particular migration phenomenon has had the most significant impact on modern Britain, indelibly changing and reshaping our society across its social and political spectrums. The contemporary British ‘migration experience’ has also produced a plethora of academic writings engaged with a multitude of disciplines, producing many sociological theories all attempting to explain and quantify the effects of large-scale Muslim settlement on wider society. But where the end of the twentieth century witnessed a proliferated interest of Islam and Muslims in Britain and the West, not just through academic studies, but also through media representations, social debates and political legislation, the beginning of the previous century was instead marked by indifference and a degree of colonial cajolery towards the subjugated Muslim ‘other’ in imperial Britain.
Yemeni migration and settlement to Britain not only spans the breadth of these two historical events and particular migration experiences, it precedes both events by more than half a century. As a result of the early migrations to Britain, Yemeni communities in Cardiff and South Shields represent the oldest continuous Muslim presence in the UK. Yet, their story has remained largely unknown and virtually untold. In exploring the unique history of Yemeni Muslims in Britain, this study asserts that the generally-accepted beginnings of Yemeni community settlement in Britain, thought to be around the 1880s, needs to be revised to a point some 50 years earlier. As this book suggests, there is some evidence to challenge current received opinion.
Although the British Protectorate at Aden was not established until 1839, after its capture by the British East India Company (EIC), the company’s vessels had been visiting the port from as early as 1609 when it was then under Portuguese control. By 1829, the EIC considered making Aden a coaling station for its various steam vessels travelling from the Far East, India, Africa and Europe, transporting raw materials from the colonies and then shipping out finished manufactured goods from Britain to the world. In 1835, Captain Haines, an employee of the British East India Company, docked at Aden and prospected the port on behalf of the Company as a possible major strategic coaling station and entrepôt for British vessels and goods sailing to and from India and the Far East. Almost immediately, Company ships began docking at the port. In much the same way that Indian lascars1 found their way to British ports on EIC vessels from the ports of Calcutta and Bombay as early as the seventeenth century, it is reasonable to assume that Yemeni baḥriyyah (sing., baḥrī, meaning literally ‘of the sea’, but understood as ‘sailor’), extremely competent at negotiating the sea trade winds to India and China from the Arabian Peninsula for more than two millennia, also signed up on British ships either sailing from Aden, East Africa or India. What is certain is that, by the 1830s, Yemenis from the southern Yemen tribes, allied through treaties with Britain, would have joined British merchant vessels. This fact is also evidenced by the rapid population increase of Aden after the British occupation. Further, the Aden Protectorate was ruled by the British through the India Office from 1839 until 1937, when it finally received ‘Colony’ status and was then ruled as a separate entity from India. Before 1937, ‘Adenese’ subjects would have been administered and, therefore, considered as colonial Indian subjects, thus adding to the ‘invisibility’ of Yemeni sailors among the lascars residing in British ports. It is for the above stated reasons that the timeline for Yemeni migration and settlement in Britian needs to be located around 1836 rather than the 1880s.
0.1 – Saeed Hassan (al-Hubabi), his wife Josephine and their son, Saeed Kasseum in the living room of their family home in Liverpool, circa 1950.
But who are the Yemenis, from where do they originate and why did they settle in Britain? The publication before you is presented as a historical narrative that not only addresses the above important questions, but also captures the British Yemeni story by constructing a detailed and integrated account extracted from contemporaneous writings, newspaper reports, magazine articles, personal accounts, achieves and recollections collected through ethnographic research and both general and academic publications. The book is also largely informed by my own research on British Yemenis that was originally undertaken as a doctoral thesis.2 The eclectic source material used in this publication has been woven together to produce a comprehensive social history of Yemeni Muslim migration and settlement in Britain from the earliest time to the present. The personal narratives, recollections and family histories of British Yemenis are an extremely important and unique source of material that both inform and shape the details of this book’s chronological narrative. An example of how rich a single family history can be in terms of individual members, their lived experiences and the specific events that mirror the wider context of British Yemeni history in which they unfold, are explored in this publication and briefly exampled below.
Gadri Salih is a British Yemeni who was born in Eccles, Greater Manchester, in 1975. He is the fourth generation of his family to be born in Britain and also to have migrated to Britain over the last 120 years or so. Gadri’s incredible family story offers an amazing ‘snap-shot’ of a unique British Muslim history that is practically unknown to most. Gadri’s maternal great-grandfather, Said Hassan, a lascar sailor from Radā’, a provincial town in the northern highlands of Yemen, came to Britain in the late nineteenth century, most probably around 1890. Known locally in South Shields and Liverpool as ‘Al-Hubabi’, Hassan soon established himself as a boarding house owner in the Holborn area of South Shields, where a growing number of Arab-only lodgings were founded for the numerous lascar sailors. The term ‘lascar’, is an anglicized version of the Arabic term al-˓askar meaning, ‘one employed in military service’, and it was used by the colonial British to mean an ‘oriental merchant sailor’ originally connected to the British East India Company, established in 1600. The term is actually unfamiliar to most Yemeni sailors who instead used the Arabic term, baḥrī, to describe their merchant sailing profession. The former lascar, Hassan, became extremely wealthy as a result of his entrepreneurial skills, eventually owning several boarding houses, an import-export business between Aden and the UK, a small shipping company with a flagship called Sheba on which Gadri’s grandmother and her siblings travelled to the Yemen from South Shields in the early 1930s. Further, on 5 June 1929, Said Hassan applied to South Shield’s Town Council for a licence from the Watch Committee to operate a private bus service from South Shields to London. While Alderman Lawson could see no genuine reason why Councillor Cheeseman disagreed to the granting of the licence, on the racist grounds that South Shields had, he said, become a ‘dumping ground for other places as far as the Arabs were concerned’, additionally, Councillor Scott took further exception to the fact that Said Hassan, as an Arab boarding-house keeper, could afford to spend £2000 on a bus when, he said, ‘some English lodging-house keepers could not even pay their rent.’ However, despite the unusual and rather discriminatory objections, the council agreed to grant the licence.3 Hassan also met Prince Hussein, son of the ruling Zaydī Imām of what was then North Yemen, during the Prince’s visit to South Shields between 21st and 22nd May 1937. Richards Lawless’ book, From Ta˓izz to Tyneside (1995), contains a photograph of Said Hassan accompanied by his wife, Josephine Hassan (neé Irwin) meeting the Prince in his boarding house during the visit, in which Hassan was presented with a ceremonial jambiyyah (Yemeni dagger) by the Prince.4
Although a shrewd and accomplished businessman, Hassan’s many boarding house properties were actually legally registered in other people’s names and when economic depression led to mass unemployment among the Yemeni sailors in South Shields, Cardiff and Liverpool, many boarding-house keepers were bankrupted simply because their lodgers could not pay their keep. In October 1930, six Arab boarding-house keepers from South Sheilds wrote to the Under Secretary for India, requesting financial help for the stranded sailors and listing a number of boarding-house keepers who were owed considerable debts by their borders. Among those listed was, ‘Mrs Said [Josephine] Hassan of 10 Chapter Row, £672’, a huge amount of money at that time. It is possible that financial difficulties forced Said Hassan and his family to eventually relocate to Liverpool by the end of the 1930s where he purchased a large, detached, Victorian mansion house, ‘The Hollies’, former family home of Frank Hornby, MP, (1863–1936), the founder of the Hornby toy manufacturing company, creator of Meccano and Hornby Trains, and later an MP, on Station Road, in Maghull, Liverpool, complete with its own