How did the Bolton Asian Migration Project come about?

I took an interest in how my father came over in 1960 to work in the UK. I just wanted to know the circumstances of why they came and how they came etc. and got their British passports. My parents originate from India but they came via Burma because my dad was born there and my brothers were born there. So there’s a big connection in Bolton of people who have this sort of Burma connection. Then I thought well Bolton is quite unique actually because it’s the only place in Greater Manchester with a big Indian population, I thought let’s open it up a bit wider. Also the Indian community encompasses both Muslim and Hindu and other faiths so I thought it’d be really good to see how people from different faiths and groups from the Asian continent came over and under what circumstances. it was the 50s and 60s really, that was the main time when they came and then it got really tough to get in when the migration laws were passed in the 1970s.

My dad came on the 23rd of December 1960 and so coming from a warm country to then landing in Heathrow Airport in the middle of December when it would have been dark and cold. My mum came in 63 and she always said to me she remembers one of the Beatles song was number one. I thought hold on these are things that we need to document while they’re alive because if you don’t get them stories and histories on video or whatever then you’ve lost it forever.

How did you begin to reach out to people? Did you target families or community centres, youth clubs? And How difficult or easy has it been to find these stories of what people got up to in their spare time?

So initially we had requested volunteers who were key to the project and particularly those who had the similar passion that I had. They would go door to door and into shops on the high street saying to people ‘if you’ve got photographs of when you came in the 60s and 70s share it with us because we want to document it in a book’. Thing was most people didn’t have a camera in them days so they wouldn’t have had photographs, but some did and some went to these photography places to have photos taken. So we used volunteers and it was easy through them to find what we wanted. We had some events in the community where people could come and have a drop in and bring photographs but they weren’t very successful. From my own experience we had four or five family albums and if I opened them now they’re all damaged because the glue from the 60s and 70s is not good, I had to take them all out individually and scan them in. I know loads of people who will have photographs stuck in their attics and they’re very precious about the photographs and they’ll never share them, so we can easily lose all that heritage, culture and history. We would visit people three or four times before they started to share documents with us because we had built that trust. The other thing we did was have a portable scanner that we travelled with, went to people’s houses and showed them we’re not here to take the photos, they can handle them and we’ll only share with permission.  We’ve got a lot of traction from social media, not much in the early days but remember our project has been going for almost a decade, people have been sending us photographs from facebook, twitter and tagging us. 

Places like Cromor Photography and Hari News Agency, were you aware of them before or did you become aware through the collecting?

A bit of yes and no. Because I was born in 69 so I knew Hari News Agency well in the 70s, it was around and it was part of the furniture in the area. I’d have gone in there for my haircut, to pick up books and stationary, stuff catering to the Asian community like books and stuff like that. Chroma, I didn’t have a clue because it might have not been around as i was growing up but it was popular before then. It was a real heart of the community where people who came from different countries, whether they were Asian, African, Eastern European, or whatever they would go to the shop to have their individual portraits taken. That could have been a passport photograph for your employer, for a visa, or whatever the documents they needed to have for immigration status but also then they would send back family photographs to their families. You see a lot of them photographs with a massive window in the background and you’ve got the husband, wife and children all in their sunday best, that photograph would have been sent back to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Caribbean, whatever to show the relatives look how well i’m doing in the UK, I’ve got a job and I have kids. 

When you conduct oral histories, what are the questions you ask, what are you trying to find out to paint a picture of Asian people living in the UK in the late 1900s?

We had some training done by the local museum and history centre in Bolton, the questions of the top of my head were things like what was the weather and what were the smells when you got here? Were the people friendly? Which people said they were. There was something about creating family trees, just a set of questions around trying to capture that period of time when they first came, the first few days, weeks, months and chapters in their life. The other key thing is from the research we done with my dads generation and people that came from BAME communities is that they had no intention of staying in the UK for long term or for good. The intention was just to come for work for a couple of years, earn some money and go back to Jamaica or India or Pakistan or wherever. So that would have changed for a lot of people coming in who saw that they would be here for the rest of their lives or their families would be here and get buried here. So I know my dad definitely had no intention of staying here long term but when my mum and brothers came over in 63 and they started school here then all of a sudden it changed. So we would have interviewed younger generations a bit differently as they came over in different circumstances.