Celebrating 50 years of St Paul’s Carnival

Older than London’s Notting Hill Carnival, 50 years ago in the summer of 1968 the first ever St Paul’s Festival took place to celebrate the diverse community of the area, fuelled by positive movements towards racial equality.

By the early 1960s, more than a decade after the first wave of people from the Caribbean came to the UK on the Empire Windrush to icy weather and an even cooler reception, around 3,000 people of West Indian origin were living in Bristol, many of them around City Road in St Paul’s.

The original festival programme from the first ever Carnival in June 1968

The inequalities they had faced, including housing and employment discrimination, as well as violence at the hands of white British youths, had spurred many into action, and galvanised the community to stick together.

The 60-day Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963 had forced the Bristol Omnibus Company, one of the city’s biggest employers, to stop racial segregation, opening up new job prospects on the same day that, 3,500 miles away, Martin Luther King Jr was announcing that he had a dream.

This gathering momentum influenced the 1965 Race Relations Act which made racial discrimination in public places unlawful, and the 1968 Race Relations Act that covered employment and housing too. The first nightclub to open its doors to the local community, the Bamboo Club, opened on St Paul’s Street in 1966. It was a deliberate attempt by owner Tony Bullimore to create a place for everyone to enjoy music.

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Against this backdrop, a small group of locals including Roy Hackett and Paul Stephenson, who had also been instrumental to the bus boycott, planned an event to celebrate the culture of the community. “The purpose of the festival is to provide a scene on which the interest and variety of the culture and life of the peoples in the area can be displayed and enjoyed,” the programme for that first ever event said. “We hope it will also lead to better understanding, greater respect and increasing harmony in this community of communities.”

In a 2012 interview, Roy said: “The first year we had maybe 2,000 [at the festival] but the next year the number doubled and then it kept doubling until it was really big.” He went on to describe how they initially began with two floats at the former Bristol Rovers’ stadium in Eastville, where IKEA now stands: “We came along Stapleton Road for about 150 yards and then we turned into Seymour Road because there was no motorway to cross back in those days.

“At the very beginning we just wanted to do something to say thank you to our community, which at that time was St Paul’s. If somebody had come up with another idea like cutting the hedges, cleaning snow from doorways or doing the groceries we may have done that instead, but we came up with this and I thought it was a good idea because everybody could have a part in it. The old people could watch from their doorways and the children would have smiles on their faces and shout, ‘Mum, look here, look here.’ That brings joy.”

Main image courtesy of St Pauls African Caribbean Carnival Ltd