The Last of the Lascars. Mohammed Siddique Seddon

and street entertainers that Salter encountered was a lascar, who he met in both London and Manchester, suggesting that lascars often adopted a vagrant existence to ensure their income. ‘Monkey Abraham’, Salter tells us:

      was another [lascar] who issued daily from the ‘Black Hole’. He earned his title from the queer attitudes he could assume. His head was some distance in advance of his body; his elbows kept crookedly afar from each other, while his boney knees sought closest acquaintance. His dress and cap were bedizened with spangles, and he wore a necklace, in four rows, of beads and strange seashells.⁴⁶

      As an evangelical Christian missionary Salter was extremely critical of what he described as ‘telescopic philanthropy’, the process of sending Christian missionaries to all corners of the empire without addressing the reality of thousands of destitute colonial ‘heathens’ roaming the streets of British cities.⁴⁷

       2.3 – The old British Port Authority building at Steamer Point, Aden, now a museum and known by Yemeni sailors as Dār al-Sayyūn (‘Place of Travel’), taken in December 2004.