Notting Hill Carnival: The Guardian
The politics of partying
In the run-up to the Notting Hill
carnival next weekend, Gary Younge
delves into
the roots, the history and the symbolism of the largest
street party in Europe
Saturday August 17,
2002
The Guardian
Notting Hill Carnival dancers in
their colourful costumes. Photo:
PA
As 1958 drew to a close, a
despondent mood drew over the offices of
the
West Indian Gazette in Brixton, south London. A decade after the
Windrush docked, with the symbolic arrival of
the postwar generation
of black Britons, a
series of racist attacks in Nottingham had
sparked several nights of rioting in
mid-August. By the end of the
month, conflict
had spread to west London, to Notting Hill, where
white youths regularly went "nigger hunting".
The Gazette's founder-editor, Claudia Jones,
had had enough. "We need
something to get the
taste of Notting Hill out of our mouths," she
said. "Someone suggested we should hold a
carnival," says Donald
Hinds, who was in the
room at the time. "We all started laughing
because it was so cold and carnival is this
out-on-the-street thing.
It seemed like a
ridiculous suggestion." But Jones had other ideas
and set about making arrangements.
A few months later, on January 30, 1959,
London's first Caribbean
carnival was held in
St Pancras town hall. Televised by the BBC for
Six-Five Special - a forerunner to Top Of The
Pops - it was timed to
coincide with the
Caribbean's largest and most famous carnival in
Trinidad. The brief introductory statement to
the souvenir brochure
came with the title "A
people's art is the genesis of their freedom".
More than 40 years on, a bright array of
oversized peacock feathers
made its way down
the Mall towards the royal family. Along with the
household cavalry in plumes and gleaming
breastplates, and the Red
Arrows streaking the
sky red, white and blue, Notting Hill carnival
took pride of place in the Jubilee
celebrations. This was a legacy of
Empire with
a difference, not an exhibition of how much has been
preserved but a demonstration of how much has
changed.
"There was more military
involvement last time," said Michael
Lewington, 62, standing in almost the same
spot he took for the
Silver Jubilee in 1977.
"I certainly don't remember calypso bands."
Here was an irrefutable sign of black people's
permanent presence and
cultural contribution
in Britain - a fact as widely conceded today as
it was contested in the 1950s.
Notting Hill carnival's journey from a
response to race attacks in
1958 to pride of
place on the Mall in 2002, passing revelry, riot and
resistance en route, is both powerful and
painful. It is the tale of
how a marginalised
community built, protected and promoted what is
now the largest street party in western
Europe, using the radical
cultural politics of
the Caribbean to confront Britain's racist
political culture.
Either way, it starts with Claudia
Jones, a Trinidadian communist who
came to
London, via Harlem, courtesy of the red-baiting senator
Joseph McCarthy. Jones moved to New York with
her parents when she
was seven. It was there,
during the campaign to defend the Scottsboro
boys, a group of young African-Americans
framed for rape in the
south, that she joined
the American Communist party in which she was
later to play a leading role. Twice interned
for her political
beliefs on Ellis Island -
ironically, the spiritual home for
immigrants
fleeing poverty and persecution - she was eventually
ordered to leave in 1955 and sent to England.
Jones was a turbulent character, manic
in her energy, masterful in
her skills as a
political organiser and chaotic in her personal life.
A lifetime of illness, engendered by poverty
and exacerbated by
prison, was further
compounded by overwork.
"She was so full
of energy, she exhausted everyone, including
herself," recalls Corinne Skinner-Carter, one
of Jones's closest
friends. "She used to
chain-smoke but I never saw her actually finish
a cigarette. And she talked liked she smoked."
Her journey across the Atlantic had
brought her to a very different
racial and
political context. She left America, at the start of the
civil rights era, when African-Americans were
asserting a new
confidence. She arrived in
Britain to find asmall Caribbean community
more divided by island allegiances they had
left behind than united
by a racial identity
they were coming to share. "It was only in
Britain that we became West Indians," says
academic Stuart Hall.
In March 1958,
Jones launched the West Indian Gazette, attempting in
part to cohere these disparate groups around
their common experience
of racism. In many
ways it was a period that echoes our own, with the
sparks of popular prejudice fanned by a
bigoted press while a
complacent and complicit
political class allowed the consequent
flames
to rage.
On August 18, 1958, the Ku Klux
Klan sent a letter to the Gazette
addressed to
"My Dear Mr B Ape". "We, the Aryan Knights, miss
nothing," it said. "Close attention has been
paid to every issue of
this rag and I do
sincerely assure you, the information gleaned has
proven of great value to the Klan."
A fortnight later, Majbritt Morrison, a
Swedish woman, was spotted by
a gang of white
youths. They had seen her the night before, arguing
with her Jamaican husband Raymond outside
Latimer Road tube station
near Notting Hill,
and they had started throwing racial insults at
him. She had enraged them by turning on them.
When the youths saw her
again, they followed
her, throwing milk bottles and shouting, "Nigger
lover! Kill her." Later that night, the
"nigger hunting" started and
the area was
ablaze.
"1958 was a big moment," Hall
recalls. "Before that, individuals had
endured
discrimination. But in that year racism became a mass,
collective experience that went beyond that."
This was the taste Jones wanted to get
out of her mouth. Only she,
says Marika
Sherwood, author of Claudia Jones: A Life In Exile, had
the combination of new world confidence and
political maturity to
launch carnival under
those circumstances. "Her experiences of
campaigning against racism and McCarthyism in
America put her on a
different level from
other Caribbeans here."
Trevor Carter,
Corinne's partner and stage manager of the first
carnival, agrees. "Claudia, unlike the rest of
us, understood the
power of culture as a tool
of political resistance. The spirit of the
carnival came out of her political knowledge
of what to touch at a
particular time when we
were scared, in disarray."
There had
been concerns that the unruliness of carnival would not
translate from the outdoors of Port of Spain
to indoors in London.
Since many did not have
cars, they arrived at St Pancras town hall in
their costumes via public transport. "The bold
ones did," Carter
recalls. "It was our way of
saying to the dominant culture, 'Here we
come
- look, we here.' "
The evening itself
went excellently. There was calypso singing,
dancing and lots of souse, peas and rice and
other Caribbean
dishes. "We disrobed ourselves
of our urban, cosmopolitan, adopted
English
ways and robed ourselves in our own visible cultural mantle,"
Carter says.
Thus began London's first annual
Caribbean carnival, moving the next
year to
Seymour Hall, alternating between there and the Lyceum until
1963, growing bigger each year. By the time
Jones was found dead on
Boxing Day 1964, it
was a large, established event. But while it was
born out of experiences in Notting Hill, it
had yet to return there.
For that we must turn
to another remarkable woman, Rhaune Laslett.
Laslett, who lived in Notting Hill, knew
nothing of Jones or the
carnivals when she
spoke to the local police about organising a
carnival early in 1965. With more of an
English fete in mind, she
invited the various
ethnic groups of what was then the poor area of
Notting Hill - Ukranians, Spanish, Portuguese,
Irish, Caribbeans and
Africans - to contribute
to a week-long event that would culminate
with
an August bank holiday parade.
"The
histories of these carnivals are both independent and
interlinked," says Sue McAlpine of the
Kensington & Chelsea Community
History
Group. "They were linked by their motivation and the
constituencies they were seeking to motivate."
Laslett, born in the East End, of Native
American parents, was a
community activist who
had been a nurse and a social worker. She died
in April this year, after suffering from
multiple sclerosis for 50
years. Her
motivation was "to prove that from our ghetto there was a
wealth of culture waiting to express itself,
that we weren't rubbish
people". She borrowed
costumes from Madame Tussaud's; a local
hairdresser did the hair and make-up for
nothing; the gas board and
fire brigade had
floats; and stallholders in Portobello market
donated horses and carts. Around 1,000 people
turned up, according to
police figures.
Steel band player Russ Henderson was
among those roped in. Laslett's
partner, Jim
O'Brien, knew him from the Colherne pub in Earl's Court
-
a favoured West Indian hang-out - and
Henderson had played at the
first event in St
Pancras organised by Jones. At the Notting Hill
event, he was playing alongside a donkey cart
and a clown, and he
felt things were getting
flat. "I said, 'We got to do something to
make
this thing come alive.' " Henderson, now 78, decided to walk his
steel band to the top of the street and back.
When that went down
well, he got a little
bolder, marching them around the area like so
many pied pipers. "People would ask, 'How far
are you going?' and
we'd say, 'Just back to
Acklam Road' and they would come a little way
with their shopping, then peel off and someone
else would join in.
There was no route, really
- if you saw a bus coming, you just went
another way."
"With the music, people left everything
and came to follow the
procession," O'Brien
says. "By the end of the evening, people were
asking the way home."
In the evening, Michael X - radical,
hustler and firebrand - turned
to Laslett,
pointed to the throng and said, "Look, Rhaune, what have
you done?"
"I was in a state of shock," Laslett
said later. "As I saw the huge
crowds, I
thought, 'What have I done?' "
During
the years Laslett ran the carnival, it was identified more
with Notting Hill than with the Caribbean,
though as word got round,
more and more
Caribbean people started coming. The numbers had grown
to around 10,000, and O'Brien says a mixture
of police interference
and the growing
assertiveness of black power meant too many different
groups had vested interests. "It was something
we didn't want to have
responsibility for," he
adds. "The police didn't want it because they
thought they were losing control of the
streets for the day, and we'd
had enough. So
we decided to hand it over to the community."
Carnival, Trinidad-style, with no entry
fee, is truly open to
everyone. Blurring the
lines between participant and spectator, it
thrives on impulse as well as organisation.
With its emphasis on
masquerading and calypso,
it takes popular subjects of concern as its
raw material for lyrics and costumes. Massive
in size, working-class
in composition,
spontaneous in form, subversive in expression and
political in nature - the ingredients for
carnival are explosive. Add
to the mix the
legacy of slavery and it soon becomes clear why so
long as there has been carnival, the
authorities have sought to
contain, control or
cancel it.
In 1881, Trinidad's former
police chief, Fraser, submitted a report
on
the carnival riot in Port of Spain. "After the emancipation of the
slaves, things were materially altered," he
wrote. "The ancient lines
of demarcation
between classes were obliterated and, as a natural
consequence, the carnival degenerated into a
noisy and disorderly
amusement for the lower
classes." He had a point. Trinidad was
colonised at various times by both the Spanish
and English, with a
large number of
Frenchsettlers, and after emancipation in 1834, its
carnival lost its elitist, European traditions
and became a mass
popular event.
"Carnival had become a symbol of freedom
for the broad mass of the
population and not
merely a season for frivolous enjoyment," wrote
Errol Hill in The Trinidad Carnival. "It had a
ritualistic
significance, rooted in the
experience of slavery and in the
celebration
of freedom from slavery. The people would not be
intimidated; they would observe carnival in
the manner they deemed
most appropriate."
Similar tensions have emerged here in
the UK. The key dynamic within
them is
ownership. Ask anyone involved who owns carnival and they
will say the same thing: the people. The
trouble is, which people?
Since Rhaune Laslett
handed over responsibility for the carnival, the
primary body organising the event has split,
reinvented itself, then
split again several
times. It has been called the Carnival
Development Committee, the Carnival Arts
Committee, the Carnival
Enterprise Committee
and, at present, the Notting Hill Carnival
Trust, which is itself riven by internal rows.
Each group has its own
version of the
carnival's history and development.
As
carnival has outgrown its grass-roots origins, it has brought with
it a constant process of negotiation and
occasional flash points;
there have been
inevitable conflicts, over both its economic
orientation and its political function.
Carnival, wrote Kwesi Owusu
and Jacob Ross in
Behind The Masquerade, is "the most expressive and
culturally volatile territory on which the
battle of positions
between the black
community and the state are ritualised".
And so it was that, less than a century
after the disturbances at the
carnival in Port
of Spain, there were riots at the Notting Hill
carnival in 1976. By that stage it had become
a Caribbean event - the
by-product of Jones's
racial militancy and Laslett's community
activism - complete with bands and costumes.
In 1975, according to
police figures, carnival
was attracting 150,000 people. It was also
the
first time most remember an imposing police presence.
The carnival's primary constituency had
changed radically. In the mid-
1970s, 40% of
all black people in Britain were born here. Having made
the long march through the institutions of
education, employment and
the criminal justice
system, many felt alienated in the land of their
birth. It was an experience that found its
daily expression in the
form of the police,
whose racist use of the sus laws made for
harassment and indignity. In 1958, the first
generation used carnival
to protest the racism
of the mob, but in the 1970s their children
used it to take on the Met. For them, carnival
was not a cultural
reminder of a distant and
different home but a means of asserting
their
claim to the only home they knew.
It was
a claim that, on the one hand, was increasingly under threat,
thanks to the rise of the National Front and
skinhead culture. But on
the other hand, it
was a claim constantly being asserted by the
powerful role music was playing in shaping
British youth culture,
through reggae, then
ska. Along with Rock Against Racism, culture had
become a key battleground for race and there
was no bigger racially-
connoted event than the
Notting Hill carnival.
"Carnival was
their day," says one Metropolitan police officer in an
off-the-record interview. "For the rest of the
year, police would be
stopping them in ones
and twos in the street, where they would be in
a minority. But for one weekend they were in
the majority and they
took over the streets."
The 1976 riot took most people by
surprise. "I just remember seeing
these
bottles flying," says Michael La Rose, head of the Association
for a People's Carnival, which aims to protect
and promote carnival's
community roots; he
describes it as like watching a relentless parade
of salmon leaping upstream. The police were
ill-equipped and ill-
prepared. Defending
themselves with dustbin lids and milk crates,
they were also outmanoeuvred. "That whole
experience made the police
very sore," one
policeman says. "They had taken a beating and were
determined that it would not happen again, so
when the next one came
about, there was some
desire for revenge."
From then on, thanks largely to the
press, carnival moved from being
a story about
culture to one about crime and race. For years after,
carnival stories would come with a picture of
policemen either in
hospital after being
attacked or in an awkward embrace with a black,
female reveller in full costume. The following
year, Corinne Skinner-
Carter missed carnival
for the first and last time, in anticipation
of more trouble. There were indeed smaller
skirmishes in 1977. At one
stage, late on the
Monday night, riot police were briefly deployed.
The next day, the Express's front page read:
"War Cry! The
unprecedented scenes in the
darkness of London streets looked and
sounded
like something out of the film classic Zulu."
Calls for carnival's banning came from
all quarters. Tory shadow home
secretary
Willie Whitelaw said, "The risk in holding it now seems to
outweigh the enjoyment it gives." Kensington
and Chelsea council
suggested holding "the
noisy events" in White City Stadium, a mile or
more away. "If the West Indians wish to
preserve what should be a
happy celebration
which gives free rein to their natural exuberance,
vitality and joy," argued the Mail on August
31, 1977, "then it is up
to their leaders to
take steps necessary to ensure its survival." The
Telegraph blamed black people for being in
Britain in the first
place, declaring: "Many
observers warned from the outset that mass
immigration from poor countries of
substantially different culture
would generate
anomie, alienation, delinquency and worse." Prince
Charles, meanwhile, backed the carnival. "It's
so nice to see so many
happy, dancing people
with smiles on their faces."
As recently
as 1991, following a stabbing, Daily Mail columnist Lynda
Lee-Potter described the carnival as "a
sordid, sleazy nightmare that
has become
synonymous with death". By this time, however, its
detractors were in the minority. Like the
black British community
from which it had
sprung, there was a common understanding that it
was here to stay. Latest police figures
suggest attendance of one
million; organisers
say it is almost double that.
In west
London, not far from the carnival route, the Mighty Explorer
launches the calypso tent. The first of many
older Caribbean men, in
pork-pie hats and
matching waistcoats and trousers, who hope to
become this year's calypso monarch, he sings
his home-written lyrics
with the help of a
small band and some backing singers. Along with
women in shiny, sequined dresses, they fill a
sweltering night with a
medley of topical
ballads. Almost all contain a strong moral message
about the dangers of drugs, infidelity and
prostitution blighting the
black community,
from people whose stage names include Totally
Taliban, Celestial Star and Cleopatra Johnson.
This is the first of the heats running
up to the carnival itself. The
standard is
higher than a karaoke bar, lower than the second round of
Popstars. But the evening is more fun than
both - accessible,
unpretentious, raucous and,
above all, entertaining.
Earlier that
day, at the Oval House Theatre, south London, the sewing
machines ceased humming in anticipation of
curried goat and rum
punch. It's time to lime
(relax) after a day of stitching and cutting
to calypso tunes and boisterous banter. South
Connections is one of
the scores of mas camps
around London and beyond, where mostly
volunteers come from mid-July to start making
the costumes for the
bands. Some are in
people's living rooms and back gardens, others in
community halls and offices. With only a week
to go before carnival,
a camp like South
Connections will be attracting around 100 people a
night - a rare focal point for relaxed
inter-generational mixing. The
youngest person
to go masquerading with the band is two, the oldest
is 75.
The preparations started the year
before. The riots in Bradford and
Burnley
provided the theme for this year's designs, entitled Massa
Dougla: One People, One Race. "In this story,
the people travel on
this earth searching for
a better future and an identity," says Ray
Mahabir, the designer. "Red is for the blood
flowing in us and gold
is for our golden
hearts."
On the day of the Golden
Jubilee celebrations, designer Clary Salandy
had trouble getting to the Mall. The police
wouldn't let her and the
rest of her mas camp
over the bridge, even though they were supposed
to be leading the procession. Chipping down
the Mall - that slow
shuffle-cum-toyi toyi of
the masquerader - filled her with
pride. "I'm
not a monarchist, but this was a recognition by the
establishment that we have made an artistic
contribution and took
carnival to people who
would never go to it."
In the Harlesden
offices of her company, Mahogany, in north-west
London, Salandy explains her craft. "The best
costumes," she
says, "have to work well from a
distance. So they have to be bold and
dynamic
and have lots of movement. But when you get close up, you
have to be able to see the detail. Carnival is
a language. Every
shape, colour and form is
used like words or symbols. And the best
costume speaks that language fluently."
Her favourite costume that day spoke the
language of defiance: one
person armed with
several huge, multicoloured shields defending his
back. "It's called Protector Of Our Heritage,"
she says. "It was
there to defend carnival."
Posted: Mon - February 3, 2003 at 09:12 PM