As well as serving in signals, Nadia also served part-time as an ATS physical training instructor. After the war she qualified as a teacher in Glasgow before returning to British Honduras, where she became the head teacher of a mission school and lectured at a teacher training college.
In 1951, however, she returned to Britain to study social sciences at the London School of Economics, and it was in London that she first encountered British racism: “You could see the cards in the window. You know, it would say ‘no blacks, no dogs, no Irish, no children’, but always no blacks.”
She went on to train as a social worker, working in Nottingham helping newly arrived Caribbean immigrants and becoming involved in racial equality campaigns. In 1959 she played a pivotal role with her Trinidadian activist friend Claudia Jones in organising the inaugural West Indian Carnival, which was held indoors at St Pancras Town Hall and broadcast by the BBC .
To help pay her way through college, Nadia Cattouse began doing some acting and singing. In 1954 she landed a role in the BBC television film The Runaway Slave, and she went on to appear in other BBC productions including Your People and My People (1959), a “West Indian ballad opera” broadcast on the Home Service; she and Cy Grant played Jamaican siblings who travel to London and are rapidly disillusioned by the discrimination they encounter.
Her career as a folk singer took off after she took part in a BBC folk musical written by Ewan MacColl, alongside Peggy and Pete Seeger and Steve Benbow, all key figures in the British folk song revival, who encouraged her to join them on tours: “Suddenly there was this scene with circuits all up and down the country. And then you had the Welsh, the English, the Irish, the Scottish and maybe half a dozen Caribbean people involved.
“Singing, exchanging music, folk songs, taking part in these big concerts, Usher Hall in Edinburgh, Festival Hall, London, and we are all joining in the chorus… And if I wanted to sing a calypso, they join in the chorus.”
She took part in the prize-winning television production Freedom Road: Songs of Negro Protest (1964), in which she sang protest songs of the US civil rights movement alongside Cy Grant, Cleo Laine and Madeleine Bell and, as an actress went on to appear in television series including Angels, Play for Today, Crown Court, Within These Walls, Dixon of Dock Green and Johnny Jarvis.
