It’s been a full year since Professor Hilary Carey and Dr Sumita Mukherjee were awarded funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the ‘Mariners’ project. To celebrate this milestone, we’re very happy to have been featured on the excellent Arts Matter Blog with an article about our progress over the past year. We’ve become a team of five; commissioned a website to showcase our findings; been busy in the archives of the British Library and Hull History Centre; and are exploring venues and themes for our conference and exhibition in our second and third years.
The full post is available to read here, along with a plethora of fascinating articles by our colleagues at the university.
A huge thank you to George and the Arts Matter team for featuring us, we look forward to Year 2!
Image: Hull Seamen’s and General Orphan Asylum, 1860. Hull History Centre, The Records of the Hull Seamans and General Orphanage, ALBUM 1863-1900, C DSHO 2/56. Credit: Hull City Archives, Hull History Centre
The Hull History Centre, located in a quiet yet central neighbourhood not far from the Maritime Museum and the original site of the Hull Sailor’s Home, houses the extensive records of the Anglican Mission to Seafarers (U DMS). Founded in 1856, the Mission to Seafarers ministered to the spiritual and moral welfare needs of seamen. The records covered all aspects of their activities in Britain and abroad and included minutes, annual reports and accounts, port files, personnel files, committee files, publications, photographs, diaries and scrapbooks, and documents from local branches and amalgamated societies.
The Hull History Centre holds some of the most significant source materials for understanding the everyday life of British seamen. I had been in touch with the archivist Claire Weatherall, who kindly helped me to scope out the materials before my first visit. I went through the records of the Hull branch of the Mission to Seamen and the Port of Hull Society for the Religious Instruction of Sailors, which was established in 1821 to care for seamen and their families through various welfare initiatives. These records offered a very interesting history of the mission’s care for the families of sailors.
The Mission – Seaman’s Mission converted into a pub (Image Manikarnika Dutta, June, 2023)
In particular, the records of the Seamen’s and General Orphanage (C DSHO) turned out to be a fantastic resource for understanding the Mariners’ Church Orphan Society’s operations since 1853. The society ran a boarding house and a school that provided food, clothing and education to orphaned young boys and girls whose fathers were victims of accidents at sea. It operated on a modest budget and saw some children return to their families to earn and take care of younger siblings. The number of children yet continued to increase, especially after a permanent care home was opened in Spring Bank in 1866.
Report of the Hull Mariner’s Church Sailors’ Orphan Society, 1858 (Source: Hull History Centre C DSHO/1/57)
The building, modelled after a barrack, was abandoned as the Port of Hull Society wanted to relocate the children out of the city into a cottage home. It found an ideal place in Hesslewood in 1921. The annual reports, minutes, and publications about the orphanage offer interesting insights into the Hull context of the projection of elitist civilisational sensibilities onto subaltern orphans in order to transform them into model citizens. The discussions on mundane decisions such as appropriate books and clothing for children of various ages shed light on a hidden chapter of child welfare that integrate religious, maritime, and family history of Victorian Britain.
In this blog, Lucy Wray discusses her first archival trip for the lascars strand, where she visited the British Library to explore records relating to the Stranger’s Home for Asiatic, held within the India Office papers.
On the week of beginning 15th May, I embarked on my first research trip to London to explore collections relating to the lascar strand of the Mariners’ project. While I concluded my week in the National Archives at Kew, I spent the majority of my time at the British Library. A trip to the British Library is a delight for any researcher, but I was particularly excited as this was my first visit to the site since my doctoral placement, undertaken at their visual arts department in 2020. Despite being in very familiar surroundings, this was my first experience using these archives to research lascars and my first venture in using the India Office Papers .
Gates at British Library, Image Lucy Wray, May 2023
What was I looking for?
Working alongside Dr Sumita Mukherjee, I conduct research for the ‘lascar’ strand of the Mariners project. Lascar is a term often used for non-European seafarers who worked on British ships. Lascars were predominately from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean and employed in large numbers by the British Merchant Marine from the nineteenth century. In addition to facing myriad difficulties and injustices relating to pay and conditions aboard ship, Lascars often struggled to secure accommodation at UK ports. For most of the nineteenth century, voluntary religious societies and missions were key providers of support and accommodation for these men. I aim to use visual and print sources to explore gendered and racialised ways missions and lascars interacted across the century.
The British Library is the UK’s National Library and one of the largest in the world, boasting around 200 million items. A researcher’s greatest obstacle is not a scarcity of sources but deciding where to begin. To get the ball rolling and hone my scope, I began by exploring sources relating to one of the best-known and most influential homes that interacted with lascars: Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders. Opened in London’s West India Dock in 1857, the Home provided accommodation, support and mission activity for lascars.
Most sources relating to the Stranger’s Home are held in the East India Office Papers. This is due to two key reasons: The East India Company provided regular revenue to the Home, and a large percentage of lascars were natives of India. Most of the records were, therefore, correspondence between the Home and the Indian Office relating to the finance and running of the Home and the cases of specific individuals from India.
What are the India Office Papers?
The India Office Records are the archives of the administration in London of the East India Company and the pre-1947 government of India. The British Library collection guide for this collection states, ‘The 14 kilometres of shelves of volumes, files and boxes of papers, together with 70,000 volumes of official publications and 105,000 manuscript and printed maps, are public records comprising the archives of the East India Company (1600-1858), of the Board of Control or Board of Commissioners for the Affairs of India (1784-1858), of the India Office (1858-1947), of the Burma Office (1937-1948), and of a number of British agencies overseas which were officially linked with one or other of the four main bodies’.[1]
The India Office Papers and Private Papers archive is immense, rich and diverse, revealing details of commerce, politics and migration. They give insight into the lives of many individuals, including civil servants, medical staff, chaplains, missionaries and, of course, mariners.
What did I view?
On this trip, I focused my search on the ‘Public and Judicial Departmental Papers: Annual Files’ IOR/L/PJ/6. These records cover the period 1880-1930 and amount to a whopping 2,024 volumes. I also examined some records from the Economic Department Records, IOR/L/E (1786-1950), comprised of approximately 4245 volumes/files and 960 boxes. Given the volume of these records, it’s safe to say this will be the first of many trips.
Here is an example of a volume of the Public and Judicial papers. Records are organised in Volumes, usually relating to one year, and each ‘item’ is indexed with a reference number. When leafing through these volumes, it’s difficult not to get distracted by other intriguing records along the way.
Strangers Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders, c. 1900. Creator unknown.
Have you encountered any interesting sources?
I am in the process of transcribing the material I viewed and photographed during my visit. Lots of these sources will be essential in understanding the relationship between lascars and organisations like the sailors home for Asiatics. This includes fascinating correspondence between the Stranger’s Home for Asiatics and the India Office in 1902.[1]
Addressing his letter to Mr Wylie of the India office, Mr Chamier of the Stranger’s Home asked if deserters should be admitted. He expressed his view that only ‘the worst of the lascars’ dessert due to their difficult financial positions and provided an anecdotal example of a ‘Goa boy’ who deserted and was currently staying at the Home. Chamier also asked, ‘How long is a destitute of India to receive free board’ suggesting it should be at least one month.
A second letter records Mr Wylie forwarding these queries to Sir Charles Lyall of the India Office, requesting his observations. Here, Wylie states, ‘Deserters have no claim to admission to the Home but if they become destitute after deserting what is to become of them? Are they to be allowed to die in the street? The Home is the only place perhaps where they can be understood’.
In a third letter, Lyall responds to Wylie, Stating, ‘The treatment of Lascar seamen is one for the revenue department, not for the Judicial and public department’. He continues to state his opinion that there was no risk involved in a native of India dying in the street upon refusal to the Home, as the workhouse was ‘always open’ to them, and Indians could be found there in ‘large numbers’.
Lastly, Chamier stated that he had no objection to ‘one month being fixed’ for the lodging of destitute men, provided the case was reported immediately to the India office. (see IOR/L/PJ/6/610, File 1733)
While short, this exchange is telling. It points to the close relationship between government bodies and mission organisations, shows a spectrum of stances regarding empathy and aid extended to lascars and even the lack of clarity regarding which governmental departments dealt with specific matters relating to these mariners. It also references other institutions that housed lascars, such as workhouses.
I look forward to returning to the British Library in July to look at more records.
References
[1] ‘Question of admitting deserters into the Strangers’ Home for Asiatics’ IOR/L/PJ/6/610, File 1733: 15 Aug 1902, British Library, London.
The mast of our project blog has an image of portside preaching, A Mission to Seamen by Henry Herbert La Thangue (1859-1929). This is probably the best known painting of marine missions from the 19th century.
Another, which deserves to be better known, is ‘The Missionary Boat’, painted in 1894 by Henry Scott Tuke (1858-1929), part of the Royal Cornish Polytechnic Society’s Tuke Collection, now on loan to Falmouth Art Gallery. Tuke was a member of the Newlyn School of painters, and for a while lived in Falmouth where he had a floating studio on a French barque, not unlike the one in this painting.
Henry Scott Tuke, The Missionary Boat, 1894 (oil on canvas). The Tuke Collection, Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society. Wikimedia Commons: Public domain
Unlike many of Tuke’s marine paintings, this one is of a specific occasion. It shows the arrival of the chaplain, James Canning Badger, neatly sailing the mission yawl Clarice, to meet the French barque Verveine of Marseilles. Badger was a chaplain with the British and Foreign Sailor’s Society (now the Sailors’ Society) in Falmouth frm 1887 to 1916. Tuke depicts Badger as a competent sailor, little distinguishable from the sailors who hail his arrival.
On shore, Badger embraced the image of the sea and marine industry as part of the rhetoric and identity of his mission. The National Maritime Museum Cornwall has a striking photo which shows Badger astride his ship pulpit in the Seamens Bethel & Institute in Falmouth, resting his hand on the wheel.
James Canning Badger, chaplain British and Foreign Sailor’s Society, Seamens Bethel & Institute Falmouth. Source: National Maritime Museum Cornwall.
The most famous literary example of a ship pulpit is that for the sermon on Jonah and the Whale, delivered by Father Mapple in chapter eight of Henry Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). But they were surprisingly common in marine mission chapels and, along with floating ship chapels, they were to be found in both American and British contexts. But that must be the subject of another blog.
Last week I visited Lambeth Palace Library, checking for correspondence relating to missions to seamen in the national library and archive of the Church of England. I found plenty to catch the interest of the historian of missions to seafarers, especially as this was my first visit to the spectacular building, which was completed in 2020 in the middle of the pandemic.
Lambeth Conference 1968
What was evident from the papers of the Lambeth Conference of 1968 is how the central idea of the mission has changed since its Victorian foundation. According to John Chelmsford, Chairman of the Council of the Mission to Seamen, and Rev. Cyril Brown (1904-1997), General Secretary of the Society, the ‘main reasons for the existence of the Society’ inluded the need to provide for transients outside settled dioceses. But the ‘first duty of chaplains’ was to ‘meet seamen where they can be found – i.e. on board ship, whether alongside wharves, in roadsteads or harbours or at the isolated oil, bulk carriers and container terminals which are a feature of the modern shipping industry’. (LPL, LC 203/4, f. 285.)
This commitment to an essentially welfare orientation is a signficant change from the bombastic nationalism which was a notable feature of the Society’s literature until at least the 1950s. For example, a speech annotated and possibly delivered by Geoffrey Fisher, archbishop of Canterbury from 1945 to 1961, is unreconstructed in its evocation of Britain’s maritime greatness, going back to the glory days of the defeat of the Spanish Armada.
It was in the reign of Queen Elizabeth the first that the seamen of England first captured the interest and the imagination of all Englishmen, and took their pre-eminent place in the affectionate regard of our people. Their achievements expressed on a great scale and with a new found confidence the varied genius of our race. They pushed out fearlessly to explore the unknown and bring it under man’s control: under God they were champions of our liberty and preserved freedom for England and the English Church against the assaults of alien tyrannies: they created and protected our commerce over all the world by which this county grew and prospered, lived and lives. (LPL, Fisher 177, f. 183)
The speech ended by giving thanks that the Duke of Edinburgh was leading the Society in the years ahead. Prince Philip took an active interest as President and this enabled a burst of new fund raising and support for the British merchant marine, but he also looked ahead to a much more diverse Society. A turning point from the old to the new was marked by the Centenary of the Society, which was celebrated in July 1956.
Mission to Seafarers Centenary, 1956
From the top of the new Lambeth Palace Library, there is a wonderful view of the city of London, overlooking the Thames, the Houses of Parliament and the Archbishop’s Garden below. The latter site was the location for the Centenary Garden Party of the Missions to Seamen, celebrated on July 18th, 1956. This was a grand occasion, with about 800 people in attendance. In his briefing letter to Fisher, Cyril Brown noted how important the work of the Honorary Secretaries was to the running of the Society, and that the Society could ‘scarsely continue’ without their help. He also noted that many of them were women, and ‘by no means young.’ (Brown to Fisher, 9 July 1956, LPL, Fisher 177, f. 192)
The Archbishop’s Garden from the New Lambeth Palace Library. Source: Hilary Carey, 26 June 2023.
Women’s work for mariners
This alerts us to an important theme, which we hope to develop as the Mariners project develops. Although in the time period of this project, seafarers were nearly always men, the work of the missions to seafarers, based on land and in and around ports, was significantly enabled by women. I like to think that the women who attended the centenary party in the Archbishop’s Garden in 1956 enjoyed their day, and the recognition of their work. Hopefully, this project will continue to uncover more of their contribution as we work through the archives.
