Shoreditch Lascars

In March 1797 the first ships carrying lascars bound for temporary housing in Shoreditch arrived in Gravesend, Kent. Gravesend was a traditional stopping point where East India Company ships stopped to lighten their loads before sailing up the Thames to moorings at Blackwall and Deptford, a few miles away from the parish of St Leonard’s, Shoreditch, then on the outskirts of the City of London. The East India Company had made arrangements with a Mrs Susannah Smetza in Kingsland Road and a Mr Samuel Coates in nearby Hackney Road to provide private lodgings to feed, clothe and shelter the sailors at a fixed rate per man. The East India Company recognised that an allowance would also be needed for the lodging’s premises, taxes, repairs and servants, and that the homes would only be needed for eight months of the year, based on the travelling season.

Susannah, her husband Eberhart (also known as Abrat) and four children lived on Kingsland Road, possibly between the junction with today’s Hackney Road and Cotton’s Garden. A court report from 1808 tells us that they had two bundles of calico fabric totaling 30 yards stolen from them, so they may have been involved in small-scale textile  trading locally, linking them to the East India Company. Samuel Coates, who ran the second lodging house, was a surveyor. By 1796 he occupied three houses on Hackney Road, one of the largest tenancies on the road. He died shortly after and his wife continued to run the lodging house. The East India Company’s contract with Susanah Smetza ran from 1797 to 1801 and with the Coates from 1798 to 1802. Complaints from Shoreditch’s residents about rowdy lascars resulted in the contract with the Coates being terminated earlier than planned and as compensation Mrs Coates was given £200 for the expenses she incurred to prepare for the sailors’ arrival.

A newspaper reported that in 1798 around 700 lascars arrived in London. Half may have lived across the two private lodging houses in Shoreditch, which were also described as barracks for the sailors. On arrival they should have been provided with suitable clothing for the season and had rations of rice, sugar, tea, pepper, salt, onions, greens, herring, and as many potatoes as they could eat. The Chinese sailors were given boneless beef and the Indian ones were given mutton. After long stints on board ships, the sailors were often in poor health. At the Smetza home their medical needs were overseen by a John Weston and those with the Coates by a William Docker, and then Hilton Docker. William was an apothecary and a carpenter in Camomile Street (now Bevis Marks) off Bishopsgate Street, around a 20 minute walk away from Hackney Road and close to the East India Company’s headquarters in Leadenhall Street. His brother Hilton trained as his apprentice and then took over caring for the sailors from his home in nearby Curtain Road.

The sailors often wanted to enjoy themselves and developed a reputation locally for being rowdy. There were around seven public houses, or inns, in and around Kingsland Road alone, which they may have visited. At this time Shoreditch was a rural area on the northern outskirts of the City of London and residents put in official complaints against the sailors’ behaviour and the East India Company decided to stop providing private lodging in the area and continued with the homes in Shadwell only. However, not everybody was against the sailors. One of the people who attended to the sailors in the Shoreditch homes wrote in their defence against the complaints. A 12 year old girl from Shoreditch managed to escape to Portsmouth and tried to board a ship to return with the lascars to India. Local parishioners had to pay for her return to Shoreditch.

“While in London they were boarded by the India Company, in a house on the Kingsland Road, in which neighbourhood they formed many tender attachments.”

The Observer newspaper, May 1797

Life in Shoreditch was not perfect. The sailors were used to working and being busy on ships, but they did not have anything to occupy their time constructively on shore. The sailors got into fights with each other and with those around them. In one instance at the lodging house in Hackney Road three lascars were charged with murdering their fellow lascar Ismael. At another time a Chinese lascar violently assaulted a young lascar boy in Kingsland Road. Some sailors ran away from the homes and were found begging in the streets of London. They often sold the clothes they were provided with by the ship owners and suffered in the British weather which they were not used to. Loneliness on shore was an issue and relationships with sex workers led to diseases and ill health for the sailors in both of the homes in Shoreditch. On one occasion four young women from Cable Street were arrested at the lodging house in Hackney Road. Several of the lascars attended the court hearing and tried to get the women released, but the judge considered the lascars ‘idle, disorderly and persons of evil fame’.

At least 18 sailors died and were buried in the borough. The winter of 1799-80 was particularly bad and claimed the most lives. Most of these sailors were buried at the Gibraltar Row burial ground, just off Bethnal Green Road. This was possibly exhumed before being built over. Many of the lascars from India were Muslim, often recruited from coastal places like Bengal and Gujarat. They would have been buried at Gibraltar Row both because it was close to the two homes they stayed at, and also because it was a nonconformist burial ground. There are also records of lascars who died in the 1800s buried at Victoria Park and St John at Hackney. Often the sailor’s first name was not recorded, either because it was unknown, or not considered important at the time. Most of those who were buried in Gibraltar Row Burial Ground were between 20 and 30 years old. One lascar was only 15 years old.

While the lascars were living in Shoreditch, the East India Company built warehouses to store their goods opposite today’s Liverpool Street Station around Cutler Street, just a short walk away from where the lascars were boarding. The number of lascars arriving in Britain increased significantly after the Napoleonic Wars of 1803-1815, and they lived elsewhere in London and the country. Though there are no known physical legacies of the time the lascars spent in Shoreditch, these warehouses serve as a reminder of their hard work across oceans.