Video: Presenter Catherine Ross speaking on Notts Tonight on Thursday May 18
A brand new show focusing on the history of Caribbean culture in Nottinghamshire and its influence in the county airs on Notts TV next week.
Caribbean Conversation starts on Notts TV at 4pm on Monday (May 22) with a brand new 45 minute episode aired at the same time for eight weeks.
The show is presented by Catherine Ross from Nottingham’s only Caribbean Heritage Museum.
Catherine has been in Nottingham since 1958 and remembers coming to the city as a young child.
Speaking on Notts Tonight, she said: “I arrived at Midlands Station wondering what my parents had brought me to because I arrived in October but the good thing was I had a coat.
“In the Caribbean you don’t need to have a coat!
“The journey though was lovely – it took six weeks on the boat but my Mum was ill for the whole trip and there was four of us that came over.
“She lay in her cabin while we were running around the ship, doing whatever, and no-one fussed around us!”
However Catherine said that when people from the Caribbean came to Nottingham, some things had to be left behind.
She said: “We lost a lot of things that were very dear to us like the sense of community, like grandparents looking after children when parents went to work.
“The biggest thing was when there’s a death, the whole community comes together to support that family.
“They’d say about all the good things that that person had done during that life and you wonder how people had the time to be so kind and generous.
“We also talk about the dancing because we found that we have introduced 52 different genres to the UK since we came here!”
Catherine wants people to know about how important the culture is in Notts.
She said: “Expect to be immersed in Caribbean culture; we cover eight different aspects of it which are all crucial to it.
“We talked to around 80 people to ask them to identify what they saw as the important parts of the culture which others ought to know about and pass on.
“When we came here, we had our own culture but had to assimilate very quickly to fit in, hence my coat and things like that!”
