Steel impact: the story of the first ever steelpan performance in Britain

It offered an opportunity for optimism and celebration for a nation still scarred by the rubble and the wounds of the Second World War. It brought community through local events and festivities held in more than 1,700 cities, towns and villages across the country. And it left a physical imprint too, in the form of landmark buildings from the Lansbury Estate in Poplar, to a series of commemorative bus shelters in the Gloucestershire countryside, and of course our own Royal Festival Hall.

The Festival of Britain, particularly here at the South Bank exhibition site, also introduced the populace to new and exciting things. There were the remarkable public art works, from the soaring Skylon to Richard Huws’ dynamic cascading Water Mobile and there were the many technical and scientific advancements on display in The Dome of Discovery. And, on 27 July 1951, in front of our Royal Festival Hall came a performance by an 11-piece orchestra on an instrument that had never been seen or heard on these shores before; the steelpan.

The roots of the steelpan can be traced back to Trinidad & Tobago and the Tamboo Bamboo bands of the 1930s. These percussion groups used bamboo sticks of varying lengths to produce different sounds and tones. Their music was lively, so lively in fact that the ruling British government on Trinidad outlawed the instrument, less it cause civil unrest. Banned from bamboo the musicians experimented with other available materials including dustbins and other scrap metal. With this experimentation came the discovery that the metal could be hammered into producing distinct notes and tones, and from single not-specific pans came the evolution into multi-note ‘ping pong’ drums that we now recognise as steelpans.

Not that the steelpan was instantly universally loved. Like the Tamboo Bamboo bands that had gone before them, the ‘panmen’ were viewed with suspicion by the authorities. The ‘pan’ itself was looked down upon as a lower class pursuit, and was even seen by some as a symbol of lawlessness. Yet, many artists and community leaders believed in the potential of this new instrument, and in 1949 the first Association of Steelbands was formed with the aim of legitimising the music. And as part of their mission to do that, the association decided they would send a representative steelpan group to the most prestigious cultural event in the world, the upcoming Festival of Britain.

Sending a steelpan band to the South Bank was more than just a musical mission. For Britain the Festival was, beyond its cultural impact, also an opportunity to shift a narrative and show the world that we were not a declining empire, but a country in a benevolent partnership with its commonwealth colonies. Not that these ‘colonies’ had much of a say in this. Still, sending a steelpan group to the Festival at least offered Trinidad a means of existing in this new narrative on their own terms. The steelpan, new as it was, became a vessel of Trinidadian and Tobagonian identity.

Undertaking this cultural mission was a brand new steel band, a hand-picked ensemble of the country’s most gifted young percussionists, led by Joseph Nathanial Griffth and titled the Trinidad All-Steel Percussion Orchestra (TASPO). Griffith, previously musical director of the St Lucian Police Band, had been recruited specially for the role – a remarkable musician he’d cut his teeth playing the sax and clarinet on Barbados as a teenager before spending time as a freelance musician in Harlem in the 1920s. He’d returned to the Caribbean to teach music on Trinidad and led bands and orchestras on Martinique and St Vincent before TASPO relieved him of his duties with the St Lucian constabulary. 

Though the Association of Steelbands now had both a band, and a purpose, they still faced the not insurmountable task of getting these men to London. With the support of local politicians and journalists they launched Operation Britain, a fundraising drive that soon captured the imagination of the whole island. Fundraising recitals were held, there was an auction at Port of Spain’s Government House, and small ‘shilling jars’ for donations were placed on the counters of drugstores across the country. Thankfully, it all added up; Operation Britain was a success and TASPO boarded the SS San Mateo for London.

On Thursday 26 July 1951 a crowd gathered outside the Royal Festival Hall, among them journalists, photographers and a camera crew from Movietone, all of them keen to discover what exactly All-Steel Percussion was, and not knowing quite what to expect. To aid the element of surprise, the musicians of TASPO had decided not to decorate their instruments, leaving them to look like the repurposed oil drums they largely were. Their performance, the first ever of the instrument here in Britain, stunned the audience, with many so taken aback by the new sound that they refused to believe it was coming from the instruments in front of them.

Following their Festival of Britain debut here on the South Bank TASPO embarked on a busy UK tour that saw them perform in September and Manchester as well as further shows on the South Bank and across London. They even travelled to France to take the stage at Paris’ legendary Cirque Medrano. Still, all tours must come to an end, and in late September most of TASPO returned to Trinidad to a triumphant welcome. The collective drive to send the group to London, combined with the positive reports of their performances in Europe had made steelpan incredibly popular – no longer seen as a lower class pursuit, it had risen to the status of cherished national instrument.

We say ‘most of TASPO’, because one of their members chose not to join the passage back across the Atlantic. Sterling Batencourt elected instead to remain in London, where he soon embedded himself into the city’s Caribbean community, bringing his steelpan skills and knowledge to London’s growing carnival movement. With fellow Trinidadian pannists Russ Henderson and Gerald Forsyth, Batencourt introduced the steelpan to music halls, clubs and schools, and then in 1966 their small band of pan players took their instruments out onto the streets of Ladbroke Grove for a local children’s fete. It proved so popular that all involved chose to do it again the following year, and again the following year; and soon enough this annual carnival in Notting Hill, grew to become Europe’s largest street festival. And all because the British feared the beats of bamboo.

This summer as we celebrate our own 75th anniversary, we’re also celebrating the impact and legacy of that first steelpan performance here in Britain. Marking 75 years of the instrument in the UK, Steel Scenes takes over the Southbank Centre on the weekend of 24 – 26 July with a packed programme of pan performance and workshops. In fact, we’ve so many steelbands and pannists joining us that we’re even spilling out into Jubilee Gardens for a full day of steel sounds on Sunday 26 July, all tied together by a special arrangement of Betancourt’s own commemorative pan piece The TASPO Story.