After a summer time of racist riots, Notting Hill Carnival celebrates love and unity
Under the Westway, children are putting the final touches to their Carnival decorations for the local library.
It’s the same scene all over Notting Hill – a vibrant clash of steel pan rehearsals coming through different open windows, dancers rushing to rehearsals, and glittering costumes being finished on sewing machines. A heady sense of expectation floats with the smells of frying spices on the August air.
After a summer of racist riots whipped up by hateful online agitators, local activists say this year’s Notting Hill Carnival is needed more than ever – a moment for an ever-resilient community to come together in strength and celebration.
“Communities have been under attack – but the joy and creativity of Carnival is the best possible antidote,” CEO of the Notting Hill Carnival Pioneers, Debra Eden, tells me.
Debra is better is known as ‘Pan Diva’ – a leading pan-woman in a male-dominated musical tradition, who is also operatically trained. She’s also a local radio presenter, and ‘auntie’ to generations of young people who have come up through the steel pan groups she has led.
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REVELRY
Now 52, this will be her 47th Carnival performance, after first competing as a Carnival Queen aged five.
“This weekend is the biggest bulwark for anti-racism,” she says. “People look forward to Carnival and the revelry all year. We spend the whole year making things.
“Children making their costumes and making up their dance routines. And the whole community comes together.”
We are walking through ‘Spanish Square’ in Portobello, where blue plaques by the Nubian Jak Community Trust commemorate the originators of Carnival. There’s Claudia Jones, the West Indian Gazette editor who held the first Caribbean Carnival inside St Pancras Town Hall in 1959. And Rhuane Laslett-O’Brien, the social worker who conceived the first Carnival in this patch of West London in 1965.
Trinidadian jazz pianist Russell Henderson, led the first ever parade. And Leslie Palmer, who in the early 1970s transformed Carnival from a local community celebration to the biggest free street festival in Europe.
“When I took over running Carnival in 1973, there was just one band walking one route,” says Palmer, now 81 but still helping artist Sophie Lodge finish the decorations under the Westway. “By 1976, there were half a million people coming.
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“As a young man I saw the potential of young people with sound systems and steel bands. I put them outside black businesses like the barbers and the bakers and the Mangrove restaurant. No-one had seen a sound system before.
“I involved BBC London Radio and later Capital Radio, which brought thousands of new people along to the Carnival and put the word out to Mas [Masquerade] Bands from across the Caribbean. And we invited people to set up food stalls – we came from Trinidad so there could be no Carnival without food.”
Perhaps Leslie’s greatest contribution was to broaden Carnival from being a celebration of Trinidadian culture to welcoming people from the rest of the Caribbean and the wider community in West London.
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Carnival went from a local event to an all-island urban festival of black music in just three years. At which point Palmer left to pursue a career with Chris Blackwell’s Island Records.
“I broadened it out to the other islands, inviting everyone,” he says. “I had seen it all in my mind’s eye. But, of course, I didn’t think a million people would come.”
Palmer’s generation – known affectionately as the Pioneers – lived through the Notting Hill race riots of 1958, attacks by Teddy Boy gangs, and the wrongful arrest of the ‘Mangrove Nine’ – a trial which led to the first judicial acknowledgement of racial prejudice in the Met Police.
When he took over running the Carnival as 30-year-old schoolteacher, landlords’ signs in the windows still said No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs. This summer’s far-right rioters have been an unwelcome echo of the past.
“We have had to be a resilient community,” says Palmer, who was made an MBE in 2017 for services to performance and the community in London.
“I know some people will be apprehensive after those racist riots, but there is no way in their wildest dreams that far right thugs could attack the Carnival. They would be run out of town immediately.”
Yet a community forged in the flame of appalling racism and police brutality still finds itself under attack. The Windrush scandal has affected many families, and damaged the trust of many more. Meanwhile, seven long years after the Grenfell fire there is still no justice for the 72 families who lost loved ones.
“That first summer after the fire, some people from outside the community tried to say there shouldn’t be a Carnival,” Debra says. “But we needed Carnival more than ever. Cancelling would have been disrespectful to all the children who had spent all that time preparing. We needed to come together.”
“I said we should go ahead but we would hold a 3pm silence on both days. I didn’t know if it would work. When it came to 3pm I was at home panicking. I thought ‘everyone thinks I’m wrong’. But there was this eerie silence. Everyone observed it. When I realised everyone was silent, I sat in my house and cried.”
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Seven years on, this year will be no different, with silences for reflection now built into the event and observed by DJs, crowds and pan players alike. The Mas Bands in their costumes and masks will all fall silent at 3pm.
Artist Sophie Lodge is up on a cherry-picker putting up banners made of local children’s art on lampposts along Ladbroke Grove. Her iconic ‘Come Unity’ green hearts were first put up at Carnival in 2016, but have since been adopted as the Green For Grenfell emblem.
BANNERS
“After years of making hearts from willow, we’ve got a community with some incredible art skills,” she says, showing us the giant HMS Windrush her team of kids has worked on for the library.
“It’s wonderful to see these skills used to celebrate the community.”
Piers Thompson, 65, co-founder of Portobello Radio – where Debra is also a presenter – says Carnival has always been for the whole community.
“Carnival started as a ‘black and white unite’ event with white Bohemians and a larger number of Black African Caribbean people,” he says. “It was a crucible for a multi-racial society and for counter-cultural resistance.”
Reach Commissioned)
Raised by strict grandparents who didn’t think the steel pans were suitable for their talented granddaughter, Carnival is where Debra learned to be free as a musician.
At the age of just nine she was awarded a scholarship to a prestigious music school that saw her appearing at the Royal Opera House alongside Placido Domingo when 11, and singing in the child cast at Sadler’s Wells.
But she rebelled and became a famous pan player who still performs regularly as a soloist and as part of Women of Steel.
“When I was 22, I became the first female band leader to take a band – New Creation – to the Panorama pan competition,” she remembers. “I was used to being the lone female. I saw it as my purpose to move things forward.”
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Debra helped form Cambridge University’s first steel band as well as performing at Buckingham Palace at the Queen’s Jubilee Concert.
Unusually, she has played for two of the most famous steelbands who are usually rivals – Ebony and Mangrove – and trained many of the current band members and band leaders.
These include Carlene Etienne, 45, the musical director of Ebony Steelband, who we meet on the way to rehearsals. Debra’s grandfather’s cousin was a rebel too – a young Calypsonian or Calpyso singer – known as the Wounded Soldier.
She points up to the blue plaque above us. “That’s him,” she says. It’s none other than Leslie Palmer. And, with that, our tour with Carnival royalty has come full circle.
