In the beginning...

Long before the deafening DJs, Notting Hill Carnival was a sedate event with poetry and pipers, organised by a tenacious local woman. On the eve of this year's Carnival, Bill Tuckey celebrates the Sixties roots of Europe's biggest street party

At 2am, on a summer's night in 1965, 45-year-old social worker Rhaune Laslett trudged wearily up the stairs of her Notting Hill home and into the bedroom. With no notion of the history-making flash of inspiration that was about to strike, she lay down beside her husband, Jim O'Brien, closed her eyes and tried to forget about the dispute she had just been trying to settle between a tenant and an unscrupulous local landlady.

Back then, Notting Hill was a place that today's wealthy residents would not recognise: a ghetto, where immigrants were crammed 10 to a room in crumbling villas with no electricity or hot water, prey to the likes of Peter Rachman and other racketeering landlords.

For Laslett, who ran a 24-hour community advice centre from the ground floor of her house on Tavistock Crescent, the working day would often end at such an ungodly hour.

And that night, it wasn't long before she fell into a heavy sleep. That's when it happened. Some would call it a dream, but for Laslett it was something more – a kind of vision. Her mother came from American Indian stock and she was a firm believer in such spiritual revelations.

"She woke me at some crazy hour," her husband Jim recalls, "and she said to me, 'I saw all these people out on the streets – they were wearing colourful costumes, dancing and following bands, and everyone was laughing.' I said: 'Did you wake me to tell me that? You're mad, woman.'"

Laslett, a high cheek-boned, aristocratic-looking woman with a cut-glass BBC accent and a twinkle in her eye, ignored her husband's unenthusiastic response. She went into action the very next day, doing what she did best: organising, cajoling, making it happen. She talked to the police, she talked to her Guyanese friend Andre Shervington, a charismatic Mr Fixit in the local Caribbean community. She drew up a plan. And three months later, on the sunny August Bank Holiday weekend of 1965, the Notting Hill Carnival was born.

Today, organising Europe's biggest street festival is a vast logistical exercise, involving 10,000 police, hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of grants and corporate sponsorship, and some delicate internal politics. The latest bout of squabbling saw the dismissal of Carnival's chief executive, Clare Holder, in April, amid accusations that the event was betraying its Caribbean roots.

But in those early days, Carnival had an agenda that today's participants would scarcely recognise. Before her death last spring, Laslett recorded some of her memories of how it used to be: "We invited all the ethnic associations to participate," she wrote. "Ukrainian, Turkish Cypriot, Asian, Caribbean, African, Irish, Scottish... It was not only a carnival, but a week-long cultural festival, with international song and dance, a folk concert, jazz and blues, poetry and darts matches in local pubs, old-time music hall... we hadn't a penny to keep it going, we were constantly begging."

There was also Shakespearean theatre, concerts by hippie bands – in 1967, Pink Floyd performed one of their early gigs in the local church hall ("we paid them £7 10 shillings" Jim O'Brien recalls) – and, in true Sixties style, a "Happening" which involved "Jeff Nuttall, motorbikes and very scantily dressed girls riding pillion around All Saints Hall, throwing jam-covered newspapers and other paint-dripping missiles at the audience."

And for the crazily eclectic grand parade itself, there were no Trinidadian masquerading outfits. Instead, costumes were borrowed from a shop that supplied Madame Tussaud's. Carnivalists in that first year were got up as as King Charles, Nell Gwynne and Good Queen Bess, some swanning around the route on horse-drawn carts borrowed from traders in the local Portobello market. "Rather incongruously, the Gas Board and the London Fire Brigade also had floats," Laslett recalled.

The musical accompaniment to all this came from Ginger Johnson and his Afro-Cuban Elephant Drums, the New Orleans Marching Band and Russ Henderson, who brought his steel band up from the Colherne pub in Earl's Court. At the head of the parade, though, was the redoubtable Agnes O'Connor and her Dagenham girl pipers. "Oh, she was a proper sergeant-major," says Jim O'Brien. "She was marching at the double. The trouble was, when Russ Henderson started up with his band, on the corner of Tavistock Crescent and Portobello Road, the crowd all stopped to listen. But Agnes kept marching on, and she was soon about three miles

ahead of everyone else. I had to jump onthe back of someone's pushbike to go and stop her."

Meantime, Henderson's band had the carnivalists eating out of their hands. "It was a fantastic atmosphere," Laslett recalled, "there were women with tea cloths and wooden spoons, waving them as they danced, almost as if they had rushed out of the kitchen."

What had started out as a parade of 1,000 or so revellers grew steadily during the day; there were nearly 8,000 by the time it had wended its way to Notting Hill Gate. And for the final leg home there must have been 10-12,000 people on the streets, Jim O'Brien recalls. "I'll never forget when we got back to Tavistock Crescent, standing on the bridge near our house with Rhaunie, looking at all those people. 'God Jim,' she said to me, 'What have I started?'"

With the help of Andre Shervington and his wife Barbara, Laslett was to continue to run the Notting Hill Carnival for the next five years. But with the police growing increasingly unhappy with the size of the event and tensions arising with more militant elements in the black community, she decided to end her involvement in 1970.

A Trinidadian named Leslie Palmer took over the running, and announced plans to turn Carnival into "an urban festival of black music incorporating all elements of Trinidad's carnival".

Over the next three decades, under a succession of different organising committees (sometimes operating concurrently), crowds rose steadily to their present levels. The now familiar mixture of booming sound systems, brightly plumed massed bands and steel bands was established, while the rioting and racial tension that surrounded the event in the Seventies and Eighties eventually gave way to a more docile, sponsor-friendly status quo – barring the odd high-profile murder. This was partly due to Notting Hill's galloping gentrification, but also ever-greater regulation by the police, Home Office and local authorities.

As for Laslett, she moved out of Notting Hill and went to Carnival less and less, disappointed at the way her founding role had been overlooked. "I feel as if my contribution has been forgotten," she told me in 1997, "so many other people claim to have started Carnival."

She also talked of the "hostility" she experienced on one occasion in the Nineties when she went to witness the children's parade. Given Carnival's status as the great showcase of Caribbean culture, it's easy to see why the presence of this well-spoken and distinctly white-looking VIP in the reception tent might have caused a few to choke on their curry goat. For while Laslett undeniably started the Notting Hill event, many subsequent organisers have argued that the true mother of carnival was a Trinidadian communist named Claudia Jones. As editor of the West Indian Gazette, she organised London's first Caribbean carnival in January 1959, in the St Pancras town hall. It was set up as a mood-lifting response to a series of racist attacks in Notting Hill by local teddy boys.

"I never started carnival for my self-esteem, so this lack of recognition didn't unduly worry me," Laslett said. "I started Carnival to prove that from our ghetto, there was a wealth of culture, waiting to express itself, and that we weren't rubbish people; it was also a very healthy way of releasing pent-up emotions in music and dance, and integrating the community regardless of race or creed. Could the successive Carnival Committees claim the same motivation?"

For the last years of her life, Laslett was confined to a wheelchair by multiple sclerosis, but continued to be a formidable community organiser, running an old people's charity from her home in north London, right up until her death aged 82.

In Notting Hill, the realpolitik continues. This year, yet another new face takes over the running of Carnival; Professor Chris Mullard, an academic and business consultant whose boardroom coup was supported by Mayor Ken Livingstone. On his appointment, Mullard wasted no time in announcing plans to massively increase business sponsorship for the event. "We don't want Carnival to be going cap in hand begging people all the time," he told the press last month. "I believe it can not only become self-financing, but a business in its own right."

Oh Rhaunie, how things have changed.

Feeling hot, hot, hot: the complete guide to carnival

Food

There are more than 300 food stalls at Carnival and an estimated 16,000 coconuts, 30,000 corn on the cobs and a ton of chicken curry will be among the Caribbean delights consumed. Some handy menu tips: 1) hard food is not a dish with attitude but a concoction of yam, dumpling and green banana; 2) a magnum is not a gun or an ice-cream, but an energy drink guaranteed to put some lead in your pencil 3) beware of the undercooked jerk chicken. When choosing which stall to buy from, remember – the fiercer the old ladies tending it, the better the food.

Best place to watch the floats

From the first-floor balcony of white stuccoed house along the route, naturally. Then you can also have access to a fridge full of cold drinks, a clean lavatory and the perfect vantage point for watching scantily-clad float followers and dancing comedy policeman. This, however, requires a rich friend with a London W11 address. And you will have to take some vintage champagne or a posh bouquet to get a seat at the window. So... those without that rich friend should head for the northern part of Ladbroke Grove where the crowd is better dispersed.

Sound systems

Old-time reggae, nosebleed techno, Brazilian samba: you'll hear it all, quite possibly simultaneously. If you want to hang out with the Portobello boho set, head for Gaz's Rockin' Blues on Talbot Road, where ska, Latin and live bands are on the menu; wannabe Cristal-swigging homeboys should check out Rampage's spot on Colville Gardens, for hip hop, garage, ragga and R'n'B; while Sancho Panza on Middle Row will have hordes of fabulous house and disco party people baying for more.

The weather

The Bank Holiday weekend is guaranteed to have the wrong weather. Either it rains and thousands of inappropriately dressed revellers trudge (in sandals) through streams of dubiously-coloured water, or it will be so hot that thousands of inappropriately dressed revellers will suffer from sunburn, heatstroke and the inhalation of fumes from rotting rubbish (see rubbish). Bring a flamboyantly-coloured brolly for either event.

The beer

Each year, an improbable number of cans of warm Red Stripe and Tennents Super will be sold at an astronomical mark-up. (Many tons of low-quality hashish will be also smoked by impressionable youngsters from Stevenage with predictable consequences.)

Carnival anthems

Each year, there's always one tune guaranteed to kick off a whistle-blowing, hand-waving frenzy. So what will be this year's successor to bygone anthems such as Aswad's "Warrior Charge" and Baha Men's "Who Let the Dogs Out"? Those DJs in the know are saving Busta Rhymes's "Pass the Courvoisier" and Ms Dynamite's "Dynamite" for the climactic moment.

The photo opportunity

Police officers dancing in the street. Locals dancing in the street wearing police officers' helmets. Police officers making futile attempts to retrieve helmets. Politicians in youth-culture headgear "getting down" to the sound systems, while eating curried goat, sharing a joke with the locals, drinking from a coconut, kissing an Afro-Caribbean baby and telling the press pack Carnival is the capital's lifeblood.

The rubbish

On Monday night, the full horror of the open sewer that is Notting Hill becomes all too clear. Residents wade through beer cans, chicken bones, water bottles, Rizla papers and half-eaten burgers until the council mobilises the clean-up operation (70 miserable souls who shift the solid detritus but leave behind an oily, rancid, beer-coloured residue; residents pray for rain).

The residents – leave or stay?

It's the subject of great debate amongst W11-ers and W10-ers in the weeks before Carnival – is it better to pack up and leave the area for the entire weekend and risk coming back on Monday night to rubbish, unsightly smells or worse in your doorway? Or to brazen it out, buying in huge amounts of food, drink, loo paper, earplugs? As a rule of thumb – most over-40s head for their second home in Wiltshire, under-30s host parties.

Best Carnival secret

On Saturday night some steel bands rehearse on Kensal Road, and it's the best chance to hear the music before it has to fight for attention with drum'n'bass sound systems. There's a lovely anticipatory atmosphere, too.

Police, camera, action

Policing the carnival is the most difficult and politically awkward assignment that the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea has to deal with. If too many truncheon-happy, riot gear-clad officers appear, the party atmosphere drains away; if just a few coppers are seen, dancing with laméed-up ladies who are wearing their helmets while elsewhere "steaming", stabbing and shoplifting crimes are perpetrated, there is an outcry. Police jargon includes "pinch-points" – where the crowd all bunches up, and "heli-telly" – footage from the police cameras in the sky. This year, there will be more than 7,500 officers and 500 stewards keeping an eye on events.

What to wear

Tricky, given that you may be planning to arrive in the area at midday and stay till after dark. There's a lot of pavement to pound to get around the 41 sound systems, and you'll be jostled by two million other revellers over the weekend. So flat shoes, light clothing and rainproof warm jacket is the non-stylish but practical look to adopt. However, if you're planning to become part of the show, remember that 30 million sequins, 15,000 feather plumes and 30 litres of decorative body paint will be used to create carnival costumes this year...

Carnival highs

The first ever Carnival to be held in Notting Hill was attended by about 10,000 people. By 2001, the figure had rocketed, with an estimated 1.5 million in attendance. In 1980, Norman Jay brought his "Good Times" sound system to Notting Hill. Twenty-two years later, the founder of Kiss FM has become one of the Carnival's main features, earning an MBE for his services to music. You can find his sound system at the corner of Southern Row and West Row – just follow the sound of foghorns and whistles.

Carnival lows

In 1976, at a time of increasing National Front activity and widespread discontent in the black community over police harrassment, Carnival descended into an all-out riot. An unprepared and outflanked police force defended themselves with dustbin lids and milk crates. Shops were looted and vehicles burned, while some 300 police officers were injured. In 2000, the Notting Hill Carnival was again marred by violence. Two people were killed and police reported a 27 per cent rise in crime. Amid fears for public safety, calls were made for the event's relocation to Hyde Park.

Notting Hill Carnival, London W10 & W11, Sun and Mon