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COPYRIGHT 2001 Center For Black Music Research
Biographies and standard reference books state that Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born in London on August 15, 1875, the son of an African man and an Englishwoman. He studied at the Royal College of Music in London and had tremendous success with his The Song of Hiawatha when in his early twenties. He visited the United States three times and died, at age thirty-seven, in 1912.
The main source for information about the composer is the biography by William Berwick Sayers, published in 1915 and in a revised edition in 1927 (Sayers 1915; 1927). Reprinted in facsimile by the Negro Universities Press and reworked by William Tortolano (1977), it remains the essential single volume account of the composer, whose life is further detailed in his widow's recollections (Coleridge-Taylor 1943) and by their daughter, Avril (Coleridge-Taylor 1979).
Avril Coleridge-Taylor's volume is not useful for information about Coleridge-Taylor's early years, nor is his wife's Memory Sketch, for she did not meet the composer until the 1890s. Sayers was born in 1881, meaning that his account of the composer's childhood did not come from firsthand experience. The present investigation into Coleridge-Taylor's early years reveals that the Sayers biography was selective with its evidence and ignored inconvenient information about the composer's early life.
The search for the truth begins in western Africa. In Sierra Leone, where the Atlantic coast of Africa begins its west-east axis, the Circular Road Cemetery in Freetown contains a sepulchre erected in 1877. John Taylor, "native of Abeokuta," died in 1876 "at the good old age of about 107 years" (Fyfe 1962, 407). The youngest of his three sons was Dr. D.P.H. (Daniel Peter Hughes) Taylor. To the north across Guinea and Senegal, in Banjul, once called Bathurst and still the only urban settlement of consequence in Gambia, there is a gravestone to Dr. D.P.H. Taylor, "medical practitioner of this colony who died at Bathurst 25th Augst. 1904 aged 57 years" (Green 1983). Dr. Taylor was the father of the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (Fyfe 1962, 407).
The Taylors were Krio (Creole), Africans with substantial European ways who numbered about sixty thousand and lived in Freetown and the villages of the colony of Sierra Leone. John Taylor came from western Nigeria, where warfare in the 1830s may have caused him to be enslaved, taken to the coast, and loaded on a slave ship bound for the New World. Thousands of Africans, among which may have been Taylor, were recaptured by the British Royal Navy and set down in Freetown, where the antislavery patrol ships had their base (Thomas 1998, 370, 653). Torn from their native lands, they became the Krio.
John Taylor prospered in business in Freetown and was able to pay for his sons to attend the grammar school. His son James, shopkeeper, moneylender, mayor, and newspaper publisher, was a leading Methodist and friend of the Methodist superintendent, who took him on a visit to England in 1869 (Fyfe 1962, 392, 421, 576; Fyfe 1993). This Wesleyan Methodist connection explains why D.P.H. Taylor was sent to Wesley College in Taunton, in the west of England.
The college's register noted in February 1870 that D.P.H. Taylor had been in England for six months and that his guardian was F. (Ferdinand) Fitzgerald, who was the editor of the London African Times (Gibbs 1993). An Irishman with African ambitions and an interest in ambitious Africans, Fitzgerald had earlier been involved with the Krio author Dr. Africanus Horton, who had qualified in medicine after studying at King's College, London, and Edinburgh University (Fyfe 1972). Taylor also went to King's College, London, where he qualified as a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons in November 1874.
The absence of documentation at King's College is unfortunate, but those who enjoy conspiracy theories may wonder why Sayers states that D.P.H. Taylor went to University College, London. The Medical Register gave the wrong college in its first entry (1877 edition) for Taylor; it was corrected in future editions but remains incorrect in both editions of Sayers's biography (Sayers 1927, 1). Sayers tells of the African doctor and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's mother and that Samuel was raised in London while his father practiced medicine in Croydon, a town ten miles south of the Thames. The doctor eventually failed and returned to Africa and out of the boy's life (3-4). All of this is a fabrication. Sayers' biography suggests that Taylor had married the boy's mother. No marriage registration has been identified. Alice Hare Martin, born in southeast England in 1856, resided in London in the 1870s. How and where she met the African medical student and the duration of their relationship are unknown. King's College Hospital was close to 15 Theobalds Road, where she is listed as residing in the 1871 census and where Coleridge-Taylor was born. Perhaps Taylor was a lodger or neighbor.
In fact, Dr. Taylor left England in January or very early February 1875. In Sierra Leone, he applied to the colonial authorities for employment in the medical service, and that application was forwarded by the Freetown officials on February 18, 1875. Received at the Colonial Office on March 12, for this was the era of sailing ships, the document has been destroyed but the Colonial Office file CO 368/9 indexes it as D.P.H. Taylor's application (1875). As his son was born on August 15, 1875, it is probable that Dr. Taylor did not know that he was to be a father.
Dr. Taylor was appointed to the colonial medical service in November 1875, and his name can be seen in the annual reports or Blue Books of Sierra Leone and those of the Gambia, where he had the job of coroner (Blue Book 1875; Blue Book 1904). His death in 1904 was noted in the Gambia Blue Book for 1904 and was announced in the Sierra Leone Weekly News without reference to his musical son (Fyfe 1962, 407). The British Medical Journal published a four-sentence obituary on October 22, 1904, noting that "Dr. Taylor was, we believe, the father of Mr. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a writer of sacred music and the author of 'Hiawatha.'"
Sayers quotes from the Sierra Leone Weekly News obituary, giving no date. He draws attention away from the African father because he did not want the stigma of illegitimacy to be attached to his composer friend's reputation: no marriage registration has been located. When Sayers was writing the biography, the composer's mother had three children by her partner George Evans, and all but Evans were alive. He brushes over their lives as well. In this way, he reduced the chances that readers might consider the Evans children illegitimate or that the Evans marriage was bigamous. His narrative flows smoothly, but the truth suffers.
In fact, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's mother shared a house in Croydon with her two daughters, living until 1953. She is mentioned in passing by the composer's widow and daughter in their accounts of his death in 1912 (Coleridge-Taylor 1943, 60; Coleridge-Taylor 1979, 95). The absence of details on the composer's mother in their books is regrettable.
Understanding the early years of Coleridge-Taylor requires information about the woman who raised him. As with the background of his father's family in the harbor town of Freetown, such information comes from examining records from two harbor towns in southeast England.
When registering the birth of "Samuel Coleridge Taylor," the woman who declared herself to be his mother informed the official that she was Alice Taylor, formerly Holmans, and that the father was "Daniel Hugh Taylor," a surgeon. Their child had been born at 15 Theobalds Road, Holborn, central London, on August 15, 1875.
The street directories and census files reveal that this house was occupied by three families and that the Holmans family had been living there for many years. The 1871 census lists Benjamin Holmans; his wife Sarah; their son John, age sixteen; and Alice, a fourteen-year-old "daughter." However, the 1861 census for Theobalds Road does not include Alice but records that the four Holmans children had all been born in Dover. Daniel Holmans was born around 1852; John Holmans (who was resident in 1871), around 1854; their sister Sarah, around 1848; and the eldest son, Benjamin Jr., around 1840. The census also records that their father and mother had been born in or near Dover, in the southeast corner of England.
It was in that port town that Alice had been born. Her birth registration states her name as Alice Hare Martin, daughter of Emily Ann Martin, born on September 17, 1856 (McGilchrist and Green 1985, 154). There is no entry under "name and surname of father." Although there is no solid proof that her father was Benjamin Holmans, the 1871 and 1881 census returns record their relationship as father and daughter. Holmans--who must have known that the British census details are confidential for a century--would hardly have allowed the description "daughter" to be added by the census official had young Alice been a more distant relative, let alone no relative at all.
Coleridge-Taylor called Holmans "grandfather," and the older man certainly fulfilled the social obligations...
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