2025 marks the centenary of the passing of the ‘Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, requiring maritime workers of colour to register with the police and forcing them to bear a Certificate of Registration.  It was a racially exclusionary order that initially applied to Welsh port cities in Barry, Penarth, Port Talbot, Newport, Swansea and Cardiff, and in northern England in Liverpool, Salford, Newcastle, South Shields, Hull, and Middlesbrough before being universally implemented across Britain in 1926.

Its aim was to prevent and regulate the numbers of overseas mercantile mariners and bar them from settling in Britain.  It required them to provide proof of their British nationality as citizens of empire.  Such proof was often difficult for sailors to obtain as they did not have passports and any discharge certificates were, in contrast to white mariners, deemed not acceptable proof of nationality, stripping a large number of people of colour of their British citizenship.

In part the Order was driven by the lobbying of the National Sailors and Fireman’s Union, endorsed by the Board of Trade, to restrict access for foreign sailors to the maritime labour market, which government officials took up.  This discriminatory order had huge implications and led to much harassment.

Mary Fazel's letter to the India Office, 1926 - IOR/L/E/9/953 f.120

The distress caused is evident from Mary Fazel’s correspondence with the India Office.  Mary Fazel, who lived in Bootle near Liverpool, was the wife of Fazel Mohamed who worked as a fireman on board ship.  On his disembarkation at Cardiff on 1 August 1925 he had been registered as an ‘alien’ by local authorities, who refused to accept his Certificate of Nationality and Mercantile Marine book in spite of the fact that he was lawfully a British subject.  She appealed to the India Office to help redress this unjust treatment, documented in correspondence between her and officials for over a year.  The Order led to much hardship for the family, as without proof of nationality he was unable to find employment aboard ship and experienced police harassment in the street.  It took over eleven months for Fazel Mohamed to receive the necessary documentation from India proving that he was a British subject.  The Official Letter from the India Office on 27 August 1926 must have come as a great relief .  As the example of Mary Fazel shows, she and her husband had knowledge of their rights and appealed directly to the authorities to seek redress from discriminatory treatment.

Letter from the India Office to Mary Fazel, 27 August 1926 - IOR/L/E/9/953 f.116

The Home Office did face opposition to the Order.  The India and Colonial Office were not supportive and the order also led to protests.  For example, as is evident from the Durrant Press Cutting from 13 May 1927, the forced registration and threat of deportation led to a mass demonstration on May Day in Cleveland Square, Liverpool, where many Indian seafarers resided.  They lobbied that the requirement for Aliens Certificates for Indians be abolished and an end to the stop and search policy by the police which they saw being arbitrarily implemented.  They appealed to the Indian National Congress for an inquiry about the condition of Indians living in England and demanded equal treatment as British subjects and citizens of empire.

Durrant Press Cutting, 13 May 1927 - IOR/L/E/9/953 f.62

Renewed in 1938 and 1942, the Order was finally revoked that same year, as Britain faced a manpower shortage in its war effort.

CC-BY
Florian Stadtler
Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks project
University of Bristol

Creative Commons Attribution licence

To find out more, please visit South Asian Britain: Connecting Histories, a new digital resource developed in partnership with the British Library, University of Bristol and Queen Mary University of London and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/X001520/1). The resource will be launched at an event at the British Library on 19 September 2025.

Further Reading:
India Office Records, Collection 141/1 Seamen - Treatment by Home Office of lascars as aliens; registration under Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order 1925 when without proof of identity, British Library shelfmark: IOR/L/E/9/953
India Office Records, Collection 141/20 Seamen - Treatment by Home Office of lascars as aliens: Special Restrictions (Coloured Alien Seamen - ) Order 1925; certificates of identity for Seamen, British Library Shelfmark: IOR/L/E/9/972
India Office Records, File 395 Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order 1925 - representations re forty natives of India India residing in Glasgow, British Library Shelfmark IOR/L/E/7/1438
Remaking Britain Project, Asians in Britain: Connecting Histories, 2025
Laura Tabili, “We Ask for British Justice”: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994)
Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto Press, 2002)

 

After the turn of the twentieth century, many women bookbinders trained in the UK drifted into obscurity, their careers often cut short by the upheaval of the First World War.  Maude Nathan did not even live to see 1914.  Her promising trajectory ended abruptly with her death in 1910 following an operation.

Enlargement of gold-tooled motifs from Maud Nathan’s binding on Andrew Lang’s Ban and Arrière Ban

Yet despite her brief career, Nathan left an impression on the craft.  In just 39 years, she earned recognition as a binder but also for scholarly contributions, notably her English translation of a textbook, Georges de Récy’s Décoration du Cuir (The Decoration of Leather, 1905) which was acclaimed by the Publishers’ Circular as ‘thoroughly practical and highly artistic’.

Favourable review of The decoration of leather in The Queen Saturday 28 October 1905 p. 53 British Newspaper Archive

The origins of Maude’s interest in bookbinding are unclear but may be connected to her father’s profession.  Jonah Nathan (1811–1886) was a partner in De La Rue, a flourishing stationery business.

Maude was likely educated at the family’s Notting Hill home, along with her eight brothers and one sister.  Several of her brothers achieved high ranks in the military and civil service.  Maude, by contrast, devoted herself to bookbinding, an occupation deemed respectable for women.  As an adult, she was financially independent and did not need to seek paid employment.  She remained unmarried, living at St George’s Court with members of her extended family.

Maude studied under the pioneering binder, researcher, and author Sarah Prideaux, who offered private lessons at her home in 37 Norfolk Square.  Maude proved to be an apt student, her work being selected for inclusion in Modern Binding (1906). She later assisted Prideaux with research for a treatise on aquatint engraving.

Maude’s contribution to Modern bookbinding on Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici

Maude's 1898 binding of Andrew Lang’s Ban and Arrière Ban was recently acquired by the British Library and is considered an early example of her work.  The actual binding is unsigned but its protective leather box is lettered with Maude’s name and the year.  The same heart shaped decorative motifs (see enlarged image above) appear on her binding of The Twelve Books of Marcus Aurelius. She was also responsible for binding The House of Usna by Fiona Macleod.  The Celtic inspired design was achieved through blind-tooling and is a testament to Nathan’s skill with that often-challenging technique.

Maude presented a binding on John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, signed ‘M.N. 1908’, to her friend, Dr. Frederick Burton.  According to Nudelman’s catalogue, this copy contains a letter addressed to Burton, dated 5 December 1910, from a family member. The letter reads:
‘You will, I know, be terribly grieved to hear that Maude Nathan has been very ill for a few days and passed away yesterday, following a serious operation on Saturday.  You can feel for us all—and for her brothers—as I know you cared for her and understood how closely the family was united by her.  We shall miss her’.

The family chose to celebrate her life by sponsoring a swimming competition for youngsters. The winners were awarded the Maude Nathan Cup.

Though Nathan’s life was short and her reputation was not perhaps as celebrated as her talent merited, her bindings display a considerable level of craftsmanship and aptitude for design.  Her legacy survives in the bindings she created and the text she translated, each a testament to her place in the history of modern bookbinding.

P. J. M. Marks
Printed Historical Collections

Further reading
Marianne Tidcombe, Women bookbinders, 1880-1920 (1996).
Item 48 in this catalogue includes a description and photograph of The Pilgrim’s Progress.
The House of Usna by Fiona Macleod (pseud Wm Sharp) Portland, ME: Thomas B. Mosher, 1903 (and once in the Thomas B. Mosher Collection).
The issue of The Artist July 1902 included three pages of print and pictures of Maude’s bookbindings.
There is a full-length portrait photograph of Maude probably dressed for a society event, wearing 'a light long dress with lace details, white shawl' (and with glasses) taken in 1907, now in the Jewish Museum in London.

NB When researching bookbinder Maude Nathan, it is helpful to be aware that there were several women of the same name in the public eye including an American suffragist, a founder of a London orphanage (the Maud [no letter ‘e’] Nathan Home for Little Children) and a talented musician from Newport, South Wales.

 

Held by the British Library, the seven volumes of the Planches Gravées de l’Imprimerie Royale [Plates of the Royal Printing House] contain proofs of the plates printed by this printing house between 1640 and 1789.

Across these volumes and their 2338 prints, several names, or at least several signatures, crop up time and time again.  Opening the very first volume, we find what comes to be the very reliable signature of Claude Mellan (1598-1688): C Mellan. Others are not as consistent.  Karl Audran (1594-1674) took on Carol, Charles, Karolus, without much explanation; Louis Simonneau (1654-1727), when working with a Latin text, signed his name as Ludovicus, a penchant shared by Gilles ‘Aegid’ Rousselet (1610-1686).  Others still used shorthand, like Jacques Stella (1596-1675) who favoured his J *.  Signatures abound, but rarely do we see the engraver beyond the various and changeable ways they sign their names.  Volume 1.2 is the exception.

This volume contains all the prints of the Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des animaux, across all its publications (1671, 1676, 1688, and 1733).  In Claude Perrault’s magnum opus, we may easily think that the only symbolic print is that of the lion that opens it, referencing Louis XIV’s own attempts to recall the glory of Rome in his image.  However, in an unassuming headpiece in the preface, Sébastien Leclerc I (1637-1714) achieved iconographic immortality.

Headpiece from the preface of Claude Perrault’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des animaux by Sébastien Leclerc, c. 1671. This print is found in volume 2.1 of Planches Gravées de l’Imprimerie Royale (1750.c.7).

In the interior of a building in, what can be assumed to be, the Jardins des Plantes (then, the Jardins du Roi), a group of savants from the Académie des Sciences gather in the centre to dissect a fox.  From the skeletons in the background to the group of men on the left by the window, who examine various items using various instruments, this is a scene of scientific rigour.  Who could easily be missed is the man on the right of the table, who shows a print to a noble man on his left: Sébastien Leclerc.

Portrait of Sébastien Leclerc I, by John Sturt, 1675-1730. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

One of the more prolific engravers of the Ancien Régime, Leclerc produced over 3000 etchings and engravings both with and without royal patronage.  Born in Metz in 1637, he began his printing career at seventeen in 1654 to later become the protégé of Charles le Brun, a painter in Louis XIV’s court.  As a member of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture from 1672 and a ‘graveur du roi’ [King’s engraver] from 1693, his is a legacy that has not often been overlooked.  However, this self-portrait is still striking among the prints made by the faceless (and sometimes nameless) engravers of the Imprimerie Royale.

The print marks his construction of his own legacy, one not intertwined, as we would expect, with the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, but with the Académie des Sciences.  His pictorial inscription into the history of the Académie des Sciences to which he did not formally belong but with which he so often associated then reminds us of his other scholarly love.  Whilst engraving gave him fame and (relative) fortune, science also held his heart.  This print then reveals what Leclerc, himself, wanted to be remembered for.

Caitlin Sturrock
PhD student at the University of Bristol and PhD placement student in Western Heritage Prints and Drawings.

Further Reading:
For Leclerc’s other self-referential moments, see Maxime Préaud, Inventaire du fonds français, Graveurs du XVIIe siècle, vol. 8: Sébastien Leclerc I (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1980), pp. 235-58.
Maxime Préaud, ‘« L’Académie des sciences et des beaux-arts » : le testament
graphique de Sébastien Leclerc’, RACAR: Revue d'art canadienne, 10.1 (1983), pp. 73–81. doi:10.7202/1074641ar
For further detail on the volumes, see Caitlin Sturrock, ‘The Scrapbooks of the Imprimerie Royale’, British Library European Studies Blog.