My friend Abdul Hamed, who has died aged 68 after suffering from cancer, made a remarkable cultural journey and enriched many lives on the way.
He was born near Lyallpur (now Faisalabad) in Pakistan, where his family had a small farm, to Janet Bibi and Mohammed Yacoob. The family came to Britain when he was seven, his father setting up as a tallyman, selling clothes door-to-door on credit then calling weekly to collect the payments. They lived in a tall terraced house in Newcastle’s inner west end, which they shared with some dysfunctional tenants.
It was there in Elswick that I first met Ab in the autumn of 1967, when I was carrying out some research into the lives of his generation of young Asians. I knocked on the door and he kindly invited me in.
Ab was then studying electronics at the Marine and Technical College in South Shields, having failed after 20-30 attempts to get an apprenticeship. Even when he qualified he had to wait a long time to get into his chosen career as a ship’s radio officer. He bore this self-evident discrimination with wry patience. Eventually he achieved his ambition, working on ships in the North Sea and the Baltic.
After two years at sea Ab changed direction. He applied to university and took a degree and a master’s in electronic engineering at Salford. Here he met Pru, from Polmont, in Falkirk, Scotland, who was studying politics and sociology. They married in 1973 and had settled in Newcastle when Ab got a job lecturing at his old college in South Shields. He remained there until he retired in 2002.
Ab was not only a caring teacher, but a master of wallpapering and all manner of domestic skills, a maker of tiles, furniture and stained glass, a cooker of curries, a baker of chapatis and stotty cake, a green-fingered propagator and an allotment-holder.
But most appreciated by his friends was his gentle, attentive quality – gentle but also argumentative. He and Pru were well matched in this respect. They shared wide-ranging intellectual interests and philosophy became an enthusiasm for them both in later years.
Ab was active in his union, and they both became involved in local environmental issues. Ab, I think, was inhibited from wider political engagement by a kind of scepticism, often humorously expressed. When I championed the single transferable vote, he maintained that praying was probably as effective in politics as voting. He spoke as an uncompromising atheist; his prophet was Bob Dylan.
Ab is survived by Pru, his daughter, Cordelia, sons Paul and Joseph, and a granddaughter.
