Exhibition launched at Mansfield museum about Windrush generation, migration and black history

Colin Nieta, Janet Baldwin, Wesley Dawes, Paul Morrisson.

‘It Runs Through Us’, the first exhibition of its kind at the Leeming Street museum, has opened its doors and attracted more than 100 members of the local Caribbean community.

It is part of an ongoing project, led by Mansfield Council, to document and collect oral histories from local people of the Windrush generation and their descendants.

The Mansfield-born children of these families, many now grand-parents themselves, are featured the oral history videos, sharing positive experiences of childhood, friendships, and working lives, alongside

Residents make their way around the Windrush exhibition.

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The exhibition features a variety of thought-provoking displays, vintage artefacts, carnival costumes, artwork, stories and a reconstructed 1960s’ Caribbean ‘front room’, from a house on Littleworth.

Retired engineer Wesley Dawes, whose mother, Violet Dawes, and aunt, Millicent Fraser, settled in the district in the mid-1950s, was a key contributor to the exhibition.

He said: “Our exhibition highlights that, like many of the women during the early period, they found work in hospitals and at Metal Box, Mansfield Hosiery Mills and a variety of factories.”

Samuel Case is another Windrush pioneer and the exhibition follows his family story – as first revealed in the Chad – from the late 1700s as told by his son, Carl Case, whose research for the exhibition unearthed pre-Windrush industrial links from the area to the Caribbean.

Samuel, who lived on Western Avenue, Mansfield, and worked at Welbeck Colliery in Meden Vale, left Jamaica in his mid-20s.

He later became the first black man elected as a Deacon by a 120-strong congregation at Mansfield’s Baptist Church, the highest honour the church can bestow on a person.

Paul Morrison, UK Education lead at global tech firm Zoom, said his parents were among the district's Windrush generation.

He said: "I am very proud of growing up in Mansfield and seeing the contribution my parents and other local Windrush pioneers made in Britain becoming a multi-cultural nation, and how they helped to rebuild it after the war.”

The exhibition will run free carnival and dance workshops, taking place at Ladybrook Community Centre, on Thursdays, from 7-9pm, and at Mansfield Palace Theatre on Tuesdays, from 6.30-8.30pm.

‘It Runs Through Us’ is open to the public on Tuesdays-Saturdays, from 10am-3pm, until November 30.