A Somali sailor in 1920s Britain

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 6 October 2021

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the early 20th century, many Somali seafarers made their way to Britain on merchant ships, establishing communities in cities such as Cardiff. One of them, Ibrahim Ismaa'il, made his way to the UK from the port of Aden. He then struck up an unlikely friendship with an eminent anthropologist who lived in an alternative community in the Cotswolds. The anthropologist later recorded Ismaa'il's remarkable life-story. Chloe Hadjimatheou reports.

PHOTO: A British liner in the port of Aden in the 1920s (Getty Images).

Transcript

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0:00.0	Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless
0:06.8	searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the
0:11.8	telly we share what we've been watching
0:14.0	Cladie Aide.
0:16.0	Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.
0:19.0	Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.
0:21.0	And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less
0:24.9	searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds.
0:31.1	Hello Hello and welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Chloe
0:39.8	Hadgemethieu. As part of Black British History Month I'm going to take you back a hundred years to the remarkable
0:46.6	story of a Somali sailor who travelled the world and ended up spending more than a decade in the UK.
0:54.0	It's 1918 on the southern coast of Europe
0:59.5	and a young man from Africa's having a new experience.
1:05.0	I naturally felt very nervous.
1:08.0	Near objects dashing past a carriage window gave me a few bad shocks, especially another train which crossed us. After that I kept myself
1:18.4	well in the middle of the carriage, as far as possible from both windows.
1:24.0	This is Ibrahim Ismael describing his first ever ride on a train.
1:30.0	The words are taken from his memoir and read here by an actor.
1:34.0	A tunnel particularly frightened me.
1:36.8	Next to me was a handsome, kindly, Senegalese.
1:40.9	He told me that the tunnel was not the natural cave, but had been dug by men right through the hills, and I began to wonder how many hundreds of years it must have taken to complete such stupendous work?
1:57.0	Like many young Somalies of his day, Ibrahim was a seafarer.
	...

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