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 grounds. Gadri’s mother remembers visiting the house during her early childhood in the 1950s and sitting at a huge dining table where all the family would eat together, with grandfather al-Hubabi sitting at the head of the table.
0.2 – Muhammad al-Hubabi, in front of his father’s luxury car, taken in Liverpool, circa 1950.
Once re-established in Liverpool, Hassan acquired a number of properties, possibly boarding houses to service the Yemeni sailors visiting and lodging in the port city. One Yemeni migrant worker, Muhammad Kasseum, originally from Ta˓izz in North Yemen, arrived in Liverpool in the late 1930s after living in Marseilles, the southern French port, for seven years. Kasseum eventually married Said and Josephine Hassan’s daughter, Attegar, and the couple first lived in Liverpool before moving to Eccles, Greater Manchester, in the late 1950s. Gadri’s family were one of the first Yemeni families to settle in Eccles and his maternal aunt, Farida Qarina Salih Ali Qaadiri, born in 1952 in Liverpool, is the first Muslim to be buried in the Eccles and Patricroft Muslim Cemetery, after she sadly passed away on 9th September 1972, aged just 20. Kasseum and his wife had a number of children, some born in Liverpool and others in Eccles and he soon established two Arab cafés in the town. The first was located in nearby Monton, but, by 1969, Kasseum had established a new café on Liverpool Road, facing Eccles Town Hall. Kasseum was also a local Yemeni community organizer and, in 1961, on his initiative he organized Arab film shows at the local cinema. Eccles Justices gave Mr Swindlehurst, the proprietor of the Regent Cinema, permission to open on Sunday afternoons to cater for the town’s growing Yemeni population. In June of the same year, the film Samson and Delilah in Arabic, was screened and shortly after there were regular showings of Arabic films and musicals.5 By the early 1960s, a sizeable number of Yemenis had migrated to the industrial cities of the UK to work in the heavy industries of booming post-war Britain. This particular Yemeni migration to Britain is known as ‘second wave migration’. Gadri’s father, Salih Ali Audhali, originally came to Sheffield in the 1950s from Radā’, North Yemen, and he moved to Eccles in the early 1960s. ‘Audhali’ was not Salih’s real name but, rather, the name of a regional southern Yemeni tribe that was allied to the British Protectorate at Aden.
Once established in Eccles, Salih married Muhammad Kasseum’s daughter, a third-generation, British-born Yemeni. Gadri describes the transnational tribal marriage connections in his family as being comparable to a chess game in which, ‘the pieces are moving from the black squares to the white and from the left to the right until you get to the end [of the board]’.6 By the late 1970s, economic recession had gripped Britain’s manufacturing industries and large numbers of migrant Yemeni workers with very few transferrable skills were facing unemployment. As a result, a significant number took up employment opportunities in the Arabian Gulf, along with Gadri’s father, who initially moved to Saudi Arabia to work in the oil industry. In 1981, once established in Saudi Arabia, Salih sent for his family to join him from Britain. Gadri and his family soon settled into their new life in the Middle East, attending school and growing up in a culturally traditional and religiously conservative Saudi society relatively happily for ten years until the outbreak of the first Gulf war in 1991.
When the former president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, invaded Kuwait, Yemen, then one of 15 countries serving on the UN Security Council, abstained from the UN vote condemning Iraq’s actions. As a result, all Yemeni migrants in Saudi Arabia were expelled from the country. In effect this meant that almost one million Yemenis were forced to return to the Yemen virtually overnight. Salih was forced to leave his business and home with his family taking almost nothing with them but the clothes on their backs. Shortly after returning to the Yemen, Salih sadly passed away, forcing Gadri’s mother and younger siblings, as British subjects, to return to the UK in 1997 where they had extended family. As a then newly-married man, Gadri remained in the Yemen along with a couple of older married sisters but in 1998 he decided to pay a surprise visit to his mother and family in the UK. After his KLM flight stopped at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia,
