of Yemen’s long history, migration and diaspora have been common themes, as Yemenis sought a better life elsewhere through trade or work.
The second chapter explores the earliest arrival and settlement of Yemenis sailors to the British port cities of Cardiff, South Shields, London, Liverpool and, later, Manchester, as recounted through the personal narratives and tales of lascars present in imperial Britain. The writings of the Reverend Joseph Salter, who worked as a Christian missionary amongst South Asian, Arab and Far Eastern Oriental sailors for many years produced two published accounts of his philanthropic missionary work amongst the abandoned and desperate lascars scattered across the port cities of Britain in the nineteenth century. They provide harrowing accounts of the deprivation and discrimination suffered by many of the early lascars. As the British Empire rapidly expanded, the terminologies and typologies relating to its colonial subjects became devoid of the details and nuances of specific ethnic subgroupings and instead the ubiquitous term ‘lascar’ was applied to any oriental sailor whether he came from Malacca, Bombay or Aden. In the use of this overarching term, ethnic subgroups; like the Malays, Indians and Yemenis, became subsumed as they were woven into the collective term, ‘lascar’. It is therefore more than likely that the ‘Arabs’ referred to by the Reverend Joseph Salter, during his nineteenth century missionary work among the Oriental sailors stranded in British ports, were in fact Yemenis. As my research confirms, Yemeni settlers were recorded in the port of Cardiff as early as the 1860s. This particular form of early migration was largely facilitated through the custom of the muqaddam (‘representative’) and the muwassiṭ (‘middleman’), who acted as subcontractors to the shipping agents and port authorities in providing ships’ crews, usually made up of around 12 Yemeni lascars from the same tribe. In the process, the muqaddam or muwassiṭ would invariably profit from a small fee and commission from both the shipping agent or port authority and the employed Yemeni lascar.
As the lascar presence increased across British docklands, a series of discriminatory legislation aimed at limiting the numbers of lascars in the ports and shipping industry was put into place from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. The lascars faced an unbelievable degree of racism and discrimination and the contemporaneous accounts of their difficult and often squalid living conditions also document a number of unique examples of early Muslim ritual practices and religious rites within the then burgeoning British Muslim community. Amongst the new measures aimed at curtailing lascar settlement in Britain were ‘coloured only’ sailors’ rests and lodging houses. In the process, there was a pairing-off of lascars who wished to lodge with people of the same language and culture as themselves and, as a result, ‘Arab only’ boarding houses began to appear in South Shields, Cardiff and Liverpool. However, despite the exclusionary measures, Yemeni sailors not only continued to inhabit the port cities but many began to marry local women and raise families, forming tight-knit communities identified by their racial and religious otherness and contrasted with the wider society of the various cities in which they settled. The multi-racial, multicultural docklands communities largely settled by Yemeni lascars became exoticized by the locals and Cardiff’s Butetown docklands area became known as ‘Tiger Bay’, South Shields’ Holborn and Laygate areas were named locally as ‘Little Arabia’ and the Trafford Park area of Manchester Docks, was known as the ‘Barbary Coast’.
Chapter 3 explores the nascent formation of early Yemeni communities across the British port cities and the emergence of the Arab boarding houses and cafés that facilitated the cultural and religious needs of the settling lascars. The chapter illustrates that despite the development of small, ‘incapsulated’8 communities, many lascars faced extremely high levels of discrimination as their white maritime peers raised continued objections to the ‘black and coloured’ seamen commissioned at cheaper rates by the shipping companies. Ironically, the establishment of national labour unions in the British shipping industry were mobilized in an effort to reduce the numbers of non-white sailors employed on ships. By the turn of the twentieth century, it was estimated that the number of ‘coloured’ seamen working on British vessels was around a staggering 40,000. However, union pressure resulted in a huge reduction of almost a third by 1912. In a desperate bid for work, Yemeni sailors were forced to travel between the docks of Cardiff, South Shields, London, Hull, Liverpool and Manchester, a phenomenon known as the ‘Tramp trade’.
By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the situation of Yemeni lascars took a dramatic turn when the British government was forced to rely on its colonial subjects to aid the war effort. Thousands of Yemenis based in British ports volunteered to serve on seconded merchant vessels used to ship vital supplies to the troops deployed in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Additionally, the increase in demand for colonial sailors to replace the British men in military service provided further employment opportunities for Yemeni lascars while others found jobs in the munitions factories of Manchester or the shipbuilding and auxiliary industries such as the timber yards. By 1919, serious economic recession and major changes in the shipping industry meant that many Yemeni lascars became redundant. In the increasing racial tensions that flared up in the interwar period during the desperate search for work within the shipping industry, a number of so-called ‘Arab riots’ broke out across the British ports. Newspaper articles inflamed the situation by making a series of unfounded claims against the minority lascars. As the race riots continued, on and off until the 1930s, the army was often employed to quell the disturbances. The developing Yemeni community faced a litany of discriminatory abuse that was aimed not just at the settler migrants, but at their indigenous wives, who were accused of being sexually deviant because of their liaisons and marriages to the Arabs, and their ‘mixed race’ children, who were portrayed as the ‘half-bred’ byproducts of what were considered to be most unsavoury matrimonies. The social exclusion faced by the Yemeni communities directly after the First World War resulted in their effective marginalization across all realms of British public and social life, despite the huge sacrifices the community had made in defence of Britain during the war.
If invisibility is a recurring theme in the history of Yemeni settlement in Britain, Chapter 4 explores their growing visibility as a direct result of the later employment struggles that directly follow the First World War and the interwar economic depression of the 1920s and 1930s. Yemenis initially lost their visibility and became submerged into broader racist and discriminatory terms such as ‘blacks’ and ‘Arabs’ during this period. It was during the interwar years that three significant events occurred relating to British Yemenis. The first was the forced and voluntary repatriation from Britain of large numbers of unemployed Yemenis during the great depression of the early twentieth century. In addition to the imposed deportations, thousands of Yemenis returned voluntarily or sought better employment opportunities in the developing Arab Gulf countries. The second event was the introduction of a spiritually dynamic and well-organized religious movement that took root across the British Yemeni communities from the 1930s to the mid-1950s. This movement, the ˓Alawī Sufi ṭarīqah, introduced by the charismatic Yemeni religious scholar, Shaykh Abdullah Ali al-Hakimi, who transformed the lives of the Yemeni sailors, their British Muslim convert wives and their ‘mixed race’ (or muwalladūn) children.
Once again, the Yemeni community moved from being unassuming and unseen to becoming religiously and culturally distinctive and highly visible. The experience of the ˓Alawī Sufi ṭarīqah within the British Yemeni community is a unique and fascinating chapter of British Muslim history that completely transformed the British Yemeni communities. Al-Hakimi, almost single-handed, established a number of religious centres across the towns and cities where Yemenis were located. He also educated the many indigenous wives of the sailors, founding Islamic classes along with Qur’ān classes for their children. During significant religious festivals, street parades were organized across the port cities in which Yemenis were settled. The third event was the dramatic change in the shipping industry as vessels moved from steam power, provided by coal shovelled into the engine boilers by Yemeni lascar, ‘stokers’ or ‘donkeymen’ to oil-fuelled ships. This development forced an ‘inward migration’ of Yemeni communities into the industrial centres of urban Britain, away from their traditional maritime employment and isolated multicultural docklands communities. In