In this blog, Yasmin Begum shares her experiences of working as a researcher with Butetown Arts and Culture Association to create an archive of Butetown Carnival and bring this to a diverse local audience.
An odd refuge
When the Windrush boat docked in Tilbury, communities from places like Cardiff and Liverpool came to greet those onboard. I’ve always been interested in this relationship, and how we represent people of colour and Black people in Wales.
The landscape of Wales is different to England in many ways, especially when it comes to film exhibition and film programming. As a Welsh language-speaking person of colour working in film, I’ve always found the archive as an odd refuge, a place where the past could be reanimated and brought back to life.
Archival film is like gold dust to me – often, archival film becomes loaded with questions of power and representation, and Wales isn’t immune to this dynamic. Two years ago, I worked as a researcher for Butetown Arts and Culture Association (BACA), which programmes and delivers Butetown Carnival, after they received a grant from the Anti-Racist Wales Culture, Heritage and Sport Fund.
Butetown is an area in South Cardiff, formerly known as Tiger Bay. In 1911, it was home to the second largest population of non-white people in Britain. While most conversations on minority ethnic representation in Britain look at the post-Windrush period, places like Cardiff and Liverpool challenge what ‘diversity’ looks like when these cities have always been diverse.
Hitting the road
As part of my work with BACA, I undertook research in different British and Welsh archives in English and Welsh to build an archive of Butetown Carnival. The Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic population of Wales has grown from 1% in 1993 to 6.7% in 2021. This means that, sometimes, it’s been harder to find archival film of Black people and people of colour in Wales from this time period. This is especially the case for portrayals of communities outside of news reports.
We visited the John La Rose Archive and Glamorgan Archives as part of our work, amongst other places. Building an archive was important for a few reasons: firstly, in gathering and consolidating information on carnival from Welsh and British archives; secondly, as a document of minority ethnic life in late 20th century Wales; and thirdly, because there has been a lack of archival collection of the experiences of working class people overall, but especially minority ethnic folk culture.
There’s an oral history with Betty Campbell, Wales’s first Black headmistress, who explains she remembers Boxing Day Carnival being celebrated amongst the West Indian diaspora in the 1940s. Butetown Carnival was formally created in the 70s and at its heyday, it rivalled Notting Hill Carnival. It shut down by the time I was born in 1993, but original carnival crew organiser Keith Murrell resurrected it with the support of others in 2015, and it continues to this day each August Bank Holiday weekend.
We then visited the National Library of Wales, which based in Aberystwyth, but has a few new sites across Wales specifically for the Wales Broadcast Archive. The Wales Broadcast Archive in Cardiff is in the Wales Millennium Centre, in the heart of Cardiff Bay. The ‘clip corner’ is still being built, but you can already access the materials by contacting the archive. It’s the first archive of its kind in Britain, specialising in TV and radio broadcast in Wales. There was one film that caught my eye called A Week in the Life of Butetown Carnival, a film about the event from 1987.
A Week in the Life of Butetown Carnival was in the ITV archive, and was never actually broadcast. Nonetheless, a copy was sent to us. We didn’t anticipate seeing the footage of performances from Aswad or Macka B, nor footage of the carnival preparations. There’s one evocative scene where music is being performed and a woman leans out the window looking longingly at the crowd, another where an older man holds a cigar in his mouth and balloon in his left hand as he dances.
Funding for museums and libraries are devolved to the Welsh government. The National Library of Wales was founded in 1920, when the British Empire was at its peak and populations of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people were already living in places like Newport and Cardiff. People of colour and Black people started living in Tiger Bay in 1859, and I was raised in the greater docklands area. The film isn’t just about carnival, but is an exploration and depiction of Welshness and Welsh culture that hasn’t yet been widely discussed.
Out of the archive
We held workshops at the Wales Millennium Centre with members of the public. My manager and I specifically undertook engagement work to publicise the workshops in person and using social media. On the day of the workshops, people not only attended themselves, but brought their friends and family with them. Many attendees even recognised friends and families in the crowd of Butetown Carnival 1987 and were astonished that the video even existed.
A month after the workshops in August, BACA and the archive organised a screening of A Week in the Life of Butetown Carnival at the Pierhead Building in Cardiff. The screening was really, really popular, and there was a discussion session afterwards.
Working class communities with protected characteristics are rightly wary of projects like these that can sometimes seem to be led by institutional box ticking rather than real engagement. Part of the role of the programmer or researcher is ameliorating these tensions. Ultimately, we saw what we wanted from the archive, we negotiated the licensing of the film for exhibition, and we offered opportunities for people to engage with the material and watch rare footage of carnival from this period.
A core part of community engagement work is the creation of fair and equitable dynamics. This work around A Week in the Life of Butetown Carnival brings home ideas of democratisation of archival film and representation, and its wider exhibition. There’s an appetite for events like this – and a vintage film about carnival during carnival week would always do very well. I’m more aware of the importance of these issues thanks to my experience working with Inclusive Cinema, Ffilm Cymru Wales, Cinema Golau, and BFI FAN Young Consultants. At industry events and training days, we talk of the threshold barrier and the perceived challenges of engaging new and emerging audiences.
We organised the film screening in the Pierhead building in Cardiff, a building historically created by the Marquess of Bute with famous red brick from Ruabon near Wrexham. On the side, it reads ‘Trwy tan a ddwr’ (through fire and water), a reference to the industry that once dominated the area. The Pierhead is an iconic building, albeit in everyday use in Cardiff. Just across Roald Dahl Plass from the Pierhead is an Everyman Cinema and an Odeon around the corner. There was something very symbolic about screening and celebrating Butetown Carnival, a carnival created from the descendants of sailors from the global south, in the very same building that was the headquarters of the Bute Dock Company. Likewise, carnival sprawls across outside the Welsh Parliament and the Senedd into Roald Dahl Plass, once the largest dry water docks in Tiger Bay. Now, it’s a basin for events and parties.
The screening of A Week in the Life of Butetown Carnival took place a few days before carnival. This allowed it to be encompassed into a wider range of carnival fringe activities, attracting carnival goers and local people alike. The Pierhead didn’t have an anxiety threshold, and the timely nature of the film made it seasonal and relevant for attendees. I don’t think as many people would have attended if the screening was in, say, January.
None of this would have been possible without the Wales Broadcast Archive. I wondered how much more archival film of Welsh, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic life is out there, and how we can better understand the future through engaging with media from the past?
Yasmin Begum is a writer, campaigner, and creative practitioner based in her hometown of Cardiff, Wales. A bilingual Welsh-English language speaker, Yasmin has worked with S4C, BBC Cymru Fyw, and published with Cylchgrawn Cara. She is a recipient of the Olive Morris Memorial Award 2022. She is currently volunteering on the Sikhism in Wales project, and she is a member of the New Black Film Collective.
You can find out more about the Butetown Arts and Culture Association on Facebook.
Header image: Butetown Carnival, photo by Rob Brazier