Sheffield’s pioneering pre-war, South Asian settlers

This year marks the anniversary of the docking of the merchant ship Empire Windrush at Tilbury in 1948. With a passenger list of British Subjects, most notably including 493 Jamaicans, Windrush has, in the intervening 65 years, become a powerfully symbolic image of the beginning of an ethnically plural Britain. Indeed, this symbolism was recently employed to dramatic effect by Danny Boyle in his opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics. 

While Windrush remains a powerful image for us today, the historical emphasis on post war Commonwealth migration to Britain has tended to obscure the significance of smaller-scale migration before the Second World War. Although it is generally acknowledged that ports such as Cardiff, Liverpool, South Shields and, of course, London have had longstanding, but socially isolated, immigrant populations since the 19th century, there remains very little research on inland migration and settlement. Inland cities are generally assumed to have not witnessed any significant settlement before at least 1942 when the needs of the war and post war economy began to act as powerful recruitment agents for Empire and Commonwealth workers. 

However my research over the last three years has begun to reveal that South Asian migration to Sheffield began with settlers arriving and building new lives here as early as the end of the First World War. By analysing recently digitised sources of evidence for births, marriages and deaths, together with recording the family memories of pioneers’ descendants, my research will, hopefully, be able to make a significant addition to the history of migration to Britain before Windrush. 

So far, I have discovered official records and family stories of migration for at least fifty Indian settlers in Sheffield in the interwar period, most of these originating in the Pashtun (also known as Pathan) areas of the northern Punjab and the North West Frontier Province of what was British India. Official documents record the many marriages of settlers with native, Sheffield-born women and the subsequent births of their children. Given the probability that, naturally, only a proportion of the migrants will have formed lasting relationships and married their partners, it will also be highly likely that there will have been many more Asian workers who stayed in the city for lesser periods, returning to India without being recorded by officialdom. 

In the era before mass international travel, working their passage as lascar seamen, stoking the boilers of British merchant ships was the only option for poor migrants, and the vast majority of the settlers continued to shovel coal and coke in the steel mills, foundries and even the collieries of the city. They lived, with their families, in all parts of the city from the Don Valley steel-working areas of Attercliffe, Darnall and Brightside to Highfields, Broomhall and also on the, then, newly built Manor Estate. 

I’m now trying to establish whether these pioneering pre-Windrush South Asian migrants and settlers formed a social network enabling further South Asian workers to successfully settle in Sheffield after the Second World War. If I can establish that clear social links through family and social networks were maintained with newly arriving settlers from pre-war to post-war then it would establish that the early pioneers were crucial in encouraging successful post-war migration. Indeed, my research has already concluded that there are a substantial number of British-Pakistanis in Sheffield whose families originate in the same districts as the early pioneers. 

Of particular interest to me are the contacts that I have established with some of the descendants of these pioneer families, some of whom have been able to provide some unique insights into the experience of people of colour in Sheffield: the industrial heart of imperial Britain, during the 1920s and 1930s. Their stories add much needed light and shade to the general histories of migration to Britain. These histories have tended to focus on the hot-spots of racism and resistance rather than those areas where migrants were accepted and achieved a degree of integration with the native population – as appears to be the case in Sheffield. 

This analysis has, since the early 1980s, made conflict a central issue for the study of migration to Britain, placing much emphasis on the phenomena of racist attacks, race riots and other more-or-less violent anti-immigrant protests. For migration historian Panikos Panayi, there has been ‘an iron girder of racism and xenophobia’ in Britain for the last 200 years and, without doubt, this is a characterisation of British society that many would recognise.[1] However, my research strongly suggests that successful settlement of people of colour did occur within working-class communities without social upheaval and communal strife. It thus remained un-newsworthy and unreported by the media of the time and unnoticed by historians since. The historical record shows that settlement was taking place quietly and without being loudly censured by the press, officialdom or opportunist politicians (unlike in the post-war years) and suggests a more optimistic conclusion that the toleration of ordinary, working people toward the newcomers was indeed present here. 

For me, these research findings raise important challenges to the assumptions we make today about the attitudes to ‘race’ and difference among ordinary people in the past. Many of the histories of migration emphasise domestic British racism, heavily implicating the working-class in its widespread application, with them being, apparently, in the thrall of British imperialism. 

If, as historians, we take only this viewpoint we risk rejecting evidence that provides important nuance and detail to the study of how imperial ideologies of racism, racial difference and social hierarchy were assimilated domestically by ordinary people. Moreover, if it can be proved that this pattern of quiet toleration, settlement and integration was repeated in other British cities between the wars it may call into question many of our current assumptions about migration history in Britain. What does seem apparent from my research is that the ‘iron girder of racism and xenophobia’ described by Panayi does not appear to have been forged in Sheffield.