Unmasking Dr Saeed: A New Play Explores a 30-Year Medical Fraud
A Teaspoon of Shampoo explores the fascinating history of Bradford's "Dr" Muhammed Saeed and casts light on an opaque and frequently misunderstood community: Review
‘Dr’ Muhammed Saeed is part of Bradford’s folk mythology. Yet remarkably little is known about him before he entered the UK from Pakistan. In the early 1960s he purchased a small GP surgery in the inner-city suburb of Manningham, and from there he launched a successful 30-year career in British taxpayer-funded medical fakery. His remedies were eccentric, and sometimes downright dangerous, but it seems his patients didn’t complain. His nemesis arrived in 1991 when he was shopped to the authorities by, it’s likely, a family member.
How did he get away with it? I ask because for me, personally, this story begins not in the 1990s, or even in the 1960s, but as far back as the late 1940s in South Wales.
Imagine, if you will, a lackadaisical schoolgirl wearing a Cardiff High School uniform alone in the school library. She is there because my grandmother wrote a letter to the headmistress, the formidable Miss Rhys, requesting that she be pulled out of Welsh-language lessons and set to ‘learning something useful’ instead.
How Miss Rhys, a highly educated Welshwoman who put celebrating Welsh language and culture at the centre of the rigorously academic school curriculum, felt about this letter is unclear. My mother was not forced to continue with Welsh lessons but instead of ‘learning something useful’ she was sent to the school library. There, by her own admission, she messed about.
After school she took a job pricing medical prescriptions in the newly established National Health Service. This is where a tiny tributory of family history joins up with the larger sweep of how Dr Saeed got away with it. Because, not long after my mother joined the NHS Pricing Bureau in Cardiff, South Wales, a fake doctor was uncovered somewhere up in the Valleys. And it was the local pharmacists who blew the whistle after receiving suspect-looking scripts.
My mother, as one of the office juniors, was set to searching room after room piled high with a backlog of unpriced prescriptions to locate the evidence. (It was intended that the National Health Service would be just that — a ‘health’ service that would wither away as the general population’s health improved under its influence. What actually happened is that from the start it was overwhelmed by seemingly limitless demand.) That fake doctor, whoever he was, didn’t last long — whereas Dr Saeed lasted 30 years. How he managed it, and what led to his eventual downfall, is painfully instructive.
Dr Shabina Aslam first heard about Dr Saeed from her mother — who frustratingly refused to provide any more details on the grounds that “we do not talk ill of the dead”. But Dr Aslam, now artistic director of Bradford Theatre in the Mill, refused to let it rest and conducted her own research. The resulting play, A Teaspoon of Shampoo, became the theatre’s first full-scale in-house production of recent times.
Bradford has a different character from the area around my home in North Yorkshire. The Humberhead Levels (as geographers call this region) is a low, watery expanse where five rivers meet to form the Humber estuary. It is a remote landscape of big skies, marshes and what can only be described as levees — raised banks to hold back the floods. Whereas West Yorkshire is densely populated and industrial — dirty towns spreading up the hillsides and tumbling into the valleys as though trying to ignore the basic topography underneath. Yet when Leeds, Bradford and various smaller towns are added together — atrociously networked though they are — they form one of the largest conurbations in the UK.
And central Bradford is visibly Muslim, with ‘Give Zakat’ posters at the railway station and giant pink arches to celebrate the Islamic holy month of Ramadan in Centenary Square.
But Bradford’s 32% Asian or Asian British population (of which 25% are of Pakistani origin) was not the reason I felt a teensy bit apprehensive. Nor was it the high crime rate. I had a more personal concern. In the course of writing this newsletter, the only actively hostile emails I have received were both from members of a creative network that used to be hosted by the Mill. One was written in an especially ugly and bullying tone. The writer wasn’t Muslim — she was white and woke, which encapsulates an aspect of Bradford’s problems exactly.
But Theatre in the Mill, situated on Bradford University’s pleasantly landscaped campus, was happy to admit me with my valid ticket and no fuss. It was much as I remembered it from three or four artistic directors back. A black-box studio theatre with a cramped and uncomfortable front-of-house area in which we all mingled before the show. The audience was disproportionately white. There were a few darker faces, a young woman wearing a headscarf, but although Dr Saeed’s old GP surgery in Manningham was not far away, on the night I was there the Manningham community as a whole had not turned out to see it. Most of the audience seemed to be curious people like myself, who remembered the story from news bulletins.
Ed Husein (Among The Mosques) has written about the austere Deobandi sect that exerts a powerful influence over many Muslims in the North of England. This movement takes a dim view of music and dancing; according to Husein women are not even allowed in Deobandi mosques with their menfolk — let alone on the stage.
So the Muslim actresses were rebels. We began with a complicated bit of Islamic theology which, in retrospect, I’ve concluded was there to cover their backs. Essentially, the entire audience would be turned into Muslims for the duration, which would enable us to judge Dr Saeed’s actions at the end.
I was taken aback by this unforewarned liberty. The production had a long list of trigger warnings but “we will turn you into a Muslim for 90 minutes” was not one of them — and I’d like to see it attempted in the other direction. I could have wriggled myself along the bench seating to leave at that point but two thoughts presented themselves:
How am I going to get un-Muslimed again if I don’t stay to the end? and,
(more seriously) In Bradford the danger posed by Islamists is real. If turning the audience into Muslims for the duration is what it takes to get this play staged, then so be it. It’s just another dratted imposition, like the traffic bollards and policemen armed with submachine guns at York’s Christmas market.
I believe all human prayers, from whatever source, ultimately go to the same Post Office Box anyway.
Framed as a podcast hosted by an amusingly egotistical Bollywood actress, the play unfolded as a workmanlike attempt to explain Dr Saeed’s actions. It is speculated that he began his less-than-august medical career by grinding up ingredients for medicines at a pharmacy in Lahore. Dr Aslam demonstrated with theatrical efficiency what conditions were like at the time. Out-of-date and contaminated medicines were dumped on the Third World. Request a smallpox vaccination and God knows what substance would be pumped into your arm. Request a smallpox vaccination certificate however and it could be had for a mutually agreeable price, enabling you to come to the UK. Where and how Dr Saeed acquired his medical degree is lost in the mists of poor record-keeping and actual paper record destruction due to wars. But it is unlikely he ever studied for it.
He came to Bradford with his two wives and a couple of years later bought a small GP practice in a bad part of town. The rundown inner-city suburb was by this time almost entirely Pakistani. This was ascribed rather lazily in the play to “white flight”.
But with my economist’s eye, I find the truth both more complex and more interesting. Many once-prosperous textile mills in Yorkshire were struggling. They used simple machines and large amounts of unskilled labour; newer mills in other countries could out-compete them. The mill owners might have invested in research and better technology. Instead they opted to extract the last dregs of profit from their decaying capital by importing cheap, non-unionised labour from a remote area of Pakistan called Mirpur, in Azad Kashmir. Large numbers of peasants had recently been displaced by the flooding of a valley and the construction of a hydroelectic dam; transporting them to Northern England at a time of post-war labour shortages was an arrangement that suited everybody.
British manufacturers of fine worsted cloth, supplying the luxury market, survive to this day. Damart in Bingley has high-performing technical fabrics sewn up. But most mills went to the wall, and no-one gave much thought to what the Mirpurese would do when they were no longer needed. Go home, I suppose.
But they didn’t go home. By that time, Bradford was home. As soon as those original workers scraped together sufficient money, they bought cheap houses near the mill and brought their families over to the West.
The ancient cities of England have elegant Georgian squares and terraces to keep middle-class professionals anchored to the centre of town. But many Northern cities ballooned outwards from tiny settlements during the 19th-century industrial revolution. Workers’ housing near the city centre was the cheapest, oldest and worst. The managers and professionals prefered to live away from the smog.
I have seen anti-Pakistani racism in action and I have no doubt it exists. But white people did not move out of Manningham because Pakistanis were moving in. It happened, at least initially, the other way round. The houses were cheap because post-war abundance and the availability of mortgages enabled the indiginous population to move out to the pleasanter suburbs. A garage, a driveway, a double gate — it was the stuff of dreams. Dr Saeed, on his generous doctor’s salary, also moved his family to a better area when he could afford it.
Does it matter if we term this process “white flight”? I think it does. The phrase, with its sticky overtones of racism, implies that a solution can be found by modifying the wrongthink inside people’s heads. We can all see how that’s turning out. Naming the process for what it is — a rational response to economic incentives — gives us a better handle on the issue and so a better set of prescriptions. You want a cohesive mix of classes and races in highly clustered central Bradford? Then improve the housing stock and quality of life. That’s a better solution than berating people.
But I digress. Dr Saeed prospered. Serving a community that had very little notion of what a professional medical service looked like, he maintained his popularity by giving everybody what they thought they wanted. A neat little series of theatrical vignettes illustrated how he did this:
Some pills to cheer you up? No problem.
Some medicine to quieten a troublesome elderly relative? Here you are.
A certificate? Absolutely.
And when Dr Saeed was not prescribing he was listening sympathetically and advising. Some of his advice was terrible but he was actually quite strong in those areas where formally trained NHS doctors are notoriously weak.
In defence of Dr Saeed, Dr Aslam made the point early in the show that in the present-day NHS it’s actually quite difficult to see a real doctor. Before you get to one, there’s an obstacle course of receptionists, health care assistants, and nurse practitioners to divert you. How much training have some of these people had? Sometimes not as much as you assume — although I must say a nurse practitioner performed some minor surgery on me very competently.
Above all, Dr Saeed loved being a doctor. Dr Saeed had doctoring down pat. After Covid I worked in a hospital for three years, and I doubt his adoring clientele would have been much impressed by some of the white-coated miseryguts I encountered there. Don’t get me wrong — if I suffer an organ malfunction I want to be treated by someone with at least 12 years at the sharp end of medicine. But the earliest healers were shamans — and doctors have always performed medicine as much as practiced it.
Dr Saeed had another trick up his stethoscope. Wherever he was born, Dr Saeed understood perfectly how to act as the “big man” in this still-tribal community. On high days and holidays his patients brought him lavish gifts similar in kind to those they would have presented to the “big man” in Azad Kashmir.
And maybe the British health establishment didn’t care that much. Dr Saeed was a warm body occupying a role that would otherwise be hard to fill. His community, so difficult to reach, adored him and unlike the notorious Dr Shipman he never set out to kill people.
These are the keys to why he lasted so long. The fake doctor in Wales was soon rumbled by the local pharmacists. In Manningham the pharmacists may have had their doubts — prescribing creosote for a sore throat was actually dangerous, and the shampoo thing was just bizarre. But instead of challenging him publicly they quietly adjusted his prescriptions after talking to the patient.
Because, although the Welsh valleys are close-knit, Manningham was, and possibly still is, held together by a different sort of glue. In tribal societies, law and justice are for the big man to dispense. Loyalty is owed to families and to the dense network of personal relationships that compose the community. In Manningham it would have been difficult for local pharmacists of any ethnicity to raise their concerns with the authorities. That would have been disloyal — not just to Dr Saeed but to his increasingly powerful web of allegiances that by now permeated the city.
Whether intentionally or not, Dr Aslam’s script offered an insight commentators on other contemporary scandals have missed. Just why it is so difficult to blow the whistle in Mirpurese communities? This play partly explains why. But instead of understanding the acute civilisational dangers of allowing an ancient system of familial and intra-tribal allegiances to flourish in a modern city, many British agencies — the police, local councils and so on — have inadvertently empowered dodgy “community leaders” like Dr Saeed. And they regard themselves as enlightened and ‘multi-cultural’ for doing so.
Yet the British Isles has been this way before. In the 19th-century Welsh schoolchildren were beaten if they spoke their native language on the premises. The tartan was banned in Highland areas of Scotland. My mother’s headmistress Miss Rhys saw that these practices were themselves barbaric, and acted to save what was left of Welsh traditional culture. Anyone who has ever listened to Yma o Hyd (We’re Still Here) sung at a Welsh football international knows it was a culture worth saving.
But we have forgotten why our ancestors were so afraid of minority cultures. In a burgeoning industrial society there was no room for monolingual Welsh farmers scraping a living on barren hillsides. Jacobite rebellions in Scotland would offer nothing but bloodshed. And further back, what was to be done about the clannish raiding parties that came across the borders from Wales and Scotland, stealing cattle and burning English towns?
Taffy is a Welshman Taffy is a thief Taffy came to my house And stole a leg of beef.
Access to an English language education, a thorough grounding in science, classical literature and the Bible, opened up vistas of Empire to children who otherwise might never leave their Valley. Both the Welsh and the Scots grasped the resulting opportunities — actually, the Celtic zeal for education far exceeds that of the English. It was a silver-tongued Welshman, Aneurin Bevan, who founded the NHS.
But by persistently bringing illiterate cousins over from Mirpur to be wed in Bradford (although, thankfully this is changing), the subsequent offspring never progressed to becoming third or fourth generation Brits with only distant and sentimental ties to the homeland. Before PIA was banned for five years (inadequate pilot certification!) I once saw a giant Pakistani jetliner disgorging at Manchester International Airport. Such is the constant traffic between the UK and Mirpur that British pounds are widely accepted as currency there.
In this, they resemble that other Celtic ethnic group I’m familiar with — the Irish Catholics on my paternal grandfather’s line. My earliest Irish ancestors probably arrived on the mainland before the Great Famine (1845 to 1852). But they too lived in ghettos (first in Everton then the Catholic area of Cardiff). They kept their customs, practised a problematic religion and married back. My grandfather, though both his parents were born in Wales, and I believe his grandparents too, was still perceived as sufficiently Irish in some quarters for him to be denied membership of the Home Guard on his first application at the outbreak of the Second World War.
This is all unspeakable heresy to the woke progressives who fester on the campus of Bradford University. Brandishing their wallpaper words — ‘white flight’, ‘Islamophobia’ — they offer explanations that explain nothing particularly well but instead leave a bad taste in the mouth because of their implicit and unwarranted moral judgements. They play down the cultural factors that determine the prosperity of nations. It has nothing to do with race discrimination. The Indian middle-classes have taken to hyper-mobile global capitalism like ducks to water (“actually on my father’s side I come from a long line of Sanskrit scholars…”); other less favoured communities have been left behind. What arrogance arts graduates display when they over-ride economic research with literary theories designed for deconstructing Middlemarch.
To be fair to Dr Aslam, she brings a light touch to the issue of Islamophobia. The ritual incantations are chanted, but this play is focussed not on racism as such but on the specific cultural moment that allowed Dr Saeed to thrive.
Two things led to his downfall — party politics and chasing skirt. A bigwig in his local Conservative Association, he aspired to become an MP and neglected his practice. And by taking his medical receptionist as his third wife (the play suggests this was after a long affair) he antagonised his existing wives and his children.
His downfall, when it came, was precipitous. Separated from his ‘big man’ society none of his powerful English friends came through for him as he might have expected. Broken by five years’ imprisonment, he abandoned his dream of retiring to Pakistan, and when he died in 2003 he was discovered to have a withered (unset) arm.
Why did he not have the break professionally attended to? No-one knows.
And before we get too smug about the superiority of British rules-based justice — consider this. West Yorkshire detectives were sent to Pakistan to find ‘the real Dr Saeed’ whose medical qualifications had been stolen. The ‘real Dr Saeed’ was unveiled at the fake one’s trial and was a coup de theatre from which he never recovered.
Yet Dr Aslam insists in her script that Saeed (she calls him Saad) is a common name in Pakistan. Finding a Dr Saeed of about the right age would be as easy as finding a Dr Griffiths in Wales. She thinks it fishy that the officers sent were from the Drugs Squad. Was there foul play, she muses. (I’d say it was because unfortunately Drugs Squad detectives had the best working knowledge of that community.)
But, whatever. The ‘real Dr Saeed’ was a good sport, the British press loved it, and the rest is history.
At the end I was relieved that the ‘rules based order’ held its nerve — though only just. The newly en-Muslimed audience voted to dispatch Saeed to a hell reserved for people who impersonate doctors. But steeped in a Christian upbringing, I don’t think that’s something we get to decide. God decides in his infinite wisdom, not us. Is that a difference between Islam and Christianity? Alas I know too little. And, apart from at the beginning and end, religion didn’t feature much in the play.
There is a world of cultural cross-purposes to be unpacked in this script. Dr Saeed’s children had their own issues, and Dr Aslam deftly though all-too-briefly hints as some of the problems that plagued the next generation. The unemployment, drug dealing, political disaffection and gangsterism are viewed through the lens of a more distant relative.
Actors Umar Butt, Sushil Chudasama, Samara Daniels, Naina Dhillon and Harveen Mann-Neary perform with triple-threat verve, breaking off from time to time to dance and sing. Butt was wholly convincing as Dr Saeed and in Chudasama the physical mannerisms of a high-status member of the British legal profession were acutely observed. It was a reminder that as we judge, so we ourselves are being judged.
It’s a shame that this enlightening production was buried in the depths of the Mill. Bradford is such a notorious graveyard of theatrical attention that it’s said the Lord Chancellor, the former censor of British theatre, once allowed a subversive play to be staged there on the grounds that “if it’s in Bradford, no-one will see it”.
But there’s enough of substance in ‘Dr’ Saeed’s story to fuel an entire Netflix mini-series. I do hope the cast of A Teapoon of Shampoo will get a shot at a bigger, better-funded outing at a more mainstream venue.
A Teaspoon of Shampoo was written and directed by Dr Shabina Aslam as a Theatre in the Mill production. You can find out more about it here.
Liz x