A German torpedo struck the P&O liner Persia at lunchtime on 30 December 1915, when the ship was about 40 miles south-east of Crete and making all speed towards India via the Suez canal. In the dining saloon John Douglas-Scott-Montagu, the second Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, had just finished his soup. One of the ship’s boilers blew up, the sea flooded in, and the Persia sank so quickly that it dragged lifeboats down with it and left hardly any wreckage for those in the sea to grasp; out of the 519 people onboard, only 176 survived.
Lord Montagu was among them. He managed to swim to an upturned boat and clung to it, together with a few other Europeans and several Indian seamen, known as lascars. Over the next 32 hours three vessels passed without stopping because they feared the U-boat had set a trap. One by one, Montagu’s companions died until of the original 33 there were only 11 left. He had lots to think about – where, for example, was the secretary-cum-mistress who had been sailing with him? (As it turned out, she was dead.) But Montagu’s thoughts turned to a different horror. What worried him, he wrote later, was “how best an Englishman might die when there were lascars to watch his end”.
Like many people whose friends and relations had been at sea – a common experience in the 1950s, when Britain still possessed the world’s largest merchant fleet – I knew the word lascar from quite an early age. My father had sailed for a year or so as a junior engineer with the British India line and he liked to remember the Indian crew, their goats tethered on deck for later slaughter, and the language that they and their British superiors used to make each other understandable. Lascari-bat was rudimentary Hindustani. He would recall a few commanding words and phrases. Ab chup raho; kam karo: “Now hold your tongue and get to work.” The family album had a box-camera snap of their foreman, or serang, a man with a large moustache and a fez-like hat. Dad used fond phrases like “a real character”. The serang’s men had shovelled coal into the furnaces and kept steam up all the way from Falmouth to Queensland and back again via Colombo.
As a workforce, they were reliable and steady (unusually among seafarers, drink was never a problem), and popular with ships’ captains and shipowners, who had begun to recruit them in the 17th century. When steam replaced sail on the routes from Europe to India and the far east, the demand for their labour grew – in contrast to seacraft, steamships needed the more easily acquired skills of stokers, engine-greasers, stewards and cooks – and by 1914 they made up between a quarter and a fifth of the total crew aboard British ships.
What recommended them most to shipowners, of course, was their cost compared with British seamen. They accepted lower wages, slept in poorer lodgings, and ate cheaper food; and all this because acts of parliament exempted them from the laws governing the terms and conditions of their British equivalents. Their employment, which had begun on ships plying the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean, caused alarm among European seamen when it spread westwards to ships in the Atlantic trades. In the 1880s, newly formed maritime unions began to agitate and protest. In 1892, fighting a campaign to become the Tory MP for Barrow in Furness, the shipowner Charles Cayzer found himself barracked at meetings by chants of “coolies, coolies” and described by rivals as “the coolie candidate” because his extensive fleet, the Clan Line, employed so many Indians and deprived honest Britons of jobs.
This old fear of cheap labour found an echo this week in the opposition to the abject behaviour of P&O Ferries, which sacked 800 seafarers without notice or consultation, cheerfully admitted breaking the law, and announced its intention to pay most of their replacements well below the minimum wage. The origins of the new recruits have not been disclosed. India was mentioned; it may not be true. What seems to be the case is that, if P&O succeed, the new crews (two to each vessel) will have to work twice as hard as the old ones (four crews per vessel) for a rate averaging £5.50 an hour. This kind of capitalism knows no quarter: Ab chup raho; kam karo.
Trade unions want the vessels to be impounded and their crews rehired, but that may not be so easily done. Thanks to the laissez-faire policies of successive governments, P&O’s ferries are owned in Dubai, built in Germany, Finland and Italy, and registered in the Bahamas and Cyprus (the move from registration in Dover was said to have been prompted by Brexit). In that context, a British crew looks like an anomaly, a quaint relic from the habits of the pre-globalised world. As Mick Lynch, the general secretary of the RMT union, told the parliamentary inquiry into P&O this week, “The politicians and lawyers in this country have watched over the last 30 years [as] our merchant marine has been decimated.” Soon, he said, “we won’t have a merchant navy … British ships … and British ratings will cease to exist”.
I think of the things I used to know. For instance, that P&O, like several other illustrious lines, had Scottish foundations; that a Shetland man, a sailor turned shipbroker called Arthur Anderson, was the principal founder in 1837, the year Victoria came to the throne; that the P stood for Peninsular, meaning Iberia, and the O for Oriental, a direction at first limited to the eastern Mediterranean and eventually reaching as far as east as Japan and Australia; that the word posh is believed to have come from the best way to travel to and from India: port cabins on the way out and starboard side home.
When P&O amalgamated with British India Steam Navigation in 1914, the result was the world’s largest shipping conglomerate, led by James Lyle Mackay, a brilliant and hard-headed businessman from Arbroath who as Lord Inchcape was offered and declined the throne of Albania, saying it was not in his line. Its ships evolved a distinctive quality that other companies – even Cunard – found hard to match. A P&O commander described it as “the sort of thing to be found in good hotels or clubs to which wealth alone does not give an entree”. A book published in 1986 to celebrate the firm’s 150th anniversary could speak of a “phenomenal company” that had diversified into enterprises well beyond shipping but remained anchored to traditions of trust, loyalty, service and pride. Less than 20 years later its shareholders sold the whole caboodle, minus its cruise liners, to the rulers of Dubai for £3.3bn.
As to the lascars, many died at sea during the two world wars – a disproportionate number in fact, blamed until relatively recently on the idea that they succumbed more quickly to the cold. Most retired to the places they had come from, which was mainly Bengal, where they spent their savings on houses that had a “tank” or bathing pond attached and a short row of palm trees planted to the front. A minority never went home and settled instead where their ships had docked, which in Britain was east London. There they fathered the first generation of Indian restaurateurs, to whose restaurants Englishmen came after a night in the pub to slump at the tables and fall off the chairs and call to the waiter, “Hey, Gunga Din”; and were somehow ignored and perhaps even forgiven. The noble and gracious England of the second Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, supposing it ever existed, had most certainly disappeared.
Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist
