Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Musical Life

Jeffrey Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317322627
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Green's study is more than a biography of an Anglo-African composer.The first comprehensive study of Coleridge-Taylor's life for almost a century, it reveals how class-ridden Britain could embrace even the most unlikely of cultural icons.

1
The Early Years

The gentle slope of Bandon Hill cemetery beyond the war memorial has the appearance of a stunted forest of stone angels, slabs and crosses as you approach the grave of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Its musical notation and poetry is ornate by the standards of neighbouring graves. The next row has a simpler memorial commemorating Emma and Walter Walmisley and their third daughter Louisa. The graves are linked as Louisa’s sister Jessie was the wife of Coleridge-Taylor. In tracing the early life of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor it has been necessary to find other hidden connections.

This suburban south London cemetery where the composer’s body was interred in September 1912 is far from the Circular Road cemetery in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where his grandparents’ sepulchre stands near the entrance. In 1869 Sally and John Taylor’s youngest son made the long journey from Sierra Leone where the Atlantic coast of Africa begins its east-west axis. Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor’s son was born in London in the summer of 1875.

Coleridge-Taylor’s father was a self-motivated migrant seeking an education and professional qualifications who would have found that the British regarded Africa as a continent of mysteries. Lands bordering the Mediterranean were known through the Bible. Older people knew of the Barbary pirates; and also within living memory were the exploits of the French Foreign Legion and the conquest of Algeria. The opening of the Suez Canal shortened the sea route to India and the Orient from 1869, but at that time, when Daniel Taylor arrived in England, tropical Africa was largely a blank in the minds of Europeans.

Henry Stanley’s ‘discovery’ of David Livingstone in 1871 and the London funeral of the hero in 1874 inspired others to seek great rivers, black kingdoms and snow-capped mountains on the equator. The ‘Scramble for Africa’ followed and maps of Africa began to be delineated with names of the travellers, their friends and sponsors, and showed the claims of Europeans. Daniel Taylor’s son grew into manhood as Britain played this imperial game, usually in conflict with France and always with Africans.

Daniel Taylor’s homeland was one of the oldest regions within Britain’s African empire. His people, the Krio or Creole, had formed through decades of association between Africans and British. Coleridge-Taylor’s fame, which blazed like the tropical sun from 1898, brought him into contact with African men and women – in England, for the composer never travelled to Africa. He moved within the small but vibrant black community of London. His achievements inspired them and others in Africa, the Caribbean and the US. His compositions included ‘Africa’ and ‘Negro’ in their titles and that genetic inheritance was visible in his appearance. His invisible inheritance must be guessed at, but to make an assessment we need to consider his father’s family.

Contact between Europeans and Africans had occurred along Africa’s coast for centuries as whites travelled in search of markets for their goods, supplies to sell in Europe and people to force into bondage on the plantations of the New World. The violence that accompanied the slave trade, as settlements were attacked, crops destroyed and human merchandise held in European-constructed castles until ships arrived provided an opportunity for ethnogenesis. Under pressures of destruction, capture and theft, new identities emerged. When slave ships were captured and the Africans released far from their natal lands a new definition of their culture followed. This had been the origins of the Krio of Sierra Leone.

Slavers anchored in the estuary of the Sierra Leone River in the region the Portuguese had named the Lion Mountain. British traders were present from the 1620s. Cloth from Manchester and India, guns from Birmingham, rum from the Caribbean, American tobacco, salted fish from Canada and French brandy were all imported; people were exported.¹ Africans formed relationships with whites, which led them to visit Europe. Their children and those born to the merchants’ African partners were often sent to school in Britain. ‘Education was chiefly prized as a means to outwit European business rivals’.²

The loss of the American colonies led the British to consider Sierra Leone as a penal colony (they decided on Australia) and exposed a substantial black population in Britain, former slaves from the US and sailors with few employment prospects as peace created a slump in shipping. The ‘Black Poor’ of the 1780s attracted the attention of the charitable and the government agreed to assist in sending some to Africa. Sierra Leone was now the Province of Freedom: its urban settlement was named Freetown. Other black people forced from the US and resettled in eastern Canada’s Nova Scotia sailed for Sierra Leone in 1792. Eight years later a third group of migrants crossed the Atlantic from Jamaica.³

The Province of Freedom became a British colony in January 1808. Britain’s abolition of its slave trade that year led the Royal Navy to have a base in Freetown. Patrols sailed out to intercept slave ships, liberating 160,000 Africans. Captured ships were auctioned in Freetown; the last in 1864.⁴ Human cargoes settled in the colony where they redefined their own African culture. 84,000 men, women and children were liberated and put down in the colony between 1808 and 1864. They, the migrants and their descendants became the Krio.

Many were strongly influenced by the Church Missionary Society and its several black leaders.⁵ Merging African cultures and languages with Christianity, English and British concepts in one generation they became clerks, lawyers, shopkeepers, civil servants, journalists, church leaders, publishers, importers, teachers and doctors.⁶ Others arrived from the interior, from along the coast and the Caribbean; Americans came from neighbouring Liberia (a black-ruled republic from 1847). The composer’s African family moved in this cosmopolitan society.

Growing up in 1850s Freetown, Daniel Taylor would have observed soldiers whose presence protected the colony and signified imperial power. The town had a garrison of the West India Regiment.⁷ These Caribbean and African troops were utilized in expeditions along the coast and into the interior, against local unrest and in campaigns following the clash of European interests. Provisioning the military was lucrative when larger numbers of men landed in the colony. When Daniel Taylor was in London in 1873–4 troops from England, Scotland, Wales, the Caribbean, Sierra Leone and Nigeria attacked the Asante kingdom in Ghana (colonial Gold Coast) and his brother William Ray or Reay Taylor ‘made a fortune contracting for the Army and Navy, and Afterwards selling surplus stores’.⁸ Entrepreneurs also traded with people in the interior. The enforcement of British legal systems in Freetown aided merchants whose investments in stock became more secure, for the police and the courts dealt with theft and commercial knavery. Freetown’s merchants extended credit and built trade networks in the belief that defaulting customers could be brought to justice.⁹ Opportunities were also found in the expanding urban centres along the coast of western Africa and the Krio world stretched to Accra, Lagos and Cameroon.

Ships loaded supplies and took on crew in Freetown, purchased equipment from chandlers and delivered a variety of products. Krio influence encouraged others to copy their successful behaviour, and Fanti, Ga and other peoples sent their children to school in Freetown and to Britain. Coleridge-Taylor found friends among these people in England.

These men and women knew a great deal about the British. Law, education, medicine and church and civic affairs were largely based on British practices. Among the many Krio who mastered them was Samuel Lewis who was studying in London when Daniel Taylor left Freetown. Lewis qualified as a lawyer in 1872. In 1882 he was the chief justice of the colony, became Freetown’s mayor and was knighted in 1896.¹⁰ The composer’s African family was successful in this way, too: one of Coleridge-Taylor’s cousins was to become Mayor of Freetown. The town was prosperous in the 1860s with shops and warehouses attracting African merchants from far away. Many of them employed Krio whose literacy in English enabled them to be clerks and managers, and took Krio ideas into the interior. Local products including cotton, hides and gold were brought by caravan to Freetown where a ‘Protector of Strangers’ looked After the welfare of the traders.¹¹ Middle-class Krio had ‘the same pretensions and expectations as their European counterparts, and their ethos was achievement orientated’.¹² Many thought their destiny was to be the future leaders of a transformed modern Africa.¹³ The region, called the Fever Coast by whites, was often fatal for Europeans including the son of newly arrived governor John Pope Hennessy in 1872. Two or three whites in a population of dozens died every month in Freetown that year.¹⁴ Yet an experienced administrator observed that the town’s water supply was pure and Freetown looked and smelt cleaner than many English towns.¹⁵ The cathedral was built from stone; other buildings were wooden.

The Taylors would have lived in a grand house with servants. Daniel Taylor attended the Church Missionary Society’s grammar school. Founded in 1845 to ‘provide secondary education for boys from the new middle-class families’ its curriculum included Greek and Latin. When properly supervised its pupils were ‘better offthan many village children in England’.¹⁶ Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor was there for four years. His family then sent him to England.

At the beginning of 1870 he enrolled at Wesley College (now Queen’s College) in Taunton in the west of England. Their files note his guardian was Ferdinand Fitzgerald: editor of the London monthly African Times. From the Somerset railway and market town Taylor went to study medicine at King’s College Hospital, London. In November 1874, aged twenty-five, he qualified as a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons (MRCS). Sometime during his years in London he met Alice, the woman who was to be the composer’s mother.

Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor, MRCS took no part in his child’s upbringing. Nothing survives on Taylor’s time at King’s College but documents at the Royal College of Surgeons show he registered in October 1871 After an examination in June. The Medical Register 1877 erroneously declared him to be a graduate of University College London, which appears in the first (1915) biography of the composer and encyclopedia entries. That biography states Dr Taylor joined a medical practice in Croydon, taking on the sole running of it and suffering financial distress as patients did not trust a black doctor working without white supervision. So Taylor returned to Africa, leaving his wife and son behind.¹⁷ It was possible for African doctors to practise in England, for William Frederick Campbell from Sierra Leone practised medicine for several years in the 1890s.¹⁸ But there was no such period in Croydon or elsewhere in England, for Daniel Taylor was back in Freetown before Alice’s body started to swell with their child.¹⁹

When she declared her son’s birth at 15 Theobalds Road, London, she informed the registrar that the father was ‘Daniel Hugh [sic] Taylor’, a surgeon and she was Alice Taylor formerly Holmans. No registration of marriage has been located. He could have married Alice and taken her to Sierra Leone, for African men returned to colonial Africa with white wives. Michael Lewis Jarrett followed the same route a year later: Freetown, Wesley College, King’s College Hospital and returned with an English wife as did two Sierra Leonean law graduates.²⁰

The relationship between Daniel Taylor and Alice is part of the complexities both of race and class in Victorian England. She was the illegitimate daughter of an artisan who worked shoeing horses, and he was the son of a wealthy merchant family qualifying as a doctor. We do not know if the couple had a lengthy relationship. This misspelling of Hughes as Hugh on the birth registration was probably an error by the registrar, for when the baby was baptised at St George the Martyr, Queen Square on 7 November he is Hughes Taylor.²¹ Both registers declare him to be a surgeon.

Dr Taylor did not join the middle-class Africans in late Victorian Britain, soon to include Dr Campbell. All would have experienced ill-mannered behaviour and hostility, generally overcome by positive elements. Universities and colleges accepted black students, and Africans were involved in commerce in England. James Hutton Brew from the Gold Coast had ambitions to be elected to Parliament, Colin Rosenbush gained enough support to float a bank when he returned to Sierra Leone and James Ellis was in business in Manchester.²² There was the Smith family from Freetown whose daughters lived in England. One married, in London, Brew’s nephew, J. E. Casely Hayford, a Cambridge graduate. Another, Emma Smith, was to become a friend of the composer. Their father had been educated in Yorkshire, studied law in London in 1868–71 and became a judge in the Gold Coast.²³ Other black women travelled to England having formed friendships with white merchants.²⁴

Medical students walked the wards of hospitals accompanying senior staff, observing and attending to patients. Those who had been at school in Britain had spent years with Britons. Four contemporary Krio doctors included John Farrell Easmon (MRCS 1879); William Renner (MRCS 1880); and Joseph Spilsbury Smith and Sylvester Cole who qualified in Scotland in 1883. Nathaniel King, a Nigerian, was at King’s College with Taylor; and John Randle qualified in Edinburgh in 1888.²⁵ Law students studied with men they would later meet in court, and handled confidential papers and conducted interviews with people seeking justice. These students saw the British when they were vulnerable. They developed friendships with fellow students and others met through work, religious meetings, sports and music, and Britons known to be sympathetic.

Yet Coleridge-Taylor’s mother is elusive. Nothing is known of her family’s religious beliefs outside a nominal Christianity so it is speculation that a meeting at a church or a chapel brought her into contact with Taylor. Nothing connects her family to Ferdinand Fitzgerald of the African Times who had been Taylor’s guarantor at Taunton and whose 30 November 1874 edition noted Taylor had qualified. Perhaps Taylor or a friend had lodged at Theobalds Road? The college was nearby and the Holmans had room for lodgers.

Whatever joy had been found in Alice’s arms Dr Taylor took the two-week steamship journey back to Freetown where he applied for employment in the medical service. On 18 February 1875 his application was forwarded to the Colonial Office in London where it was received on 12 March. The document was destroyed long ago; the index shows it existed.²⁶ Dr Taylor was appointed a probationary officer, temporary Assistant Colonial Surgeon at Sherbro.²⁷ The Sierra Leone Blue Book for 1876 noted this commenced on 15 November 1875 at an annual salary of £350. Taylor failed to meet the standards expected. In August 1876 he was criticized for being extravagant and failing to send in returns. Newly appointed governor Cornelius K...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1 The Early Years
• 2 The Royal College of Music
• 3 The Promising Young Composer
• 4 The Wedding Feast
• 5 ‘A Sentiment Prevalent Here’
• 6 Intensifying the Effect
• 7 The International Star
• 8 A Stalwart Member of the Profession
• 9 A ‘Definite Place for the Negro in the World’s History’
• 10 A Tale of Old Japan
• 11 Requiem
• 12 The Legacy
• Postscript
• Appendix 1 The Song of Hiawatha
• Appendix 2 Further Reading
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index