London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City. Sukhdev Sandhu

were reduced to the status of spectacles. They became living, breathing, and, in Baartman’s case, steatopygous incarnations of the cabinets of curiosities so popular during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

      Black people, whether descendants of those who had come to London during the eighteenth century or themselves recent arrivals from Central Africa and the Caribbean, could also be found living in the portside communities at Shadwell, Limehouse and Poplar. They worked on boats, lifting crates and bales, clearing decks, rolling casks, arranging ropes and sails. Those without regular employment could be found at West India Docks at six in the morning queuing up with hundreds of other men – ex-clerks, discharged sailors, Irish immigrants – for the chance to lug boxes of tea from wharf to warehouse. This state of affairs angered some. A dock-labourer’s wife interviewed in John Law’s Out of Work (1888) cried out, ‘“Why should they come here, I’d like to know? London ain’t what it used to be; it’s just like a foreign city. The food ain’t English; the talk ain’t English. Why should all of them foreigners come here to take food out of our mouths, and live on victuals we wouldn’t give to pigs?”’¹⁸

      Not all blacks found jobs. Those who didn’t were likely to be sent to workhouses, the raw and unsentimental nature of whose inhabitants is ably captured by Henry Mayhew and John Binny:

      their behaviour was very noisy and disorderly, coarse and ribald jokes were freely cracked, exciting general bursts of laughter; while howls, cat-calls, and all manner of unearthly and indescribable yells threatened for a time to render all attempts at order utterly abortive. At one moment, a lad would imitate the bray of the jackass, and immediately the whole hundred and fifty would fall to braying like him. Then some ragged urchin would crow like a cock; whereupon the place would echo with a hundred and fifty cock-crows! Next, as a negro-boy entered the room, one of the young vagabonds would shout out swe-ee-p; this would be received with peals of laughter, and followed by a general repetition of the same cry. Presently a hundred and fifty cat-calls, of the shrillest possible description, would almost split the ears.¹⁹

      The East End in which blacks lived became synonymous in Victorian times with spiritual degradation. It was a man-trap, a Satanic stronghold, a dumping ground for human flotsam. It wasn’t just that the area was blighted by poverty; the colour of its inhabitants encouraged reactionaries to see it as a place of contamination, of moral canker. The problem was one of poor (racial) hygiene. In sensationalist newspaper reports as well as in the accounts of social workers, it was seen as a dark zone which needed Christian reclamation just as urgently as those heathen lands thousands of miles away which were being penetrated by explorers and missionaries. General Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, wrote a tract about London entitled In Darkest England (1890) that portrayed the East End as a ‘lost continent’, and argued that, ‘The foul and fetid breath of our slums is almost as poisonous as that of the African swamp’.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