Remembering the London Refuge for South Asian Nannies Far From Home
This story was originally published in Atlas Obscura. Cover image: Two ayahs with their charges. Courtesy Satyasikha Chakraborty.
Sunlight pours into a room with floral-patterned wallpaper, where a coterie of women sit around a large table. Dressed in collared blouses and plain skirts or saris, the women sew and read with immense focus, aware of the watchful presence of other women standing behind them. This moment, possibly staged, was captured in a photograph in 1904, in the borough of Hackney. It is one of the rare records of the Ayahs’ Home, a refuge in East London for colonial South Asian ayahs who had crossed oceans caring for British children, only to be abandoned in a foreign country far from home.
Ayahs were once the backbone of British households in India. Colonial families hired the women as nannies and expected them to be quintessential caregivers: soft-spoken, maternal, faithful, capable, and attentive. Draped in plain white saris, their heads often covered, the women sang lullabies to their charges, rocked them to sleep, and narrated enchanting fairy tales. In return, the ayahs were cherished by their little masters, and were indispensable for British mothers, particularly at sea.
The Ayahs’ Home in Hackney in 1904. British Library/Public Domain.
Between the late 1700s and mid-1900s, countless ayahs traveled under the employment of British families. Maritime voyages were long and arduous, marked by bouts of seasickness and dangerous storms. The ayahs relieved memsahibs of their childcare duties by tending to their young and often anxious charges, and keeping them entertained for hours, day after day. Upon disembarking in London or other port cities, however, their services no longer required, a number of the ayahs were unceremoniously discharged. There are no records documenting how many ayahs found themselves in this position, or how most of them fared.
Some of the women found their way to the Ayahs’ Home. Established in 1825 in Aldgate, near the Tower of London, the Ayahs’ Home eventually relocated to a building on King Edward’s Road around 1900 before moving again, a few doors down the street. Run by Christian missionaries from the London City Mission, the home’s name was painted in bold white letters on the arch over its front door. Here, Asian governesses and nannies, steamer trunks in tow, trickled in from all parts of the sprawling Empire, including Hong Kong, British Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Burma (Myanmar), Malaysia, and Java.
The Ayahs’ Home at 4 King Edward’s Road in 1921. The building today is divided into private apartments. British Library/Public Domain.
“The home had very high ceilings,” says historian Rozina Visram, author of Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History. “It was bright and colorful.” Visram began researching the ayahs more than three decades ago. Within the home, there were 30 rooms, she adds, noting that the sleeping quarters were divided by ethnicity and nationality.
Little is known about the ayahs who stayed there; their personal stories were rarely recorded. The London City Mission, however, routinely published articles about the Ayahs’ Home in its magazine. “In fact, the materials which have survived about the ayahs are mostly from these magazines,” says Satyasikha Chakraborty, a historian at The College of New Jersey. “So, you have to be cognizant of the fact that the magazine was a kind of propaganda tool, where the London City Mission would normally write good things about the institution.”
An ayah stands behind a woman and her child, location unknown, in this image from the 1860s. Public Domain.
Other publications noted the home. Chakraborty shared a September 1923 article from the Yorkshire Post that described how the ayahs spent their days at the establishment, engrossed in intricate embroidery work, playing cards, or trading stories. Chewing betel leaves was one of their “simple pleasures,” according to the article, as the women sat cross-legged on the ground, indulging in a game of pachisi and tossing cowrie shells in the air as dice.
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