Pakistani boy who came with nothing becomes the Mayor
By Ian Herbert, North of England Correspondent
21 May 2005
The prospects of a new life in Britain were hardly inviting for young Afzal Khan when he arrived, aged 12 and with no grasp of English, to face the limitations of life in a two-up, two-down terrace in rural Lancashire.
His parents had settled in Brierfield, a mill village between Burnley and Nelson where the way ahead for most British Pakistani boys was a job at the Smith & Nephew cotton mill.
And so it was for Afzal. The pay was poor, although an improvement on Jhelum, a Punjabi trading post built for the dispatch of cargoes between India and England, which his parents had left behind.
Then in the late 1980s, came the moment which changed his story of immigrant struggle into one of achievement and inspiration. Leaving the mill at 6am one morning, after another eight-hour night shift, he looked back at the Ribble Valley, saw the tiles of the old mill roof and, in his own words, asked himself: "Do I want to spend the rest of my life here?"
He quit the mill aged 20, went back into education and began a route to professional and civic life that this week saw him appointed as the first Asian Lord Mayor of Manchester.
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=640100