Watch more of our videos on Shots!
and live on Freeview channel 276

This article contains affiliate links. We may earn a small commission on items purchased through this article, but that does not affect our editorial judgement.

My name is Tré Ventour-Griffiths - a Northants historian-sociologist of Jamaican-Grenadian heritage and PhD researcher at Kingston University. Since April, I have been travelling the UK interviewing Caribbean and non-Caribbean peoples about their experiences with Caribbean communities in mid-to-late 20th century Northamptonshire (1948-1985) as part of my PhD.

Since April 2023, I have been conducting interviews as part of my PhD research (with Kingston University in London). Here, I have been talking to Caribbean people (by descent and birth) who lived in Northants at any point between 1948 and 1985 - effectively about their experiences living in the area. I have also interviewed non-Caribbean people who had significant interactions with Caribbean people. For example as via life-long friends, inter-cultural marriages, and social events, such as famous Caribbean blues dances (also known rent parties) and Sound System.

My own family (the Ventours and Noels) came to Northampton from the Caribbean island of Grenada in the early 1960s. I am looking for people willing to be interviewed on their experiences - The Windrush Generation (including those who came as children), first generation British-born people of Caribbean heritage who grew up in the area, and non-Caribbean people that were socially or otherwise involved with Northants Caribbean communities at any point between 1948 and 1985.

One reason for my focus on Northants rather than elsewhere is due to the popular media focuses on major cities, including London and Birmingham. Another, is Northamptonshire is home. Using oral history testimonies, my research centres this localness we all know in order to decentre popular focuses on cities that we have seen in popular film and television programmes.

Photographer: Kelly Cooper Photography (left picture)

Accessible history texts about Caribbean communities in the Town and Rural are lacking in the mainstream. Though many Caribbean people moved to British cities from the 1950s, these are not the only places that have a postwar Caribbean history.

When my great-grandparents moved to Northampton in the early 1960s, they were not alone but part of a thriving Caribbean population in the Abington area. In those days, Abington was the place to be! This is also a history of the workers, including local shoe and boot factories upheld by Caribbean labour. Additionally, the nurses who worked at St Edmund's, St Andrew's and St Crispin's hospitals. There were also railway workers and other factory workers, further to iconic West Indian clubs that were a hub of both leisure and activism in the early days.

However, further research findings so far have also spoke to racism - such as Teddy Boys in the Mounts and National Front presence in Kingsthorpe. There were also Black churches and blues dances. Further findings have also shown a Caribbean experiences out in the rural stix in Isham village, as well as Banbury on the Oxfordshire-Northants border. Rural racism is another point that does not get explored enough in the context of postwar Caribbean communities.

This project uses the experiences of early Caribbean arrivals (including those that came as children as well after the Second War in the 1950s and 1960s), first generation early British-Caribbean (many of which are now in their 50s and 60s) to help tell a story of the place we all call home.

If this sounds like you, a friend, a work colleague, a family member or otherwise, do get contact via email ([email protected]) or send a message to my social media pages - on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Educator seeks participants for research study about Northants Caribbean communities