‘We are diverse cultures come together': the vision of harmony behind Manchester's Caribbean carnival

The Guardian

3 days ago

The Caribbean islands of St Kitts and Nevis are 4,000 miles from Greater Manchester and a fraction of the size. But the dual-island nation inspired a tradition in the English metropolis that is still going 55 years on – the annual carnival in Moss Side.
Geraldine Walters, 79, a retired mental health nurse who was born in St Kitts, and her late husband, Rudolph, from Nevis, were on the very first organising committee from the Leeward Islands People's Association (Lipa).
She remembers how passionate everyone was about making it work – so passionate that when funding from the authorities arrived late one year, carnival treasurer Rudolph took out a loan to fund it, using their home as collateral, without her knowing.
She said: 'We had it for people to come together and have a good time and enjoy themselves, because sometimes in the community you didn't know anyone – it was for Black, white, anyone who wanted to come and enjoy themselves.'
It's a legacy that still unites people today. This weekend, thousands will gather in and around Princess Road, the route to Manchester airport that bisects Moss Side, for a celebration of Caribbean culture that would not be possible without the carnivals of the early 70s.
Locita Brandy, now 90, left Nevis for Britain in the late 1950s. The Manchester she came to, with its gaslit terraced streets, was austere and still scarred by the war. In those early days making a new life on Carter Street, Moss Side, to help her family back at home, living conditions involved 'four people in one room, cooking on a paraffin heater on a landing upstairs' and encountering the idea of 'race' and its inequalities for the very first time, her son, Keithly Brandy says.
As a Black woman at that time her opportunities to socialise were restricted not just by race, but by gender roles, Keithly says. But through the Church of England and the Mothers' Union she began to develop as an activist, while bringing up six children.
By 1970, émigrés from the Leeward Islands – the arc of tropical jewels between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean – including Locita Brandy and the Walters, decided to stage an event that would brighten up the year.
Five years earlier, they had formed the Leeward Islands Association, at the home of local baker Billy Hanley, with the objective of 'promoting racial harmony, morally, socially and culturally'.
The first event involved Lipa joining Alexandra Park's centenary festival, which was like an English summer fete, before throwing an impromptu procession through the streets, with one steel band and three floats.
In the years that followed, Irish dancers mingled with the carnival traditions of Trinidad, Grenada, Montserrat, St Kitts and Nevis and Antigua, infused with the spirit of Jamaica's junkanoo masquerades, with troupes led by a police marching band and white horses parading through Moss Side, and dances in the neighbourhood's Polish Club.
There were no elaborate costumes. Moss Side's traditional English haberdashers donated fabric for the event, while the late Labour MP Tony Lloyd acted as patron, and big Manchester employers such as Kellogg's acted as sponsors. Prizes for the carnival king and queen were handed out at Belle Vue fairground. The day started early – and when it was over, everyone got together to clear up the litter.
'That's what I like about Manchester,' Viola Walters, Geraldine's daughter, who made costumes for carnivals past while her mother cooked 'for thousands', said. 'We are diverse and different cultures come together.'
Manchester's carnival has evolved through the years, with continued debates in the city about how it can stay true to its roots. Pioneers like the Walters, describe feeling left behind – although today's event says it celebrates the 'elders' who 'worked tirelessly' to keep it going.
When asked to sum up his mother's legacy, Keithly Brandy, who, with his siblings, grew up steeped in the traditions of Manchester's earliest carnivals, uses just one word, without any hesitation: 'Overlooked.'
'It's been an uphill struggle to get mum's legacy recognised,' he added.
Keithly is now working through the dozens of crates that his mother compiled in a lifetime of activism that took her to South Africa on pan-African missions, and to Croatia, Poland and Russia with the Mothers' Union.
Her papers, now being carefully catalogued by Manchester's Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre, are thought to comprise one of the UK's most extensive, post-Windrush Black history archives. Keithly envisages a future where insights from the collection will be taught in schools, alongside African languages.
There are unmarked signs all over Manchester of Locita Brandy's work as a campaigner, educator, social worker, councillor and Christian activist. In the pelican crossing she fought for in Moss Side after a child was knocked over. In the sports ground that was set up for girls to enjoy sport. In the memories of adults who enjoyed their first childhood trips to the seaside through the Normanby Street youth project she began, and the former pupils of the now-closed Birley High who remember the African-Caribbean-inspired dishes she introduced to the menu while working at the school kitchen.
For Locita and the early carnival organisers, including Basil Gumbs and Estelle Palmer (the great-grandmother of Premier League footballer Cole Palmer) carnival was just one way of keeping heritage alive.
'Mrs Brandy and the others who came here as part of the Windrush generation, they were homesick,' the Manchester historian Linford Sweeney said. 'And while London had their carnival, there was nothing going on in Manchester for the community, it was basically work, work, work and more work.'
As a fusion of pan-African, uniquely Caribbean and European traditions, a traditional carnival – with its mas bands, steelpans, feathered headdresses and costumes, carnival queen, princess and prince – derives directly from the tensions and exchanges of colonialism. It draws on traditional African masquerades as well the parodies of French colonisers' masked balls that enslaved people would hold in Trinidad; the word carnival – which by one interpretation means 'farewell to meat' – is linked to Roman Catholic, Lenten traditions.
Fundamentally, Sweeney says, carnival is about freedom. 'It's not a party really, it's a celebration,' he said. 'It's meant to be a celebration of freedom. In 1834, with the end of slavery, people got their chance to be free to do what they wanted to do, went through the streets and they had various parades and various things to celebrate freedom.
'We can't forget that. If we forget what happened to us when we were called three-fifths human and called property, then I'm sorry for the next generation, because they could end up in exactly the same position.'
The British, post-Windrush version of carnival, while echoing liberation celebrations, accelerated with the introduction of Jamaican sound system culture, which brought reggae and soca outdoors.
'My mum allowed me, as a young person, to introduce the sound systems to carnival,' Keithly Brandy said. I had friends in London – the Mastermind Roadshow, though they were called Conqueror at the time, and they were allowed to come down and play. They played at the Abasindi Centre until 5am.'
Sweeney has fond memories of spending the 70s setting up youth theatres in Manchester and riding with the Natty Bongo sound system.
'Carnival and sound systems went hand in hand,' he said. 'People were starting to really think, listen, let's get out of the house parties – the ones the older people used to do in people's front rooms. The blues parties started coming in with the sound systems. We'd go to the Russell Club and then a blues party – we didn't finish until 6am in the morning.'
Manchester Caribbean Carnival is on 9 and 10 August, with a packed programme of events from early, including J'Ouvert, a parade and music in Alexandra Park, Moss Side