Looking back with Eric Leaver

AS retirement affords 67-year-old Mudassir Khan the time to begin writing his memoirs, he sets about recording an era that, 44 years ago, found him arriving in East Lancashire for the first time -- at a unique watershed in its economic and social history.

For he came just as its traditional textile industry began a 30-year terminal decline -- and as an unintentional herald of the thousands of Asian immigrants whose arrival was meant to save it from the overseas competition that killed it.

The advance guard of the East Lancashire's now-vast ethnic community, the newcomers were the young men lured from India and Pakistan to run the new production-boosting night shifts in the mills that Lancashire's own weavers and spinners were reluctant to work, supplementing the workforce of an industry which the region's own young generation was increasingly unwilling to join.

But when Mudassir arrived from Hyderabad in Pakistan's Sindh province in 1956, this influx was still some three years away. Indeed, he tells me that then he was one of just nine or ten Asians living in Blackburn.

And a couple of years later when he appeared in the middle of the front row of this photograph (right) of a Pakistani students' social at the then Blackburn Technical College, there were hardly any more in the town. The number of Asians at the function was, in fact, boosted by other overseas students from colleges at Burnley and Bolton.

Older readers may recognise Blackburn's former chief education officer, Donald Hartley, pictured in the row behind wearing a Pakistani hat, and, on his right, Donald King, head of the College's textile department.

But, as Mudassir relates, though the cotton industry -- and the skills taught at the "Tech's" textile section -- had been the attraction that drew these Asians to East Lancashire, none had originally intended to stay, but were determined to acquire the knowledge and qualifications that would make them top managers in textiles in their own country.

"Having been first established in Karachi, the textiles industry had spread quickly in India and Pakistan about that time and it was booming. The mills were seeking spinning, weaving and dyeing masters and Blackburn was the place to come for qualifications," he said. Indeed, the extent to which Lancashire's long-standing global dominance of textile manufacture was by then shifting to developing industrial countries was illustrated by the intake at the Blackburn college's textile department in 1956 -- reflecting how East Lancashire was exporting its expertise, but less and less of its cloth as the emergent low-cost overseas mills captured more and more of the world market.

"Of my own class of 14 or 15 students in 1956, only three were English. The rest were Indians, Pakistanis, Bengalis, Chinese, Egyptian, Jordanian, Turkish and there was one Brazilian," recalls Mudassir, of Alexandra Road, Blackburn.

Out of the group, only he and fellow student Riaz Chaudry, pictured far right on the front row, failed to return to their home countries at the end of their course -- in Mudassir's case, much to the ire of his father who had funded his three years' study in Blackburn in order to help him pursue a career in Pakistan.

While the returnees looked forward to managerial jobs back home, Mudassir, staying on in the country he had come to prefer, had to start in Lancashire textiles as an ordinary weaver, first with Courtaulds at Preston and later at the William Birtwistle group's Waterfall Mill in Blackburn. But his decision coincided with the UK industry's response to overseas competition -- of upping production by introducing night shifts manned by immigrants from India and Pakistan -- a move that was to steer his career upwards just as the migratory flood was destined to dramatically reshape East Lancashire's social character over the following 40 years.

"When I came at first, most people in East Lancashire had hardly ever seen a coloured person," he says. "People reacted in an extremely friendly way. Old ladies would stop us Asian students in the street and ask us how we were getting on and, especially at Christmas time, we would get invited into people's houses. "I remember going once to Clitheroe and being stopped by a lad of about ten who asked me if he could take me and show me to his friend as he had never seen a coloured man before. That's how unusual we were then."

All that changed with the arrival in 1959 of hundreds of others to work in for companies like Birtwistle's and John Duckworth's Roe Lee Mills and the development found Mudassir transferring from his looms at Waterfall to the personnel department as his language skills were employed to liaise with and train the new influx of Asian workers and to help them with welfare problems ranging from finding accommodation to joining a GP's list.

"The Lancashire industry might have been able to compete if it had modernised more at this stage. But it was easily being beaten in terms of production by overseas firms because they were equipped with brand new automatic looms and spinning machinery while, here, the mills were still relying on much older, less efficient ones," he says.

Married for almost 40 years to his wife Kathleen, who also has the Muslim name, Fernaz, and with a son, Suhail, and daughter Shahnaz -- whose promptings led him to begin penning his recollections -- Mudassir later joined the Blackburn textiles firm of Ledatec, formerly the Blackburn Cord Company, before spending the past 10 years lecturing in GCSE and A-level Urdu at Accrington and Rossendale College and teaching the language at basic level to English people who work with Asians. He has also been a magistrate for the past six years.

He remains rarely placed as one of the few Asians who have witnessed East Lancashire's transformation from having no ethic community at all to possessing one numbering tens of thousands -- to the extent that, in his own words, parts of the region have become facsimiles of India and Pakistan and he is called upon to educate people living in them in British culture. MEMORIES: Mudassir Khan writing his story and (above) the Asian students' dance at Blackburn 'Tech' in 1958