Book
review
From
Ta'izz to Tyneside
An Arab community in the north-east of England during the early twentieth century
by Richard I. Lawless
University of Exeter Press.
Hardback £30, paperback £15
This substantial book
of nearly 300 pages, including over 30 pages of notes, is a very detailed study of a small
Yemeni community of itinerant merchant seamen in South Shields from the turn of the last
century to the present day. Thus it was almost on Dr. Lawless doorstep as the
recently retired Director of the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Durham
University.
The book deals initially with the arrival of the first Yemenis as
stokers on steamships at the end of the 19th century and how some settled and set up
boarding houses for their brethren. It then goes on to explain something of the background
of how these essentially mountain-bred peasant farmers came to be employed in such an
unlikely trade; how they prospered in the first two decades of the twentieth century and
then how the declining demand for shipping produced a violent colour-prejudiced reaction
among British seamen and local residents resulting in the first race riots to be
experienced in the United Kingdom.
He explains very effectively, how the society organised itself
around the boarding houses, in the slum area around the South Shields docks and of the
revival of Islamic teaching in the 30s and 40s with the arrival of an inspired
alim. However, there is a clearly a limited amount of written material available
from a largely illiterate community and so much of Dr. Lawless material comes from
letters in the local newspaper, minutes of discussions in the local council and Home
Office minutes, none of which show the authors thereof in anything but a very unpleasant
light.
To a degree, the reprinting of the newspaper correspondence and
the detailed reports of South Shields councillors makes for monotonous reading. For the
average reader, it might have been easier if more of this was relegated to the notes. Five
pages of anonymous abusive letters about the Arab community followed by three or four of
Arab boarding house keepers replies over-eggs the good doctors point.
The book is an exacting piece of scholarship which is of value
particularly to social historians rather than the average reader.
JAMES NASH, November 1995
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