rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">20 Jack London claimed that, ‘No more dreary spectacle can be found on this earth than the whole of the “awful East”, with its Whitechapel, Hoxton, Spitalfields, Bethnal Green, and Wapping to the East India Docks. The colour of life is grey and drab. Everything is helpless, hopeless, unrelieved, and dirty.’21 James Greenwood described the area as a ‘modern Babylon’ and in The Wilds of London (1874) wrote of how
Everybody addicted to the perusal of police reports, as faithfully chronicled by the daily press, has read of Tiger bay, and of the horrors perpetrated there – of unwary mariners betrayed to that craggy and hideous shore by means of false beacons, and mercilessly wrecked and stripped and plundered – of the sanguinary fights of white men and plug-lipped Malays and ear-ringed Africans, with the tigresses who swam in the ‘bay,’ giving it a name. ‘God bless my soul!’ remarks the sitting magistrate.22
It wasn’t only East End blacks who attracted press attention. The spotlight fell on lascars too. These were sailors – Bengalis, Muslims, Malays, Chinese – who sailed to England aboard trading merchant vessels. Many thousands arrived each year in London and in other port cities such as Greenock, Hull and Liverpool. Their voyages had been taxing: poor ventilation and nutrition led to high mortality rates. Dead lascars were often thrown overboard in the English Channel.
Upon disembarking, lascars would go looking for somewhere to lodge until they could find a ship that was heading back to where they came from. They settled near to the docks in Shadwell, an area commonly referred to as ‘Tiger Bay’ or the ‘Black Hole of East London’. Here they lived in dreadful accommodation in dark alleys, narrow streets and blind courts, areas that were considered off-limits to many of the locals. As many as fifty lascars could be found sleeping on the floor of a damp and fever-fogged room. Some slept in tar-boiling sheds in the East India Docks. The floors were hard, the windows unglazed. One eyewitness spoke of how he had reeled from the stench and at the appalling sound of so many ragged-trousered Indians crying out to him for ‘blanket’, ‘more blanket’.23
Lascars were sitting targets for opportunistic criminals. Often these criminals were themselves Indians or Chinamen who lured them to their lodging houses with the promise of cheap rents and ethnic camaraderie. The day-to-day running of these houses was left to the proprietors’ English mistresses. Here and in nearby tap-houses, much to the chagrin of city missionaries, the lascars would sing, drink, smoke opium, dance and jollify with women. They’d also while away their time listening to native fiddlers and musicians. They wanted a bit of fun as well as forgetfulness. A description of Indians in the Royal Sovereign public-house off Shadwell High Street evokes this well:
Here they squatted on straw, passed round a hookah and listened to a turbaned musician play the sitar: He sometimes appeared to work himself up to such a pitch of excitement as to seem about to spring on some one, when he would suddenly relax into comparative quietness, to go through the same again. The song recited the adventures of a rajah’s son who had been carried away to fairyland, and his unhappy father sent messengers everywhere to find him, but without success, till the jins and fairies, after he had married one of them, escorted him back to his father’s house.24
If contemporary accounts are to be believed, landlords were simply buttering up their lascar clientele in order to fleece them. Within a short time they were encouraging their guests to run up huge gambling debts and fobbing snide currency upon them. Sooner or later the guileless lascars would end up in Horsemonger-lane Gaol or City Prison, Holloway, among a motley assortment of maimers, larcenists, brothel-keepers, dog-stealers, bestialists, embezzlers, fortune-tellers and pornographic print sellers. The fate of those who avoided jail was hardly much better. Some ended up in workhouses, others in hospital. These, though, were the lucky ones, for, as Joseph Salter put it:
The captain sails off to another land, and the lascar sinks into the stream of human life, and is noticed no more till he is seen shivering in rags, crouched in the angle of the street, and soliciting, in broken English, the beggar’s pence, or is found dead by some night policeman in Shadwell.25
Small wonder that lascars became a cause célèbre in some philanthropic circles. Reverend James Peggs contrasted the public’s indifference to their plight to the largesse directed towards black slaves during the Abolitionist campaigns of the previous century. ‘Has the Asiatic less claim upon our sympathy, than the Negro?’ he asked, before adding, ‘we want, for Britain to be loved, and her benevolence to flow “through every vein of all her empire.” But should it not be most powerful in the heart of her empire, the seat of her commerce, and the altars of her metropolitan devotion?’26 The eventual establishment in 1846 of the Strangers’ Home For Asiatics went some way, though by no means all, to alleviating the worst distress.
Some Indians did manage to muster a living of sorts – even if only through begging; a gentleman named Kareem was widely known for the diverting spectacle he made by standing under a railway arch in Westminster with his four young children all of whom were dressed in white garments. It was a fleeting vision of purity in a landscape of blackened murk. Indians were most commonly found peddling scarves and foodstuffs in Petticoat Lane, as well as at St Giles and Whitechapel where they performed as contortionists and tumblers for rapt audiences, swept crossings, vended curry-powder, played ‘tum-tum’ while spinning round and round, and sold Christian tracts from boards suspended in front of them. An 1848 issue of Punch depicted one sweeper at St Paul’s churchyard who allegedly demanded a toll for crossing the street. Such contributions to the daily economic life of the city and to the cosmopolitan crosstown traffic were not confined to South Asians. Reflecting on the changing face of the metropolis during Queen Victoria’s reign, one popular historian claimed that many people ‘would not like to lose the courteous negro omnibus conductor nor the picturesque black shop porters who now and again help us to realize that London is the capital of an empire which includes many different races of people’.27
Grim and inglorious as London was for very many blacks and South Asians during the nineteenth century, it seemed like heaven to black people on the other side of the Atlantic. For those toiling as slaves or indentured labourers in the States and the Caribbean, the English metropolis was but a vague and impossible dream. To be poor and vagrant was a small price to pay for individual liberty. It was a place of escape and comfort, just as Paris was to be for novelists such as Chester Himes, Richard Wright and James Baldwin a century later.
Such sentiments are expressed, albeit fleetingly, in the autobiographies of black American fugitive slaves such as Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl (1861). Memoirs like these rarely deal with life in England for more than a few pages at best. They were published to abet American Abolitionism and, consequently, focused on the physical and moral savagery inflicted by Southern plantation owners, as well as on the terrors and hazards slaves faced during their bids for liberty. London, inasmuch as it cropped up at all in the autobiographies of slaves such as Moses Roper or William and Ellen Craft, was a place whose value lay in what it wasn’t (Carolina, say, or Virginia) rather than what it was. London was not a city they fled to; rather, it was a city away from their real homes. If any place was to be romanticized or celebrated, it was the former slave port of Liverpool which was the English city where most fugitive slaves arrived. William Farmer, agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, claimed in his preface to William Wells Brown’s memoirs that Liverpool was ‘to the hunted negro the Plymouth Rock of Old England’.28
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