Nagina Singh

1948–2016

Nagina Singh was born in 1926 in Sialkot. During partition in 1947, Sialkot came under Pakistani territory, and Singh, a Sikh, fled with his family to India. In 1948 Singh moved to England to work as a market trader and pedlar. He first worked in London, Glasgow and Cambridge before settling in Bristol. He initially rented rooms in Bedminster in south Bristol and then in St Michael’s Hill in central Bristol before managing to buy a house in 1952. In 1956 he officially married Balbir Kaur in Bristol, although they had already been married in India. They had three daughters and two sons together.

Between the 1960s and 1990s, Singh worked as draper in his clothes’ shop in St Paul’s, Bristol. He was the founder trustee of the first Sikh gurdwara in Bristol in the 1950s. This was the Sri Guru Nanak Prakash Singh Sabha Gurdwara, which was founded in St Mark’s Road in Easton, Bristol in 1958. The mortgage for the gurdwara was paid for by Sikh families in Bristol. In 1979 it was moved to a disused post office site round the corner on Fishponds Road, where it remains to this day. Following his retirement in the late 1990s, Nagina and Balbir moved to a retirement home in Bishopston, Bristol. There they were often cared for by sitters from Dhek Bhal, an Asian women’s collective based in Bristol that had been set up by Zehra Haq in 1987.

Nagina Singh died in 2016. His body was carried in a horse-drawn carriage to his funeral and nearly 300 people came out to see his funeral procession and pay respects to one of the earliest known Sikh settlers in Bristol.