As part of our research for the ‘Mariners’ project, we’re interested in how missionary engagement with sailors in British port cities affected religious practices, identities, customs and rituals.
Life at sea and in ports was quite often fatal for seafarers, especially seamen who were not British-born. For seamen known as ‘lascars’, cramped conditions on board ships and in port cities, illness, disease and poor health care, alongside the dangers of the sea, led to high fatalities. There were also high incidences of suicide. The ritual of funerals and burial services are an interesting indicator of the way in which sailors of non-Christian faiths adapted their customs and were catered for within burial spaces in port cities.
I’ve been doing some further research into ‘lascar funerals’ in the nineteenth and twentieth century in the major port cities of London, Hull, and Cardiff, and have found some very interesting newspaper reports that reveal the way Muslim and Hindu religious practices were observed by Asian seafarers. Scholars such as Nazneen Ahmed, Humayan Ansari, Eliza Cubitt and Diane Robinson-Dunn have written about some of the practices of burial and internship of mainly Muslim lascars in mainly London. Looking at newspapers enhances and furthers their findings.
For example, in May 1894, Bawa Golam Sahib, who was 30 years old and worked on a ship from Bombay to Roath Dock in Cardiff to load coal fell ill and was taken to the Hamadryad Hospital Ship. The HMS Hamadryad was permanently moored in Cardiff as a seamen’s hospital, next to the HMS Thisby used for missions, and HMS Havannah used as a school to train boys for seafaring. Sahib was interred at the New Cemetery at Cardiff and press reports reported that he had been given a Hindu funeral by his shipmates – around ten of them wearing white garments and brightly coloured turbans in a short, simple cemetery before pouring soil over his burial.[1]
Elsewhere in Wales, a lascar sailor was buried at Merthyr Dovan Cemetery, near Barry Dock, in December 1893 with roughly twenty mourners who observed Muslim rites, ‘as far as they possibly could’.[2] In January 1895, the funeral of a Muslim seaman, Ahmed Sk Dawood took place in Newport. Dawood had died on board the Indrapura in the Alexandra Dock. Six fellow Asian seamen wore turbans and rode the carriage that followed Dawood’s hearse through the snow to the graveside. A news report specifically noted that the mourners recited from the Koran. Finally, ‘leaving the grave by one of the paths, they suddenly halted, formed in a circle, and chanted their last farewell to the comrade whose remains they were leaving in the snow-covered strange land.’[3] Dawood left behind a widow in Bombay.
While illustrations of lascar funerals are few and far between, we have a photo of mourners at a lascar funeral in Hull in 1909. The photograph at Hedon-road cemetery shows more than ten mourners carrying a coffin. Taking place in September the men were all wearing trousers and jackets and kufi caps.[4] The sailor had died of beriberi, a deficiency of vitamin B1, which had inflicted four crew members of the Knight Errant in Hull but two lascars had died on the voyage too and had been buried at sea. Two of the deceased in Hull were lascars.[5] They were called Masrooda Jabudeen (aged 25) and Ahmed Yussuf (35) and had Christian services alongside prayers from around twenty crewmates.[6] While these seamen had many mourners, not all funerals were well-attended and might even be described as ’pathetic’. A year earlier in Hull Cassin Aleebux, a fireman on the SS Iran, had died of consumption. He was buried in Hull Western Cemetery but only four crew members attended his burial and performed Muslim rites while a small crowd looked on.[7]
[1] ’Funeral of the Beri-Beri Victims’, Hull Daily Mail, 15 September 1909, p. 3
[2] ’Beri-Beri at Hull’, Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 13 September 1909, p. 11; ’Beri-Beri at Hull’, Sheffield Independent, 14 September 1909, p. 4
[3] ’Lascars‘ Funerals To-Day’, Hull Daily Mail, 14 September 1909, p. 5
[4] ’Mahomedan Funeral in Hull’, Hull Daily Mail, 14 January 1908, p. 5
[5] ‘Hindoo Burial at Cardiff’, South Wales Daily News, 16 May 1894, p. 6
[6] ‘Local News Items’, Western Mail (Cardiff), 30 December 1893, p. 6
[7] ’Mahometan Funeral at Newport’, Cardiff Times, 2 February 1895, p. 5