At Canvey Island
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Inspired by a brochure given to me by Gary Arber, I decided to go for a day trip to Canvey Island. Printed by W.F.Arber & Co Ltd in the Roman Rd in the nineteen twenties – when Gary’s grandfather Walter ran the shop, his father (also Walter) was the compositor and uncles Len and Albert ran the presses – this brochure seduced me with its lyrical prose.
“Canvey Island, owing to its unique position at the meeting place of fresh and salt waters, which continually wash its shores, enjoys a nascent air which is extraordinarily health-giving and invigorating, and is, indeed in this respect, possibly above all other places in the kingdom. Prominent physicians in our leading hospitals pay tribute to the properties of the air, by sending patients to the Island in preference to any other locality.”
Yet in spite of this irresistible account of the Island’s charms, when I told people I was going to Canvey, they pulled long faces and declared, “You’re joking?” Undeterred by prejudice, I packed sandwiches in my satchel and set out from Fenchurch St Station with an open mind to discover Canvey Island for myself. Alighting at Benfleet, I crossed the River Ray to the Island arriving at the famous wall that reclaimed the land from the sea – constructed in the seventeenth century by three hundred dutch dyke diggers under the supervision of Cornelius Vermuyden.
“One of the first places the visitor will make for is the sea-wall, which he has undoubtedly heard a good deal about before coming to Canvey, and with which he will be anxious to make a closer acquaintance. The wall completely encircles the Island, and, following all its windings in and out, covers a distance of about eighteen miles.”
Since I had no map and had not been to Canvey before, Gary Arber’s brochure was my only guide. And so I set out along the wall where stonecrop and asters grew wild, buffered and blown by salt winds from the estuary. With a golf course to the landward side and salt marshes to the seaward side, that widened out into a vast open expanse stretching away towards Southend Pier on the horizon, it was an exhilarating prospect and I enjoyed the opportunity to fill my lungs with fresh sea air.
“The grand secret of the wonderful health-giving properties of the air is the evaporation from the “saltings,” during the time when the tides are out, which charges the air with ozone, which is thus constantly renewed and refreshed, making it extremely healthy, clean and bracing.”
Reaching Canvey Heights and looking back, the contrast between the hinterland crowded with bungalows and whimsical cottages, and the bare salt flats beyond the wall became vividly apparent. Many thousands before me, coming to escape from East London, had also been captivated by the Island romance that Canvey weaves – and I could understand their affection for this charmed Isle that proposes such a persuasive pastoral idyll, when resplendent beneath a sky of luminous blue.
“There is a charming freedom about life on Canvey which will appeal to most people whose work-a-day life has to be spent in towns or their suburbs. The change of scene is complete in every respect; streets, bricks and mortar, are replaced by bungalows of very varied designs and appearances”
Surrounding Canvey Heights, I found a neglected orchard of different varieties of plum trees all heavy with fruit, and filled my satchel with a selection of red, yellow and purple plums, before making my way to Rapkins Wharf with its magnificent old hulks nestled together in a forgotten creek. The Island breezes played upon the rigging like a wind harp, filling the boat yard with other-worldly music, where old sea salts sheltering amongst the array of rotting vessels. Next, turning the corner of the Island, I reached the shore facing the estuary and walking along the esplanade soon came to Concord Beach Paddling Pool where I joined the happy throng at the tea stall, spying the big ships that pass close by.
“All the vessels, bound to and from the large ports on the Thames, must pass Canvey, and thus a constant procession of all sizes can be watched with interest and pleasure, ploughing their lonely furrows through the waters. Monster ocean-going liners bound for the other side of the world, sailing vessels with their full rig of canvas spread, and, as the sun catches the sails, delighting the eye with one of the most haunting sights to be imagined – the estuary teems with interest at all times. Here one can realise that, despite the progress of motor and steam in water travel, there still remain a few ocean-going vessels under sail only.”
At the next table, a group of residents were debating the relative merits of Benidorm and Costa del Sol as holiday destinations, only to arrive at the startling yet prudent consensus that staying here in Canvey Island was best. Eavesdropping on their conversation, and observing the idiosyncratic villas adorned with pigeon lofts and flags, I recognised that an atmosphere of gleeful Island anarchy reigns in Canvey, situated at one remove from mainland Britain.
“The strict conventions of dress and deportment so tiresomely observed in towns can be ignored here in Canvey, and the visitor casts off all artificial restraints, simply observing the ordinary rules of decency and respect towards others which his own courtesy will dictate.”
Crossing through the streets, marvelling at the varieties of bungalows, I came to the Canvey Island Rugby Club playing field at Tewkes Creek, where I sat upon a bench to rest and admire the egrets feeding in the creek, while men walked their bull terriers on the green. Tracing my path back along the wall towards Benfleet station, I discovered circles of field mushrooms and picked myself a bunch of the wild fennel that grows in abundance, imparting its fragrance to the breeze. Then I returned home on the train to Fenchurch St at six, pleasantly weary, sunburnt and windswept, with my mushrooms, plums and fennel in hand as trophies, enraptured by all the delights of Canvey.
“For the family there is no better spot than Canvey for holidays – the glorious, exhilarating air sends them home again pictures of health and happiness.”
I never saw Canvey Island’s petrochemical refineries, or what happens at night. I am prepared to countenance that Canvey has its dark side, but I was innocent of it. I am an unashamed day-tripper.
This boat is for sale, contact the owner at Rapkins Wharf, Canvey Island.
Mushrooms picked at Canvey
Plums and fennel from Canvey
The wall around Canvey Island
At Anna Maria Garthwaite’s House
Anna Maria Garthwaite, the most celebrated texile designer of the eighteenth century, bought this house in Spitalfields when she was forty years old in 1728, just five years after it was built. Its purchase reflected the success she had already achieved but, living here at the very heart of the silk industry, she produced over one thousand patterns for damasks and brocades during the next thirty-five years.
The first owner of the house was a glover who used the ground floor as a shop with customers entering through the door upon the right, while the door on the left gave access to the rooms above where the family lived. For Anna Maria Garthwaite, the ground floor may also have been used to receive clients who would be led up to the first floor where commissions could be discussed and deals done. The corner room on the second floor receives the best light, uninterrupted by the surrounding buildings, and this is likely to have been the workroom, most suited to the creation of her superlative designs painted in watercolours – of which nearly nine hundred are preserved today at the Victoria & Albert Museum.
Anna Maria Garthwaite contrived an enormous variety of sprigged patterns each with different permutations of naturalistically rendered flowers, both cultivated and wild species. Yet equally, her work demonstrates a full understanding of the technical process of silk weaving, conjuring designs that make elegant employment of the possibilities of the medium and the talents of skilled weavers. Many of her designs are labelled with the names of the weavers to whom they were sold and annotated with precise instructions, revealing the depth of her insight into the method as well as offering assistance to those whose job it was to realise her work. She was credited by Malachi Postlethwayt in The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce of 1751 as the one who “introduced the Principles of Painting into the loom.”
Born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, Garthwaite moved to York with her twice-widowed sister Mary in 1726, coming to down to London two years later – and it is tempting to imagine that the pair became a familiar sight, taking long walks eastwards from the newly built-up streets into the fields beyond, where they collected wild flowers to serve as inspiration for botanically-accurate designs.
In spite of its commanding corner position at the junction of Wilkes St and Princelet St (known as Princes St in Anna Maria Garthwaite’s time), this is a modest dwelling – just one room deep – and, nearly three centuries later, it retains the atmosphere of a domestic working environment. In common with many of the surrounding properties, the house bears witness to the waves of migration that have defined Spitalfields through the centuries, subdivided for Jewish residents in the nineteenth century – the Goldsteins, the Venicoffs, the Marks, the Hellers, who were superseded by Bengalis in the sixties and seventies, until restoration in 1985 revealed the interiors and unified the spaces again.
Apart from wear and tear of centuries, and the stucco rendering on the exterior from 1860, Anna Maria Garthwaite would recognise her old house as almost unchanged if she were to return today.
Christ Church seen through an old glass pane from Anna Maria’s Garthwaite’s workroom.
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Two Lost Breweries Of Whitechapel
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Within living memory, Whitechapel was home to the Albion and the Blue Anchor Brewery, two of the largest breweries in the country, premises for Watney Mann and Charringtons respectively. Photographer Philip Cunningham‘s grandfather worked at The Albion brewery and it became his melancholy duty to record both breweries in the eighties at the point of their demise. (Accompanying text also by Philip.)
The Albion Brewery in the nineteenth century
My grandfather was a train driver until the day he was discovered to be colour blind, when he was sacked on the spot. He then became a drayman and – apart from two world wars – spent the rest of his working life at the Albion Brewery in Whitechapel. He was one of the first draymen to drive a motorised vehicle, a skill which saved his life in WWI.
The brewery started trading in 1808 and although by 1819 it was under the control of Blake & Mann, by 1826 it was in the exclusive ownership of James Mann. In 1846, Crossman and Paulin became partners to form Mann, Crossman & Paulin Ltd. The brewery was re-built in 1863, becoming the most advanced brewery of that time, producing 250,000 barrels a year.
Stables were built on the east side of Cambridge Heath Rd with a nosebag room containing in excess of one hundred and fifty nosebags, each filled by a metal tube from the store above. The former Whitechapel workhouse in Whitechapel Rd was used for the bottling plant, but when this proved to be too small it was moved to a site on Raven Row, two hundred yards south.
In 1958, the company merged with Watney Combe & Reid to become Watney Mann Ltd. In 1978, a spokesperson for Grand Metropolitan the corporate owner who acquired Watney declared, ‘The bottling plant has a very strong future as a distribution and bottling centre for the GLC area and parts of Southern England.’ Yet the plant was closed in 1980 with a loss of two hundred jobs after the building was declared unsafe and too costly to repair. Keg filling transferred to Mortlake, the bottling plant became a distribution centre and the brewery was shut down in 1979. The buildings on the Whitechapel Rd were converted to flats and the rest of the site is now occupied by Sainsbury’s.
Gates of the Blue Anchor Brewery
In 1757, John Charrington moved his brewing business from Bethnal Green to the Mile End Rd. This was the Blue Anchor Brewery, and John Charrington’s brother Harry lived next to the brewery in Malplaquet House from about 1790 until his death in 1833.
The brewery was built on Charrington Park, extending for sixteen acres behind the malt stores. Some land was sold off for building and a section was given to St. Peter’s Church, while the remainder was used for cooperages and for stables housing one hundred horses and a blacksmith’s forge. There were also coppersmiths, tinsmiths, gasfitters, millwrights, hoopers, engineers, and carpenters with a timber store and saw pit. The hop store was a spacious darkened chamber one hundred feet long, filled from floor to ceiling with hops, and the odour was overpowering.
The Blue Anchor brewery became the second largest in London producing 20,252 barrels of beer a year. In the nineteenth century, steam engines were installed which ran until 1927, when they were replaced by electric power. During the Second World War, half the lorry fleet was commandeered for the army.
Yet in 1967, the company merged with Bass to become Charrington Bass and later Bass Ltd – the largest brewing company in the country. The last brew at Charringtons was in 1975 and distribution was then moved to Canning Town. A new administration block was built at a cost of three and a half million, only to be demolished for a retail park.
Photographs copyright © Philip Cunningham
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Paul Bommer’s Huguenot Plaque
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People often stop and admire the Huguenot Plaque of twenty Delft tiles by Paul Bommer commissioned by Huguenots of Spitalfields and installed on Hanbury Hall in Hanbury St, which was originally built as a Huguenot Chapel in 1719.
Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, Spitalfields
Méreau with a chalice
La Neuve Eglise – now Brick Lane Mosque
Méreau showing the Lamb of God
Méreau showing the Dove of Peace, Shield with Cross of Lorraine & Swan
1598 – Edict of Nantes when Henry IV granted rights to Huguenots
Anna Maria Garthwaite, designer of Spitalfields Silk
1685 – Revocation of the Edict of Nantes which forced Huguenots to flee persecution
Fleur de Lys, méreau with crucifix and hare
Huguenot Silversmiths
Horticulture in Spitalfields
Psalms 9:9 – “The Lord is a refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble…”
Horticulture in Spitalfields
Huguenot Clockmakers
Spitalfields Silk Merchant
Méreau with a cross, a silk bobbin and an oak symbolising Strength & Fidelity
The Huguenot Cross
Méreau with crest of France, canary and oak symbolising Strength & Fidelity
Protestant preaching at La Neuve Eglise
Paul Bommer’s Huguenot plaque at Hanbury Hall in Hanbury St
Images copyright © Paul Bommer
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and also read about
The Motor Mechanics Of Bow
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Yaima at Bow Tyres
Over the years, Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I have visited many railway arches documenting the life of these charismatic spaces where people have sought the liberty of earning a living independently and enriching the city in the process.
At Arnold Rd in Bow, we dropped in on a parade of a dozen arches where garages offering all aspects of motor repair have thrived over recent decades, supplying a reliable and conscientious service to local people.
In common with other railway arches across London and the entire country, we found these small businesses are subject to escalating rent increases which mean they are struggling to make a living and which threaten to destroy their livelihoods entirely.
Yet in spite of this crisis, we received a generous welcome from this mutually-supportive community of twenty-five to thirty mechanics who work together across their different garages, sharing skills and helping each other out as necessary.
Sultan Ahmed at Bow Motor Aid
Minar Uddin and his son Mostafa at Jonota Motors
Mostafa Uddin – “We do mechanics and some body work, small jobs. I have been working here for ten years, learning from my dad. I began by doing stuff with him and now I am running it. My dad set up the business thirteen years ago. He had another garage before this one in Bancroft Rd, but he had to leave that one because the rent was high. Now this rent is sky-high as well, our last recent increase was nearly double. With the amount of rent we have to pay, it is not worth us working for the small income we can make. If the business continues like this, we cannot carry on.”
Opal Meah, proprietor at S Motors
“I do car mechanics and electrics. I have been in business since I left school, over twenty-five years now, and I have been in this arch for about eight years. Every year the rent goes up and now they are increasing it more. I am not making any money. One month you are lucky and you make enough to pay the bills but other months are very hard. I don’t know what I am going to do, I don’t know anything else but car mechanics. I want to stay here, but if I cannot afford the rent how am I going to stay? Before it was good but now it is so tight.”
Mohammed Chowdhury at S Motors –
“It’s really close knit here – like a big family – and everyone looks after everyone else if anyone gets stuck. Everyone has their own speciality and their own trades, so we can always ask everyone else to help us out. Yesterday, I was not too sure how to remove a panel from a Volkswagen golf but the bodyshop next door gave me a hand and I had the job done in a matter of minutes. Round here, it is beautiful because you can rely on each other, if anyone needs help or a push for a car. It is brilliant.
Quite a few new businesses have established themselves here in small arches and then grown substantially and looked for bigger premises and are doing really well. Some of these arches have been renovated and everybody has enough business to keep themselves afloat and cover their wages. It is a great starting point.
Some customers are drive-throughs, other are local. Word of mouth and friends and family have built our business. No-one who works here lives too far off from here.
If someone has background knowledge and they are looking to get into it and pick up some skills, there are opportunities here for young people to learn, develop themselves and climb up the ladder.
Rents are increased here without any reasoning and the landlords want to move this place upmarket, trying to get in other kinds of businesses. But if they are constantly bumping the rent up, how are people supposed to survive? Everyone’s struggling to survive here now, to be honest.”
Faisal Siddiqi at Ali Auto Repairs
Shajhan at Jonota Motors
Arif Giulam at Reliance Motors
Tommy, Misa Sheink, Sayed Uddin, Arif Giulam and Naiem at Reliance Motors
Shajahan Ali at Ali’s Body Work
Ali Noor at Ali Auto Repairs
Ahmed Shuhel at Spanner Work
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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At St Andrew’s Chapel, Boxley
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In the autumn of 2019, it was my great delight to accompany Matthew Slocombe, Director of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, to visit an unspoilt fifteenth century cottage on the Pilgrim’s Way in Kent that the Society had rescued from decades of neglect. Their founder William Morris would have been proud because it is exactly the kind of rural dwelling that he dreamed of in his wistful lyric visions of old England. The cottage had not been inhabited in fifty years or decorated in a century and one exterior wall was close to collapse. Five years later, the building has been repaired and is up for sale at Inigo House.
St Andrew’s Chapel in 1911 (Courtesy of Maidstone Museum)
Sarah Ainslie’s Somali Portraits
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Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie undertook this fine series of Somali portraits, accompanied with eloquent testimonies dictated by her subjects
Adan Jama Mohammed – Seaman
“I came to this country when I was twenty years old in 1958. Before than I was in Aden, working on a small passenger boat, but when I came here I was thirty years as a seaman and living in Middlesbrough. I started on 8th April 1959 as a merchant seaman, earning £21.50 a month. Until 1980 it was my job, then I worked on big container ships. We didn’t have much to do. I married in 1987 and I had a family in Middlesbrough, but we had to leave because they closed the docks and the factories. I had a house and a family, and a mortgage I couldn’t pay. The building society said if I didn’t pay £70 a month, they would take the house back. I had to sell the house at half price, and now my children are grown up and don’t want to know me. I live on my own in a flat at the Seamen’s Mission in West Ferry Rd, Isle of Dogs, and my family live on the other side of London. I don’t like living here in this city, there’s too many people – but you can’t help it, if you don’t have a choice. I do have some friends at the Mission. It was a hard life as a seaman.”
Ahmed Hassan Sulieman – Seaman
“I was born in Aden, when I was a schoolboy everyone over sixteen joined the army. My father was in the First World War and he was killed fighting for the British in Egypt in 1918, when I was four. So my brother and I, we wanted to join the army and take revenge on the people who killed him. All my family were in the army. All the army, they treated us very good – white and black together, no colour bar.
In 1944, I was shot in the leg while I was on a British ship that was sunk by two German U-boats off Durban. We were at sea on a raft for two days and two nights before we were marooned on land without food. I went inland and walked for six days to search for help before the British found us and took us to Durban, and when we recovered they sent us back to fight. In Egypt, four thousand people were being killed a day at that time.
I was also in Germany and Japan, the kamikaze pilots crashed into our ship. It was a very bad war, but we wanted to win – losing was nothing. I am brave because I wanted to beat the Germans and I fought for myself, I didn’t want to be captured. I was happy when we won the war and I’m happy that I’m still alive. I had four medals but I lost two recently, I never asked for them.
At the end of the war, they gave us a passport and a suit of clothes, and they brought us here to the Seamen’s Mission where I live today. So we were quite happy. I’ve been here seventy years. They said you are fit to work and I joined the Merchant Navy. I got £200 a month, before that I only got £24 a month and I had to shovel coal but the food was free. I worked as a merchant seaman until I got too old and I have lived in the Seamen’s Mission for the last forty years. I and my brother we used to go back to Somalia every year, until he was killed in a car crash in Poplar in 1980.
They told me I could bring my family over, but there’s nowhere here for them to stay. I had eight children, all grown up. Now haven’t seen them for over a year and I feel sick, and I want to go home for good. I’m too old and I want to see my children.”
Shamsa Hersi – Manager of Somali Elders Day Centre
“I was born in a town called Burao in Somaliland and I came to UK as a refugee in 1990 when I was a child. From an early age, I wanted to work for UNICEF and in those days my great uncle used to work for the United Nations, he talked to me about his work when I was eight. I cared for my family for many years in Somalia – it is second nature to me, but you have to train to be a Social Worker. I believe that if you can work with people to help them, then it gives you a more rewarding life. I studied at university in the UK and I have a qualification in psycho-therapy and a diploma in working with people who have had traumatic life experiences. It’s about giving something back for the support I received when I came to this country. It takes a lot of guts and hard work and skills to build relationships, but it’s a privilege to work with these people – they are survivors.”
Ali Mohammad – Day Care Officer
“In 1988, there was a civil war in Somalia and I fled to my brother Isaac who was a senior official at the Ministry of Education in Mogadishu. Then, in 1989, there was a massacre – fifty-six people in my tribe were shot. They dug a mass grave and shovelled them in, but there was boy who was not shot and fell in the grave too. He managed to get out and spread the news. My brother told me to go to South Africa or India, anywhere away from Somalia, and he gave me 200,000 Somali shillings and $100. I went to India and then to Bangladesh where I studied at Dhaka University, hoping to come to Europe. My grandfather Uma Hassan sent me some money from London and my visa came through before I graduated, so he told me to come at once and I arrived at Heathrow on August 21st 1992. Because I had a family address, I decided to surprise them. I took a minicab to Poplar and they couldn’t believe it was me when I arrived!
I shared a two bedroom flat with another guy in Woolwich. The country was in recession at that time and there were no jobs. Some of the Somalis who came before me didn’t try to find work, they were so negative. They said, ‘As a black guy, you haven’t got a chance.’ But I tried and, after a month, I got a job as a kitchen porter at Queen Elizabeth Military Hospital in Woolwich, all the kitchen staff and cleaners were employed by a contractor. At first, I found it hard to get all the work completed on time but it got easier after a while. I got £2.85 an hour. Language was a problem and it was a very physical job, I found it exhausting. I couldn’t understand the people I worked with because they spoke colloquially – innit? – whereas I spoke more formal English.
I enrolled at Greenwich University and while I was working seven until seven for five days, on the other two days I did my part-time course. What I earned, I sent home but there wasn’t much left after I paid the bills. I lost my job when the contract ended after one year and eight months but by the time I finished I was earning £4.50 an hour. After three years at university, I left with a diploma in computing but I was unemployed for three months. I could only get work one day a week, doing cleaning and security in the City, I couldn’t find a decent job – they were all shut to me.
Someone told me there was an apprenticeship in Social Care available for a resident of the Ocean Estate. I was still living in Woolwich but I thought, ‘I could move to the Ocean Estate.’ A Somali landlord had a four bedroom flat with an empty room, so I took it and I got the job. They paid £500 a month and I did six months working in Social Care with disabled people, seniors and children. I did well and, in 1995, I spotted a job for a Day Care Officer advertised. By then I had my certificate, so I applied and I won that one. And this is the job I do now here at the Somali Elders Day Centre. I got married in 1997 and I have three daughters and I live in Bethnal Green, five minutes walk from my work. I know everyone in this area.”
Ahmed Yunis – Seaman
“I came here in 1956 when I was a sailor in the Royal Navy. I felt comfortable in London because at that time my country was a British colony. I came on a Saturday and I left on the Monday. I was only here two days, I went to the Merchant Navy office and they gave me a job which lasted until 1982, when I retired. I lived in Liverpool for twenty-eight years but I consider London my home.
I am ninety-three years old. I have two wives, one here and one in Somalia. My London wife is forty-five and I have four children under eleven, the youngest is six. I am a grateful father. I am also a great-grandfather. If you don’t smoke or drink or kiss women, you stay healthy.”
Kinsi Abdulleh – Artist
“When I got off the plane in the eighties as an eighteen-year-old refugee, I had an older family of relations to go to in Cable St. I remember thinking, ‘We’re going to England.’ and we passed Westminster and the Tower, and we ended up in this run-down, dark little side street. I thought, ‘God, what have we come to? This is really poor, like being in Africa. I’m jumping from the frying pan into the fire!’ But, on the other hand, I fell in love with the place. I went to college and it was exciting that I could get up and go without supervision. I watched the Jackson 5 on TV and bought jeans, even though the older generation expected me to be more conventional. They said, ‘You’ve only been in the city two days and you’re going ice skating!’ They had a false outdated view of my country that I was supposed to believe. I came from the city not the village. People imagine you’ve come from Zululand and you live up a tree. I spent the formative years of my life being displaced, so I should be the one longing for tribal culture, but I am frustrated by the patriarchal tribal culture. I’ve been fortunate to end up in a place where people have extended a hand to me. I can go anywhere in Tower Hamlets, and that’s why I’ve stayed because I can walk down the street here and make my own history.”
Ali Mohammed Adan – Seaman
“I first came to London by ship in March 1958. I stayed in Aldgate for a night and went to Newport where my cousin had a house. There are many Somalis there. From that day until I retired in 1990, I was in the Merchant Navy, and I brought my family over from Somaliland. In 1970, I moved back to London to Bethnal Green but my wife and daughters chose to stay in Newport.
In Somaliland, I owned over a hundred camels and sheep. Nobody keeps camels anymore, everyone sold them and moved to the city. They say, ‘It’s too much work.’ But keeping camels and sheep and living on a farm, it’s a good life because you eat every day. Everybody wants to do it again now.”
Ismail Ibrahim – Seaman
“I came to this country in 1958 from the South Yemen which was a British colony. I was born a British subject and I am still a British subject. They say to me, ‘Why do you like it so much?’ I say, ‘I don’t know any other government.’ I joined the Merchant Navy in 1960. After we fought in the Falkland Islands in 1982, I came back and joined the Ministry of Defence from 1983 until 2000. I was in Czechoslovakia with the United Nation Forces from 1984-89, then I was in Georgia. I was in Cyprus but when they were going into Iraq, I said, ‘I’m not going.’ I retired four years ago. In the Navy, I worked in the engine room and in the Merchant Navy, I was coxswain.
I was born in British Somaliland, in the city of Berbera, one of six brothers and four sisters. In 1960, we got independence and they joined British Somaliland to Somalia which had been an Italian colony and was run by the mafia – they rape, they kill. So we decided to get our land back and have self-government, and we fought for twelve years. They killed my father, they killed my brother and they killed my children.
In 1991, we got independence again, and we settled down and all was ok in Somaliland. The country needs European help because there are no roads and no facilities. So what can I do now? – I’m ok but a bit old. I’ve got four boys and two girls, and an ex-wife in Somlia that my brother took on, and a wife here in the City Rd that I don’t live with. I was away on a ship while my children were being born, I was always at sea not here with my children as they grew up. They don’t know me. My life was sea, sea, sea.”
Ahmed Esa – Seaman
“I joined the Navy in 1953 in Aden, I was a young guy and I just wanted to work and visit other countries. I came to Plymouth in 1953 and stayed with the Navy until 1969 when I joined the Merchant Navy. I retired in 1988 after thirty-nine years. My brother was in the Merchant Navy too, he was younger than me. He came to London and enlisted, but I never worked in London. All that time, my family was at home, so I fetched them here and they live in London now. I haven’t been back to Somalia since 1996, I can’t afford to cost of the trip. Being in the Navy, it was a hard life – all that time at sea, even if you got to different countries. I’ve have no home, I’m living here in the Seaman’s Mission and waiting for flat of my own. I’m a single man again, now my children have grown up. My brother caught a virus and died in Forest Gate. Life in London is solitary, though I have a few friends at the Mission from the Merchant Navy. I was a deck hand, a carpenter and an able-bodied seaman, an odd-jobs man.”
Yurub Qalib Farah – Day Care Officer
“I came to this country on my own as an asylum seeker in 2001. I had friends here to stay with and I went to college in Haringey, studying English Language and Computers – before I came this country I was working as a secretary. In 2002, I started searching for work, and people said Tower Hamlets is the best place to find a job and I learned that Mayfield House was advertising for a Day Care Worker. I called up the number and came for an interview with the manager at 2pm on November 11th 2002, and I have worked here ever since. My ambition is to help people and be a good care worker, and in this job I am using the experience I have had to help others. I got married in February 2004, and we don’t have children but my sister came to join us. I went back to visit my family in Somalia for the first time in ten years last Christmas. There had been some changes and my friends had moved to a different area, so it was like another country to the one I knew. It was safe but so hot. I think I have two homes, here and there – and I’m glad to have that. When I said to my friends, ‘I’m going home,’ they say,‘Which home?’ And then they say, ‘Can we come with you?'”
Ahmed Awad Yusuf – Seaman
“I first came here in 1959 at nineteen years old. At that time Somalia was a British colony and I had a British passport. Seven of us, we took a ship to Marseilles and caught a train to Dover and then arrived at Liverpool St. There were a couple of Somali coffee shops in Leman St and I stayed at one for three days. A friend of mine lived in Newport so I took a train from Paddington and stayed with him for four weeks, and then I lived in Cardiff for three years. First of all, I went to the Social Security and they gave me £2.10 a week, while I was looking for a job. I worked three years in Cardiff Dock. The Merchant Navy were looking for seamen and they gave me a job for twenty six and a half years. I moved back over here to London in 1965, and I lived in Leman St, Cable St and at the Seamen’s Mission in East India Dock Rd, and in 1984, I returned to Somaliland. But in 1990, I came back here with my wife and children. I live in Leman St, it’s the place I first came and it’s where the people I know are. I’ve been all over the world, Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Gulf States, China, Japan – all the places the British ruled.”
Ruquiya Egeh – Housing Association Manager
“I came here in 1988 as refugee from Somalia at the age of fourteen. I came speaking not a word of English. I was one of twelve children, but both of my parents were teachers and my father was able to send money to support us. Fortunately, my elder sister who I came with was nineteen, that’s why we weren’t fostered, she was old enough to be my guardian. At first, we were taken to the Home Office and then sent to a refugees’ hostel somewhere in London, before being taken to temporary accommodation in Forest Gate. We met some Saudi people at the mosque and I was able to go to Swanley School in Whitechapel. But the other pupils treated me as a stupid person because I couldn’t speak the language and I had playground fights because I thought they were swearing at me. Within a space of two years, I managed to learn enough English to pass seven GCSEs. I came from a good educational background and I wanted to prove I knew something.
I found college much more difficult because there was less support yet I managed to pass Health & Social Care, but I hated it and my sister went through depression at that time too. In the second year of college, I changed courses so that I could use my strengths and I did Arabic, Maths, Chemistry, Biology and Physics, and I did well and applied to University. Getting into University was a big deal and I studied Biomedical Science at Greenwich University. I got married in my second year of college and became pregnant with my first child, which let me down because I was so exhausted I fell asleep in classes. But my husband supported me and his parents looked after the baby so I could work. By the third year of University, I had three children. It made me want to achieve, I was the first person in my family to get a University degree and, when I rang my father, he said, ‘Well done, you made me proud. You were my first child to go University, now I can hold my head up.’
When I work with people who have got language problems, I know their frustration. Now I’m pushing my children. I say,‘You’ve got to be first in the class,’ just like my father said to me. I tell them, ‘If you have a good education, you can get a good job and earn good money. Knowledge is power.'”
Mahoumed Ali Mohammed – Seaman
“I came to London in 1948 and I stayed here at Seaman’s Mission for a while and for four months at the Strand Palace Hotel. I worked for the British railways for twenty years, as a porter, as an assistant lorry driver and in signalling in the Underground. Then, in the seventies, I joined the Merchant Navy and the Royal Navy for another twenty years until I retired in 1992. I was based in Cardiff but I came back to London in 1996. I have a girl and boy and my wife lives in Cardiff. When I called and said,‘I’m going to London,’ she said, ‘I’m staying here with my kids.’ I’m eighty-eight now and I live in Bethnal Green.”
Ibrahim Abdullah – Surveyor of Works
“I first came to London in 1956 and studied at the Brixton School of Building for a Diploma in Civil Engineering and then I went back home. At that time, the British ruled the country and I became a Surveyor of Works. I did not return to Britain until 15th June 1990, fleeing the Civil War, and then I brought my wife and family with me. We became British Citizens and now I come regularly to Mayfield House Day Centre to meet other Somalis who were seamen, and there are lots of them. I find it calm and cool, no problems here.”
Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie
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