The true founder of the Notting Hill Carnival which is attributed mainly to Claudia Jones. The outdoor festival was the brainchild of social worker Rhaune Laslett, in collaboration with the London Free School, a community action adult education project co-founded by Laslett with photographer and political activist John “Hoppy” Hopkins and an amorphous group of contributors from the local community.World Boxing Champion Muhammed Ali visted her home when he visited London in 1966.

Laslett, born in the East End to a Native American mother and Russian father, was a notable figure in the community of Notting Hill who had adopted a proactive role in healing the racial tensions in the area in the late Fifties. She set up an adventure playground called Shanty Town for children of the area and established a voluntary neighbourhood service that provided free 24-hour legal advice to immigrants, local residents and the homeless.

She said the idea for the festival came to her in a vision — a “hamblecha”, as it is known among Native Americans — in which she saw people of all races dancing together in the streets. In a 1989 interview with The Caribbean Times she recalled her dream: “I could see the streets thronged with people in brightly coloured costumes, they were dancing and following bands and they were happy. Some faces I recognised, but most were crowds, men, women, children, black, white, brown, but all laughing.”

Laslett consulted her trusted neighbour and respected figure in the community, Guyanese activist Andre Shervington, about how to get the West Indian community to participate in the festival. She also consulted others and was advised to invite a well-known Trinidadian musician named Russell Henderson whose Sunday afternoon jazz gig at the Coleherne pub in Old Brompton Road was popular among West Indians.

In a 1966 interview with The Grove magazine, edited by Hoppy and published by the London Free School, Laslett said: “We felt that although West Indians, Africans, Irish and many other nationalities all live in a very congested area, there is very little communication between us. If we can infect them with a desire to participate, then this can only have good results.”

Laslett’s first Carnival featured a cornucopia of participants, all local residents but hailing from many places: India, Ghana, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Cyprus and elsewhere. Performers included Nigerian musician Ginger Johnson and his Afro-Cuban band, Agnes O’Connell and her Irish Girl Pipers and a white New Orleans-style marching band. Horse-drawn carts were borrowed from traders in Portobello Road to make floats and there was even an inter-pub darts match.

The festival also began to take on more militant connotations in response to the pressures that black people and the counter-culture scene were experiencing at the hands of the police and the Establishment. The Black Power movement had spread across the Atlantic and gripped the imagination of the black masses. For some, it became increasingly uncomfortable to have a woman identified as white sitting at the helm of what was by now seen as a distinctly black Caribbean cultural affair.

Rhaune Laslett found her authority being challenged, and her influence and control over the event gradually diminished. She retired from organising the festival in 1970 due to ill health (she died in 2002), amid concerns that violence would erupt because of rising tensions in the black community surrounding numerous police raids on the Mangrove Restaurant, a popular West Indian hangout. She left, dismayed that the festival she had conceived had adopted a confrontational tone that had sidelined her contributions.

Over the years, the dominant Caribbean hallmark and a pervasive ignorance about the carnival’s early history has led to many erroneous and conflicting accounts as to who originally “founded” the event. And the contributions of Laslett and the London Free School have become cursory footnotes, thus perpetuating the belief that the Notting Hill Carnival is of uniquely black-Caribbean origin.

This is an edited extract from Carnival — A Photographic and Testimonial History of the Notting Hill Carnival, by Ishmahil Blagrove Jr, published on Saturday by Rice n Peas Publishing, £25 (020 7243 9191, ricenpeas.com).