a return landing to Jeddah where it was discovered that both engines had actually failed! Nine hours later Gadri boarded a British Airways flight this time flying to London, Heathrow. Once in London, Gadri was obliged to make his own way to Manchester. However, disorientated by his difficult and redirected flight and unaware as to how he might find his way to Manchester, he approached ‘a very tall police officer’ saying:
I’m lost. He [the policemen] said, ‘What’s the story?’ I said I was on the KLM [flight], I was supposed to go to Amsterdam, then Manchester, this is what happened. … What am I supposed to do? I’m in London, I’ve never been here in my life. And he said, ‘You’ve got a Manchester accent!’ … He said, ‘[You’ve been away] eighteen years you say? You’ve still got that Manchester accent!’ But he helped me, and he took me [to the ticket office] to buy a ticket for the train. … He got me on the train.7
Gadri was then aided at Paddington Station by two Algerians who eventually helped him board a train for Manchester and contacted his family to arrange for them to meet him at the station in Manchester, after recognizing Gadri was an Arab, who was ironically lost in his own country! Gadri Salih’s family narrative crystallizes some of the key historical and sociological themes pertinent to British Yemenis explored in this monograph; migration, diaspora, discrimination, community settlement and formation, religion, culture, politics, being and belonging. This book traces the transformation of a nascent group of colonial, oriental merchant sailors into a thriving community as Britain’s oldest established Muslims, but who are practically invisible.
0.3 – Gadri Salih, great-grandson of al-Hubabi, and his fifth-generation, British Yemeni children at their home in Eccles, Greater Manchester.
The first chapter of this book provides a brief history of Yemen from ancient times as a centre of the production of frankincense and myrrh that was much sought after in the ancient world. The incense and spice trade turned Yemen into a place of legend and myth, as well as a very wealthy region both through international trade and agricultural production in its southern highlands. The production of incense and export agriculture meant that ancient Yemen needed its established camel caravan routes to carry goods to Babylonia and Byzantium and its developed entrepôts, which included Aden, to ship merchandise to Upper Egypt, the Mediterranean and across to Abyssinia via the Red Sea and through the Gulf of Aden to the Indian Ocean to India, the Far East and China. The ruling Sabean and Ḥimyarite kingdoms shaped the changing fortunes of the Yemeni people as a combination of economic shifts and natural disasters afflicted the prosperous region and it fell into rapid decline. Arabia Felix or ‘Felicitous Arabia’, as the Romans had called it, soon went from being the ‘land of plenty’ to the ‘land of empty’. The northern highlands of Yemen had been influenced by Byzantine Christianity for many years both from the Hellenistic world and from across the Red Sea in Africa. But when the Ḥimyarite king, Dhū Nawwās converted to Judaism and began persecuting his Christian subjects in Najrān, the powerful Abyssinian kingdom invaded in the early sixth century CE (Common Era) to remove the king and re-establish Christianity as the dominant religion of the Yemen until the introduction of Islam in the early period of Muhammad’s mission.
Dominated for a millennia by the minority ruling Zaydī Imāms, a branch of Shii Islam, the harsh topography and differing terrains of the Yemen have meant that imposing total rule over the whole country has never been completely achieved and the ancient tribal hostilities between the dominant Kathīrī and Qu˓aytī tribes of the southern desert region of Ḥaḍramawt were eventually exploited by the British in the mid-nineteenth century who desperately sought to control the port of Aden to protect its imperial, global entrepreneurialism. It is at this juncture that the historical narrative of this monograph begins as thousands of Yemenis sought employment on ships sailing from Aden, with many sailing to Britain from as early as the 1830s. The establishment of the British Protectorate at Aden in 1839 effectively precipitated the creation of two Yemens; the former northern socialist, Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) and the former southern Marxist, Peoples Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY). Britain’s colony at Aden lasted until 1967 when they were eventually ousted after a fierce independence war. Throughout the changing fortunes 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
