part of the crew of the recently docked vessel Knight Errant on charges of causing disorder and obstruction on the city’s Hedon Road. The men apparently became victims of their own success as street traders when they attracted ‘a vast concourse of people’ due to their ‘striking and attractive character’. According to the report they left the ship carrying a ‘large quantity of sticks, fans, and feathers, which they endeavoured to dispose of…’. Through the services of an interpreter the men explained to the magistrate that this was their first visit to England and ‘knew nothing of the laws of the country, but it was their custom when in port to endeavour to sell articles so as earn little more than their pay from the ship, which was very small.’273 Such activities were commonplace among lascars endeavouring to make their seafaring labours more profitable. Many items, including contraband, from tobacco to monkeys, parrots, snakes and wild birds to spices, coral, carpets, cannabis resin and ‘native curios’ are all mentioned in reports from across Britain. The Glasgow Evening Post even reported a thriving trade in Indian mongooses. These were, according to the paper, happily supplied by lascars to enable grateful Glaswegians to control their troublesome rat population.274
A useful insight into the trading activities of lascars was provided by Haider Khan who recalled his time working the stokehold of a British troopship stationed
272Daily Mail (Hull), 10 August 1887, p.3. 273Daily Mail (Hull), 3 December 1888, p.3.
274Evening Post (Glasgow), 23 November, 1901, p.5. Figure 3.1
Lascar seamen are searched in their quarters by Port of London officials
near Basra during the First World War. Here, a number of the men regularly ‘exercised their entrepreneurial skills’, some becoming ‘quite successful traders.’ Obtaining leave from the serang they would use small rowing boats to travel to the city to purchase goods, including fresh foodstuffs, such as grapes and oranges, pomegranates, dates and raisins – all items that newly-arrived troops, many also from the subcontinent, had little or no access to. Positioning themselves mid-river, the lascar traders would greet incoming troop ships with their wares. Haider Khan estimated that men on their days off could make a profit of thirty to forty rupees in this manner. However, he also noted that the serang would extract a cut of this profit and he, in his turn, ‘would occasionally present bottles of whisky to the Chief Engineer, who had become habituated to such bribes and (who) would unnecessarily harass the whole crew if he did not receive them.’275
Trading between ports en route to their destination was not only a common means of supplementing meagre wages, it also allowed men to build up sufficient reserves of cash to support their successful desertion in Britain. A reserve of cash was essential in preventing destitution for the earliest pioneers – those for whom the social and cultural infrastructure of migration and settlement had not yet been developed. Lascar seamen deserting their ships in later years were able to rely on cash loans and other forms of credit such as food and accommodation provided by kinsmen, fellow
biradari members, or countrymen, often
boarding house keepers and cafe proprietors. Trading activity while still engaged in seafaring also allowed the accumulation of sufficient capital to invest in a pedlar’s licence and a small stock of goods to be peddled on the streets of Britain. The following sub-sections will examine the British- based phenomenon of the South Asian pedlar in further detail.