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39.
NOTTING HILL FESTIVAL. An original poster announcing the London Free School Notting Hill Festival, September 18-25, 1966.
Printed silkscreen in dark red and black on pale brown paper stock. 70.8x51cm. Designed by Wendy Gair (who created the earliest posters for Pink Floyd shortly after).
A rare and important poster announcing the first revival of the Pageant and Fair of Notting Hill, which became the Notting Hill Carnival. Organised under the umbrella of the London Free School, the festival’s primary organiser, Rhaune Laslett, claimed that the idea for it had come to her in a dream and later described it as “the emergence of an oppressed and disadvantaged people waiting to express itself”.
She was advised by her neighbour, Guyanese activist Andre Shervington, to invite Trinidadian musician Russ Henderson, who regularly played to a West Indian audience at the Coleherne Pub in Earl’s Court. As Ishmahil Blagrove Jr. explains, “It was the attendance of Henderson and his band that changed the course of what might otherwise have become a traditional English pageant, albeit with a multi-cultural theme” ("Carnival", p.12; item #45). Henderson, along with Nigerian Ginger Johnson and his band the Afro-Cubans, and other participants from India, Czechoslovakia, Armenia, Ireland and elsewhere, all of whom were residents of the local community, are listed on the poster for the festival’s first date (September 18), which was held, like most that followed throughout the week-long event, at All Saints Hall in Powis Gardens.
The festival was publicised beforehand by small processions led along the Portobello Road by LFS members Dave Tomlin and Joey Gannon, playing their saxophones, and on September 19, as the poster announces, a pageant started and ended at Acklam Road “with floats and marching band”. Six days later, on September 24, the poster advertises a “Carnival Dance and Mardi Gras. Fancy Dress Optional. With The New Iberia Stompers, West Indian Bands, Irish Caeli Band”, prefiguring what in subsequent years became a predominantly West Indian Carnival.
The festival’s diversity and eclecticism is highlighted by the events listed on the other dates: they include “Old Time Music Hall”; a staging of “Woyzek” by Georg Büchner; screenings of avant-garde films at the Mercury Theatre; folk singing (Jeremy Taylor, Al Stewart, Jo Ann Kelly, Chris McGregor, Isla Cameron, and others); jazz and poetry (Jeff Nuttall, Michael Horovitz, Harry Fainlight, Bob Cobbing, Bill Butler, Pete Brown, Alexis Korner, Sandy Bull, Tom McGrath, Ron Geesin, and others); an “Animated Jazz Concert” (with Mike Westbrook, Jeff Nuttall and Mike Kustow); and cryptically, “A Mystery Night” on September 23 (Gustav Metzger’s auto-destructive performance at the LFS’s adventure playground).
The festival was a triumph of cooperation between a loose coalition of community activists, musicians and countercultural luminaries, each with the shared aim of breaking down social, class and racial boundaries, and while the London Free School experiment proved short-lived, the Carnival it helped give birth to became its most enduring legacy.
Ticket info giving Rhaune Laslett’s address and phone number written out in red marker pen. Two very short, closed edge tears; light creasing along right edge; minor surface wear; evidence of old tape removal to corners of verso; overall, Very Good.
An exceptionally rare poster, of which no other extant copies could be located.
