Catherine Ross: Keeping Caribbean Family History Alive

A museum collection can begin with something that has spent years in somebody’s home. For Catherine Ross, the story attached to that possession matters as much as the object itself. Museumand, the organisation she founded, brings together material objects and people’s recollections to explore Caribbean life in Britain. Its approach invites families to recognise their own knowledge as something worth recording, while making that knowledge available to people from other backgrounds. ¹

From St Kitts to Nottingham

Ross arrived in Britain from St Kitts in 1958, aged seven, and her family settled in Nottingham. Looking back in a 2023 interview, she remembered a child’s excitement about coming to a country with a queen and princesses. Having grown up on a small island, she imagined that she might actually encounter them. The unfamiliar weather and school dinners soon supplied a more everyday introduction to England. Pastry and chips were especially striking to a child accustomed to different meals. ²

Her school memories also included racist insults and unwanted touching of her hair and skin. She has connected her later work with the absence of Caribbean history from what she was taught. Learning about her heritage gave her ways to answer other people’s ignorance. Museumand grew from a determination to make that knowledge easier for others to find: children should be able to learn about their families’ backgrounds, and adults should have opportunities to share what they know. ²

In a first-person account published by Reform in 2018, Ross described a working life that had included law, accounting, teaching and advisory work. She also recalled how racism changed its expression as she progressed through education and employment, from overt name-calling to exclusion from opportunities. Her account places the museum within a longer life of work and learning. The experiences it records include professional ambition and disappointment, as well as the upheaval of leaving one country for another. ³

A museum shaped by two generations

Museumand’s full name is The National Caribbean Heritage Museum. Its mother-and-daughter partnership combines Ross’s experience in teaching, consultancy and strategic development with Burrell’s background in fashion and creative work. Ross has taken responsibility for partnerships, fundraising and interpretation; Burrell has shaped the organisation’s creative direction. Their travelling approach brings exhibitions to different communities, allowing conversations with visitors to contribute to the work as it develops. ¹

An early project made history part of a takeaway meal. From December 2015 to January 2016, the museum worked with Nottingham restaurant Jamaican Ways on an edible exhibition. Customers received a guide explaining the cultural background of the Caribbean dishes they bought. The restaurant became a place where eating could lead to learning about the historical circumstances in which recipes developed. It was an accessible experiment in reaching people through something they already enjoyed, with the interpretation travelling home alongside the food. ⁴

The organisation also made contributing an object manageable. Its 2018 appeal invited donations or loans of photographs, letters, posters and other belongings, accompanied by a hundred words about the contributor or the item. That short account could establish who had kept an object and why. A family possession could enter a public collection with a recognisable person’s experience still attached, rather than losing its meaning when it left the house. ⁵

Putting Caribbean lives on the record

Between 2017 and 2018, Museumand collaborated on Caribbean Journeys, a community arts project led by researchers Kelsi Delaney and Sofia Aatkar. Members of the Gedling Caribbean Elders group took part in travel-writing workshops, exploring prose and poetry before recording journeys of their own. A further workshop took place at Nottingham Central Library. The resulting anthology, edited by Aatkar and Delaney and published in 2018, preserved accounts that had previously gone undocumented. ⁶

These writings included journeys to Britain and return visits to the Caribbean. Some were humorous; others described hostility encountered in the UK. That range matters. A person’s relationship with home can change across decades, and a departure does not finish the story. The workshops gave participants room to decide which experiences to relate and how to express them. Museumand’s community connections helped make that process possible, while the anthology gave the writing a life beyond the sessions themselves. ⁶

Television provided another route into the same local history. In April 2018, Ross co-presented a Windrush edition of Rediscovering Notts with Kate Chaplin, taking viewers through places connected with Nottingham’s Caribbean community. She also presented Caribbean Conversations for Notts TV, bringing together guests from different islands to discuss life in the Caribbean and Britain. These programmes placed familiar voices within a public account of the city, allowing people’s recollections to become part of the way Nottingham explained itself. ⁵

Museumand travelled further that June, joining the V&A’s Passport to the Motherland: Migration Dreams event. Its contribution used suitcases and life stories within a programme of talks, music, performance and creative activities. The format allowed migration to be approached through belongings and personal experience. A suitcase could prompt discussion of what somebody chose to take, what they left behind and how they imagined a new life. ⁷

The difficult history of childhood

In 2018, Museumand partnered with the National Trust Museum of Childhood at Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire on Black Dolls: The Power of Representation. The exhibition formed part of Exploring Childhoods, a wider project intended to broaden the museum’s collections and approaches to interpretation. Caribbean community expertise helped bring a different set of questions to objects associated with childhood. ⁸

The display included historical and contemporary dolls, children’s books and material from Museumand’s own collection. Racist caricatures appeared alongside more recent representations, including Black Barbies. Visitors were asked to consider how such objects affected children and were invited to leave responses. Reviewing the exhibition, writer and heritage worker Panya Banjoko recorded sharply differing reactions. The display therefore exposed the difficulty of assuming that everyone remembers a childhood toy with the same affection. What one visitor treated as familiar could carry a history of humiliation for another. ⁹

A further collaboration at the V&A in December 2018 brought Ross and Burrell into a larger curatorial team. Led by Michael McMillan, Look We Here presented films and 72 objects from outside the museum’s own collection. These were belongings that had travelled from the Caribbean or been bought in Britain by Caribbean migrants. The project assembled different forms of expertise around material culture, with Ross and Burrell among 17 Caribbean creatives credited as curators. Their participation brought the knowledge developed through community collecting into a major museum’s exploration of Caribbean culture. ¹⁰

Seventy objects, many more stories

The book 70 Objeks & Tings offered another way to bring this work into people’s homes. Museumand launched it online in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, followed by a printed hardback in 2021. Its sections covered food, homes, hair and beauty, dress, culture and Caribbean contributions to Britain. The publication subsequently developed into a touring exhibition, giving readers the opportunity to encounter some of the objects in person. ⁴

The project drew on the knowledge of more than 180 Caribbean elders. Its title acknowledged patois, using a familiar form of expression for possessions and experiences that might otherwise appear unremarkable. Museumand brought the exhibition to Nottingham Castle in 2023 as part of the Windrush anniversary programme. The intention was both to introduce visitors to this history and to give people who recognised the objects an opportunity to reminisce. Elders’ testimony supplied the objects with a context that a label recording their date or material could never provide on its own. ¹¹

At York Castle Museum in 2024, the exhibition encompassed cooking utensils, household goods, food packaging, beauty supplies, funeral items, games and newspapers. Ross described the visit as an opportunity to gather further stories from Caribbean people in York and the surrounding area. Touring could therefore expand the archive as well as display it. The collection remained open to information supplied by each place it visited, with local knowledge helping to develop a fuller account of Caribbean life across Britain. ¹²

Money, trust and public history

Some of Museumand’s most revealing work concerns how families managed practical difficulties. For a 2023 exhibition at the Bank of England Museum, Ross and Burrell explored the Pardner Hand, a form of community saving. Members paid regularly into a common fund, with each person receiving the accumulated amount in turn. Organising such a scheme depended on trust and the work of the person responsible for collecting and distributing the money. ¹³

The exhibition connected this practice with the barriers Caribbean migrants faced in accessing British banking services. Photographs and memories showed how pooled savings helped people make substantial purchases. Placing those accounts in the Bank of England Museum brought family strategies into the public history of finance. It gave attention to the organising and record-keeping behind apparently private arrangements, and to people whose economic contribution might otherwise be discussed only through the jobs they held. ¹³

Ross has also addressed histories that resist an uncomplicated anniversary celebration. In 2021, she contributed to Leeds Libraries’ work commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the Chapeltown uprising, alongside West Yorkshire Archives, Parliamentary Archives and Museumand. Her essay encouraged readers to examine records of the unrest and consider the grievances of people who took part. She urged attention to local places and archival evidence. Here, the museum’s concern with community memory extended to protest, unequal treatment and the question of whose account becomes accepted as public history. ¹⁴

Family voices on the air

The Objeks & Tings podcast, made with Message Heard, provides a particularly clear example of Ross and Burrell’s conversational method. In an episode about hair and beauty, guest Rudi Page chose a hot comb. He connected it with his mother’s hairdressing and his later work at the Black haircare business Dyke & Dryden. Ross contributed a small but revealing distinction: in St Kitts, she knew the implement as an iron comb. ¹⁵

That exchange let a shared object reveal differences within Caribbean experience. The conversation moved between domestic knowledge and commercial history without requiring the guest to separate one from the other. Ross’s contribution also made her an active participant: her own memory could prompt an explanation, a comparison or a laugh. Listeners heard history being worked out between people who brought different experiences to the discussion. ¹⁵

Another episode featured photographic artist Wendy Leocque, who had turned her grandmother’s suitcase into a pinhole camera. The suitcase had accompanied her grandmother to Britain in 1956. Leocque used it to photograph objects and places associated with her family’s Windrush experience, explaining the slow process of making and developing the pictures. Ross responded enthusiastically to the idea of giving a cherished possession another practical purpose. ¹⁶

Burrell initially admitted reservations about altering old objects, then explained how Leocque’s account had changed her response. The exchange captured a productive question within Museumand’s work: how should a family’s inheritance be carried forward? Preserving an object can mean keeping it intact, but descendants also make new work from what they receive. Ross’s museum gives those decisions a public space. Families can explain what they have kept, what they have changed and why the story still matters to them. ¹⁶

Sources

1. Museumand — About.

2. LeftLion — Catherine Ross: Voices from Nottingham’s Windrush Generation.

3. Reform — I am… a Windrush generation immigrant.

4. Museumand — Exhibitions.

5. Museumand — Windrush 70th Anniversary programme and collecting appeal, 2018.

6. University of Leicester, Centre for New Writing — Caribbean Journeys.

7. Victoria and Albert Museum — Passport to the Motherland: Migration Dreams.

8. National Lottery Heritage Fund — Exploring Childhoods.

9. LeftLion — Black Dolls: The Power of Representation at Sudbury Hall.

10. Victoria and Albert Museum — Look We Here: Curating the Caribbean Pin Up Display.

11. Museumand — Windrush 75: 70 Objeks & Tings touring exhibition.

12. York Museums Trust — 70 Objeks & Tings: An Exhibition Celebrating 75 Years of Caribbean Culture.

13. Bank of England Museum — Community savings and the Pardner Hand, by Catherine Ross and Lynda Burrell.

14. Leeds Libraries — The Chapeltown Uprising of 1981: commemorating and investigating, by Catherine Ross.

15. Message Heard — Objeks & Tings, episode 10: Afro Hair and Beauty, transcript.

16. Message Heard — Objeks & Tings, episode 5: Through the Pinhole, transcript.