Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Reena

Stanton Sharma. Today we're going back to 1966 when an acclaimed artist from Trinidad

was specially selected to design fabrics for the most famous women in the world. Queen

Elizabeth II. They actually flew over the national flower, the Chaconia. From Trinidad to Britain

she designed the fabric, they had it printed here in England and then flew it back.

That's Rose Sinclair, a lecturer in textile design at Goldsmiths University of London.

She's talking about her friend, the artist Althea McNeish. Althea was considered to be

the first Caribbean designer to achieve international recognition. She was born in Trinidad and moved

to England in 1950 when she was 26 years old and injected a burst of colour into post-war Britain.

Althea spoke to the BBC about inspiring British designers with her bright designs.

I thought what is there to be afraid of is fun, get on with it, you know. It's a language of

a soul. You don't have to sit on that, you spread it out around you. Althea originally came to London

for an architecture degree but instead enrolled on a screen printing course before studying textiles

at the Royal College of Art. It was here that her exuberant creations grabbed the attention of

Arthur Stuart Liberty, the chairman of the prestigious department store Liberty London.

He commissioned her to create new and exclusive designs. In 2018, Althea described her first meeting

with Arthur. When I saw this man with his core of his eyes, I said, wow, he called all his buyers

from the furnishings, from the dress department, everybody. I'd pay when they were cookers.

And they weren't the only ones swooning over Althea's work.

She designed top-selling fabrics which were made into dresses for iconic Parisian

hot-couture labels, including Christian Dior. Althea's creations also featured in high-end fashion

magazines in the 1960s as she was quickly becoming one of the most influential textile designers

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