Earliest Goans in London
(Excerpts
from a Port Cities of London document)
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Arrival of the first Lascars
Baptism records from the end of
the 17th century in East Greenwich show that a number of young Indians
from the Malabar Coast were brought to England as servants. However, it is
difficult to find out exactly where these people came from.
A Navigation Act was passed in 1660 that
restricted the employment of non-English seamen to a quarter of the crew on
returning East India Company ships. There is evidence of this law being
enforced with the arrest of a Captain Bookie in 1730 at Greenwich.
East India Company pay books suggest that
the captains had become so attached to their Indo-Portuguese cooks that these
cooks were travelling on two or even three voyages between London and
the East Indies with the same master.
Replacement crews
Between 1720 and 1800, the volume of trade
at the Port of London tripled. Several of the larger East India Company ships
called at Goa and returned to dock at Erith, Woolwich or Deptford.
Many British sailors were lost on the voyages to the East Indies,
so many Indo-Portuguese Lascars from Bengal and Madras were recruited as
crew.
The employment of Goans on board East India
Company ships was further encouraged
after the brief British presence in Goa between 1797 and 1799 during the
French Revolutionary Wars.
Deptford Goans
The British generals acquired a taste for
Goan food and took many Goans as cooks and general servants to Bombay. It is
possible that there were Goans at Deptford among thirteen Lascars and a
Portuguese on board an Indiaman who were
buried in the parish of St Nicholas at Deptford in 1796.
If there were some Goans living in Deptford
it is quite likely that they lived around King Street, New Street and Lower
Street, which were the most cosmopolitan streets at that time.
Abandoned seamen
Around the middle of the 19th century,
increasing numbers of Goans settled in London. Most were seamen who had been
abandoned by their shipping masters.
There were some specific areas of East
London that attracted the early Goans.
One of the most famous areas was a group of
passages off the High Street at Shadwell known as Tiger Bay.
Census returns for this period omit Goans
and other Asians as a landlord could be imprisoned for housing them. But
there is evidence from other sources of Goans in the area. At 12
Bluegate Fields, Francis Kaudery (probably Cordeira), who arrived from Goa around
1855, worked as a steward at the Royal Sovereign Public House.
This was a popular meeting point for Lascars
who would often gather to drink Arrack and play skittles in the courtyard
behind the pub.
The Strangers' Home
The plight of these often poor people was
taken up by Lieutenant Colonel R. M. Hughes, formally of the East India Company, and Joseph Salter of the
London City Mission. The men held a meeting in 1855 to set up a Strangers'
Home.
The main contributor to the 'Home for
Asiatics, Africans, South Sea Islanders and Others' on the West India
Dock Road was the East India Company, which provided £200. The newly
founded Peninsula and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O)
provided £20 to the home, which opened in 1857.
Lascars were admitted as long as they had
the prospect of local employment, or were on a ship returning to the East.
Beside the home was the Lascars Shipping Agency. There were Goans at the home
and one of them complained that there was no Konkani-speaking priest to hear
his confession.
The Suez route
With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869
ships could travel to India and Australia by a shorter route, without
sailing around Africa. Companies such as the British India Steam Navigation
Company (BISNC), which were already employing Goan crew in the Indian Ocean,
now used them on voyages via Suez to London. This further added to the
seamen on P&O vessels visiting the port of London.
Writers mention Lascars, servants and Ayahs
(children's nurses) at the Isle of Dogs where Goan Arrack was available in
1872. The nearby area around Ratcliffe Highway, behind the Limehouse Basin,
was another popular haunt of Lascars. Some of these men married local British
women and lived at Mile End Old Town. They may have gone to church at St
Mary's and St Michael's in the Commercial Road.
First family
The first Goan family known to live in
England was the Mascarenhas family, who came via Bombay and lived in Mortham
Street, East Ham. Three of their children were born in East London. Mr
Mascarenhas was a professor of languages and his wife was a dress-maker.
It is very possible that these Goans
worshipped at the Church of St Francis of Assisi on Grove Crescent Road. In
the more affluent area of the city
about six or seven Goan women lived at a lodging house. These Catholic Goans
were regular attendants at the Sunday services of the Roman Catholic chapel
of St Mary at Bloomfields Street,
Moorfields.
This early Goan community was eventually
assimilated into the general population of East London and ceased to exist as
a distinct community by the beginning of the 20th century.
P&O and the Lascars
In 1881 the Peninsula and Oriental (P&O)
line moved its terminus from Southampton to London. The census reports
of that year provide a valuable
insight into the changing Goan Lascar population in the port of London.
Altogether there were more than 55
Goan Lascars on four vessels in the port of London - three of these were
P&O ships. Many of these men were recruited in Bombay via an agent in
Goa.
It has been possible, through family history
studies, to trace some of these men to particular Goan villages. P&O
continued to employ a large number of Goans on ships sailing between
London and India or Australia
Goans in St Katharine's
St George's Street, with shops on one side
and the warehouses of St Katharine's Docks on the other, was a popular area
for Asian sailors. Here, in a housing scheme originally intended for the
poor, a Goan appears to have rented a flat at Katharine Building in
Cartwright Street in 1888.
The census of 1901 shows the increase
in Goan Lascars in London. There were more than 120 Goan seamen in the Port
of London, of which 104 were on the P&O ships in the Albert Docks.
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