Armistice Day: Ex-council boss says remember Asian soldiers

Sir Bill was leader of Blackburn with Darwen Council from 2001 to 2004, and served as a councillor for 24 years.

He spend his working career as a youth worker, was chair of Blackburn College between 2008 and 2016, and was Mayor of Blackburn with Darwen in 1989/90.

Here, he shares an extract from his forthcoming book '‘One In A Million’  where he speaks passionately about meeting Asian war veterans and how they were finally recognised for their efforts in world conflicts, and also challenging some of the comments he has heard over the years.

(Note: The passage below features occasional language some people may find offensive)

Words by Sir Bill Taylor

Remembrance Day came round again, and somebody said something within my hearing, deliberately I think, in my local pub.

I think the comment was intended to irk me but actually it got my creative mind thinking. 

The comment was ‘You never see a P*** wearing a poppy, do you?’. On reflection his observation had some empirical validity. But I knew a different story. 

Since 1979, Anne and I, sometimes with a civic twinning party or accompanying groups of young people, had visited Péronne on the River Somme a few times. 

We had been to the British Commonwealth Military Cemetery on the outskirts of the small French town. My reckoning was that around 540 military men were buried there. 

We found only one man, a lieutenant I think, over the age of 30. 

Most of the other people buried had barely left their teens. 370 or more men, with names like Khan, Patel and Singh, had travelled thousands of miles to a war not of their making and laid down their lives on Flanders fields. Lest we forget. 

On a family visit to the cemetery, Anne wrote something in the Book of Remembrance safely inset in the wall. She wouldn’t let me read what she had written.

Years later, on a return visit, I remembered that incident and couldn’t resist looking for what she had written. It said simply ‘Please don’t let this happen to my son’.

In the Great War, the war to end all wars, over a million people from what we now know to be India, Pakistan and Bangladesh served their ‘mother’ country overseas. 60,000 of them perished, nearly 10,000 won decorations, including eleven Victoria Crosses. 

Two decades later they answered the call to arms once again when the world’s biggest ever volunteer army of 2.5 million men came from that same part of the world. 87,000 died, never to see their real home again.

I got a few remaining local veterans invited into the leader’s office and about half a dozen old grey beards arrived, including Ali Khan, Jalal Din and Sardar Ali as well as Khadim Hussain and Fazal Hussain.

They brought with them their army passbooks, some crumpled old photographs and other wartime memorabilia of which they were rightly proud. 

They told me a few stories as old soldiers like to do. 

They expressed frustration and sadness to me that their stories had never been told before, not in the wider community or even within the Asian community, and showed gratitude to me for helping them get their story out. 

One old soldier told me he often got called a ‘silly old P***’. I was instantly angry for this lovable, dignified, proud old guy.

I asked him ‘Who said that to you, white kids?'. ’Sometimes,’ he said, ‘but usually our own Asian lads.

'I just say, listen, son, if it wasn’t for me, you’d be speaking German now!’

Not the first time I’d heard that, but from a new direction.

I told all this to Amar Abass. Amar was around 20 or so at the time and was chief executive of Youth Action, a local organisation.

This conversation took place at Radio Lancashire in Blackburn and was overheard by Greg Dyke, at the time BBC director general, who was visiting the station. 

Amar and his team, led by project manager Imran Master, worked hard, learned loads and informed many others when they later mounted a superb photos, words, press cuttings, audio and film footage exhibition entitled ‘Mutual Respect’ in the BBC Open Centre in Blackburn. 

At the time Imran said, ‘This has been a massive learning chance for me and the youth group. We learnt this is the first of this kind of project ever to be done and we felt honoured to be doing it’.

One of these old grey beards, as I called them, was Fazal Hussain. Fazal had been born in 1918 and died at the ripe old age of 95. He was a lovely, dignified, true gentleman. 

As a young man, in his 20s, he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in the Middle East and Italy during the Second World War.

Fazal, with his fellow veteran Khadim Hussain, eventually went into local secondary schools and told senior pupils about their experiences. 

Those who listened and learned from these two now frail old guys were captivated by their stories. Basically, whilst the battle continued to rage around them their job was to go onto the battlefield and remove the wounded and later the dead. 

Their bravery will have saved many lives and also enabled the bereaved to properly mourn their fallen loved ones.

Around 2011, this eventually resulted in the production of a half- hour documentary entitled 'We Also Served', much of it made by teenagers from Beardwood and St Bede’s high schools in Blackburn in conjunction with the BBC. 

The film, used as a teaching aid to promote community cohesion, was eventually shown in many schools in Blackburn, across Lancashire and beyond. Fazal and Khadim were well into their 80s before they became film stars.

The film can be found by searching for ‘Blackburn Muslim War Veterans.’

In 2016 I was proud to be able to promote Fazal’s name to be chosen and used to identify households in the new Each Step purpose-built state-of-the-art dementia unit not so far from Ewood Park. 

This was a process driven by my ex-NHS chief executive Neil Matthewman, then in charge of New Step, who had ‘got’ my approach to public services.

It was a proud, fitting and probably long overdue mark of recognition and respect for Fazal Hussain, a man of great humility and dignity.

This is an extract from Sir Bill Taylor’s new book ‘One In A Million’ which is due to be published this month.