A soul-stirring personal history of immigration
Where is home? For many of us it is the place we live now, but also the place where we grew up, and perhaps a faraway place where we have rarely set foot but where our family roots lie. For Aminul Hoque, an academic and presenter of this episode of A Very
British History (BBC Four), it is the comfortable house in Walthamstow he shares with his wife and three daughters. It is also a council estate in the East End, where he spent his childhood playing football and trying not to get his head kicked in on the way to school. And it is Bangladesh, the country where he was born and lived for only three years before coming to Britain, but which exerts a strong emotional pull.
This engaging BBC Four series has previously examined Britain’s Irish and Chinese communities. Like the Channel 4 series My Grandparents’
War, it takes one personal story as a way into a wider history. Hoque’s story began with his father, Shamsul, who came alone to England in 1963 at the age of 24 from what was then East Pakistan. He was among a wave of Bangladeshi migrants who, as citizens of the Commonwealth, were granted work vouchers to find jobs in a Britain that needed manual labourers. Hoque worked briefly in a Yorkshire cotton mill before moving to London, where he found employment in the Spitalfields rag trade.
One of the strengths of the series is the archive footage, which here documented a fascinating period of social change. We saw the men at work in garment factories; I would have loved the programme-makers to have found the well-spoken gentleman who clearly hoped for better than menial work: “Actually, I don’t like it. But circumstances compel me,” he lamented.
The programme did trace some characters, however, including Rajonuddin Jalal. He was filmed in the 1970s being visited by a brusque housing officer who batted away his request for housing. Luckily, Jalal was offered a place to stay by a local woman, Cathy Forrester; touchingly, they remain friends today.
Other Londoners were not so welcoming. The National Front was at its peak in the 1970s. Hoque and his cousin recalled the daily harassment they faced – a teacher had to collect Bangladeshi children from the estate and walk them to school each morning to protect them from being beaten up. The tensions culminated in the Battle of Brick Lane following the 1978 murder of a young textile worker, Altab Ali, which galvanised the Bangladeshi community into fighting back against the racists. The East End park where Ali died is now named after him.
The documentary felt especially timely after the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, unveiled plans to limit migration to skilled workers who have a job offer, a good command of English and a salary of more than £25,000 a year. The vast majority of Bangladeshi arrivals would not have passed this test.
Hoque reminded us that thousands of Bengalis were lascars during the First and Second World Wars, and many of them gave their lives to Britain. The generation that arrived in the 1960s, and those that came after, toiled in factories and lived in grim conditions – sometimes with up to eight men sharing a bedroom, using the beds in shifts – while sending money home. When their families began arriving, the women would work as seamstresses.
At the heart of the film was Hoque’s own family story. He only began learning about it as a teenager when he broke his ankle playing football and was confined to the living room with his father – then a distant and “strange person” to him – for company. Mr Hoque Sr began talking about his life, and the boy was captivated. In doing so, the older man was performing the same function as this worthwhile documentary, shining a light on the struggles and achievements of a disadvantaged community (those achievements include sparking our national love affair with curry, as Bangladeshis are responsible for the majority of what we know as “Indian restaurants”).
Hoque took his daughters and his father on a trip to Bangladesh – and visited the house built with Shamsul’s savings – hoping that they would connect with their roots (when one of his daughters asked how she would communicate with cousins who spoke no English, he replied brightly: “Google Translate!”). He also dug out the old passport on which his mother had arrived in Britain with him and his siblings, setting him on a path to a British life. “It’s quite soul-stirring,” Hoque said, a description that could be applied to his film.
A Very British History ★★★★