A skilled painter and decorator by trade, he often worked restoring old murals and paintwork in churches and old buildings, and enjoyed showing members of the bateria photos of this on his phone. I could see from these that he had great skills in this area. He brought those skills to the LSS, helping the school countless times on our float designs for our parades at the Notting Hill Carnival. 

In February 2015, Paul told me a bit about his family background. He said he was born on 28th December 1948 and grew up in Southampton, where he became close friends in the 1970s with Dave Renshaw, who later would be one of the founders of the samba group BAT2K. This is what he told me of his family:

“My father was Blackshirt before WW2 – a supporter of Oswald Mosley who hated Blacks, Jews, Gays etc and said that Hitler should have won the war. I  fell out with him and ended up never speaking to him as his views were just too extreme. My father ended up moving to South Africa with his family, taking my brothers and sisters there. I visited there in 1974 and could not believe how the black majority were living. I saw with my own eyes the reality of the apartheid state which my own parents endorsed. I did some building work there and got friendly with some Zulu builders – who kept on insisting on calling me “boss” – despite my request not to.

I went back to their township – despite being stopped by black policemen and told I could not go. I just got into the boot of the car and carried on the journey. When I got to the township in Natal and walked into the bar – the whole place went quiet – but then everyone was really friendly. After this time, I lost contact with his family. By 2015 my mother and father were dead, but I still had brothers and sisters in South Africa – but I was no longer in contact with them.

My mother was of Portuguese aristocratic origin – her grandmother was from Portugal, from the area of Coimbra. Her family were rich landowners who fled the country after the revolution which deposed the constitutional monarchy and established a republican regime in Portugal in October 1910. They came to live in England – so I am really a mixture of British and Portuguese origins”.

He ended up back in Southampton and here as noted above he met Dave Renshaw. The group they formed was the first samba band in this part of England and they named it the Southampton School of Samba. This was sometime in the early 1990s and they got in Sam Alexander to help set the group up. Eventually after the group was done, it was renamed BAT2K and they made contact with the LSS. This led to numerous members over the years coming to take part in our parades at the Notting Hill Carnival every year. It was this connection with the Notting Hill Carnival that Paul told how he’d first made contact with the LSS. 

In recent years, Paul had become a special person for me in the school because he had become the last person left from all those who’d been in the bateria in the mid-1990s. For the last decade of so, I had felt great affection for him for all the time and work he’d put in for the LSS. 

I remember when he first joined in bateria in 1994 – 26 years ago. By this time, he had moved to London and almost straight away began to be as involved as much as possible with the LSS. His first parade with the school in the Notting Hill Carnival was in 1995 and he did every carnival since then – a total of 25 parades between then and the last one the school did in 2019.

I appointed him to be the head of Tamborim section in 2001 – a post he held for several years with real dedication. He helped me write the tamborim arrangement for the 2003 samba de enredo (Orfeu em Notting Hill), and was a bateria director in the Notting Hill Carnival for 15 years (2002-2015). After that just came out as a steward and helped out over the Carnival weekend wherever work was needed.