Although Aftab Ali never settled in Britain he was important in organizing lascars there. Furthermore his work in the late 1940s and early 1950s made it possible for thousands of migrant workers to settle in Britain.

Ali worked as a sailor in the 1920s gaining valuable first-hand experiences of the inadequate working conditions of lascars. This motivated him to work tirelessly for better working rights for South Asian seamen. In 1925 he became involved with the Calcutta-based Indian Seamen’s Union, soon becoming its General Secretary. In order to make South Asian seamen’s campaigns for better conditions more effective, he proposed to unite the various unions under the banner of the All-India Seamen’s Federation. He became its President in 1937.

He visited London in 1939 en route to the International Labour Organization’s conference in Geneva. Ali also participated in the Indian Workers’ Conference, organized by Surat Alley. Apart from London he also visited Dundee. While in London he was embroiled in the power struggle between Surat Alley and Krishna Menon. Suspicious of Alley’s Communist connections, he briefly supported Krishna Menon’s efforts in the East End of London and was considering Menon as the official representation of the All-India Seamen’s Federation. However, Menon quickly lost support among the lascar community and Ali switched his support back to Alley.

The work of Surat Alley and Aftab Ali was instrumental in breaking the deadlock between British ship-owners and striking lascars at the outbreak of war in 1939. Ali became Vice-President of the All-India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) in 1939 and was a member of the Bengal Legislative Assembly from 1937 to 1944. In 1941 he broke away from the AITUC. He was appointed Honorary Lieutenant Commander of the Royal Indian Naval Reserve in 1942.

After the partition of India, he moved to Pakistan and sat as an independent MP in the Legislative Assembly. He proposed that Pakistani seamen should leave their ships in British ports and settle there, adding to the small South Asian community already settled in Britain. In the early 1950s, he formed the Overseas Seamen’s Welfare Association to campaign for the granting of British passports to distressed seamen and their families.

Surat Alley was a trade unionist and political activist who campaigned tirelessly for the rights of Indians – and particularly Indian seamen – in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. India Office surveillance files record the details of his passport, thus shedding light on his date and place of birth, but beyond this, little is known of his early life in India. Indeed, even his affiliations are disputed, with some describing him as a Bengali and former seamen and others doubting that he was a Muslim. It is likely that he arrived in Britain some time in the early or mid 1930s, and it is known that he married a white woman called Sarah (Sally) Reder, with whom he lived first in London’s East End and later in Glasgow.

While Alley was involved in an extraordinary range of activities and organizations, his struggle for equality for Indian seamen was perhaps his greatest political contribution when in Britain. He held a number of posts in different organizations all of which aimed for the betterment of the pay and employment conditions of lascars. He was Secretary of the Colonial Seamen’s Association, formed in 1935 by black, South Asian and Chinese seamen in reaction to the British Shipping (Assistance) Act. He was also the London representative of Aftab Ali’s All-India Seamen’s Federation. In this latter role, he gave much assistance to lascars striking against their unequal treatment at the beginning of the Second World War. He organized meetings and rallies, distributed leaflets, and listened to the seamen’s grievances. When Aftab Ali called off the strikes, having reached an agreement with the authorities, Alley cooperated with this decision but continued to campaign for the release of lascars from prison and their subsequent re-employment, lobbying the Home Secretary and calling on the TUC for support. Alley gained a reputation among government officials as an agitator and trouble-maker, in spite of their partial reliance on him to negotiate with lascars.

In the early 1940s, Alley wrote pamphlets and issued memos on the appalling conditions of Indian seamen’s hostels in Britain, their lack of compensation and pay when injured during the war, and the insufficiency of their wages. In 1941 he sent his memo titled 'Indian Seamen in the Merchant Navy' to the Shipping Federation, the Indian High Commissioner, the Ministry of Shipping and the Ministry of Labour and National Service, urging their intervention. But the authorities repeatedly stonewalled him, claiming intervention could only come from India. In September 1943, when the All-India Seamen’s Federation was starting to disintegrate, Alley launched the All-India Seamen’s Centre, which was soon merged with Aftab Ali’s India-based India Seamen’s Union. The inaugural meeting, held at British Council House, Liverpool, was attended by ninety seamen and other South Asians, as well as spokesmen from the National Union of Seamen, the International Transport Workers’ Federation, and several other organizations. By 1944 the AISC had branches in London, Glasgow and Liverpool. Alley worked hard for the organization, disseminating information in Urdu and Bengali as well as English, and urging seamen to join in order to better protect their rights and interests. His years of activism did see some small successes, although these were generally credited by the authorities to the ship-owners rather than to Alley himself.

Surat Alley’s political interests extended beyond the concerns of lascars. He was Honorary Secretary of the Hindustani Social Club, an organization committed to the social welfare of working-class Indians in Britain as well as to raising their consciousness of the struggle for Indian independence. In this capacity, he helped to organize a charity performance by Ram Gopal and his troupe at the Vaudeville Theatre in December 1939. Alley was also general secretary of the Oriental Film Artistes’ Union. He was involved with Swaraj House, and in 1943 he helped to set up the Federation of Indian Associations in Great Britain which brought together the middle-class members of Swaraj House with the working-class members of the Indian Workers’ Association. Surveillance reports suggest he was an associate of the revolutionary Udham Singh. Shortly after Singh’s arrest in 1940, Alley’s lodgings were searched. Not just confining himself to Indian organizations, Alley was also an active member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, helping them to gain access to the Indian working classes, and worked as an ARP warden in the Second World War.

Kamal Athon Chunchie was a Methodist minister and the founder of ‘The Coloured Men’s Institute’ in Tidal Basin Road, Victoria Docks, Canning Town. He was the eldest of nine children born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to Muslim parents of Malay origin. His father was one of the leading Muslim figures in Ceylon. He was educated at Kingswood College, Kandy. In 1915 he enlisted in the public schools battalion, 3rd Middlesex regiment, joining around 28,500 other South Asian troops in the trenches. During the First World War, he saw active service on the Western Front, in Italy and Salonika. Chunchie converted to Christianity while convalescing in an Army hospital in Malta. He arrived in London on 6 March 1918. Towards the end of the war, while stationed in Chatham, he met Mable Tappen, who was stationed there as a member of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. They married in July 1920 and had one daughter, Muriel.

In December 1921, Chunchie began to work as a missionary for the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society among the Asian, Chinese, African and Caribbean sailor community in the Canning Town area of London. He initially took up a position at the Queen Victoria Seamen's Rest in Poplar, which was affiliated with the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society. He would visit the local residents and the seamen population in ships, hospitals, and lodging-houses, preaching to them and providing material assistance. His missionary and philanthropic work also extended to the small ethnic minority community resident in the docklands, many married to white partners, and their children, as well as colonial and Indian students. Chunchie spoke out against racism and the plight of the dispossessed in the East End which he saw as incompatible with Britain's Christian values.

In 1923, in a rented hall in Swanscombe Street, Chunchie founded the Docklands' first black Wesleyan Methodist church, and a Sunday school. In his efforts to counter racist discrimination of the black and Asian population he lobbied for the establishment of an organization that catered for London’s East End’s black and Asian community, a plan that came to fruition in 1926 with the establishment of the Coloured Men’s Insitute (CMI) in Tidal Basin Road, Canning Town. It was a religious, social and welfare centre for sailors and local residents with Chunchie as the responsible pastor and warden. From 1926 until the centre's demolition as part of the West Ham Road widening scheme in 1930, Chunchie worked tirelessly as a fund-raiser to keep the centre open, addressing Methodist gatherings all over the UK. He was an accomplished speaker, invoking the Christian ideals of equality and brotherhood to combat racism, unmasking the hypocrisy of Christian England and its attitudes to race. Chunchie was well-respected and well-liked by the black community in East London; however he faced criticism from the East End Branch of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, who accused Chunchie of patronizing black people and fostering segregation. Chunchie was also criticized by the Methodist Mission House over his management of the CMI. After 1930, no plans were drawn up to reopen the CMI elsewhere and Chunchie worked as a missionary deputation in the home church from 1930 to 1932.

Chunchie, however, would continue to work tirelessly to relaunch the CMI as an independent organization. With the support of a multi-racial council that included Dr Harold Moody of the League of Coloured Peoples, Professor R. K. Sorabji, and Lady Lydia Anderson and dedicated volunteers, amongst them his wife, he worked hard to build a new CMI. However, due to a lack of funding this never came to fruition, which meant that Chunchie had to use the limited facilities of the Presbyterian church in Victoria Dock Road as the centre and his own home as a base to continue the numerous pastoral, charitable and religious activities of the CMI.

Chunchie played cricket for Essex, was a member of the Royal Empire Society (from 1935), and was vice-president of the League of Coloured Peoples (1935–7). During the Second World War he was a member of the voluntary firefighting party in Lewisham, South London. In 1943 he also attended meetings of Swaraj House. He died on 28 June 1953 after a heart attack. He is buried in Hither Green cemetery.