Black Mahler: The Samuel Coleridge-Taylor story, by Charles Elford
Author: Charles Elford. Review by Simon Webb
I was happy at my Anglican primary school in Croydon, though it was the sixties and it was ‘a different time’. We exited assemblies to the accompaniment of regimental marches played on a gramophone, and were expected to learn our letters from a reading-scheme populated entirely by middle-class children, none of whom had disabilities like mine, or a single mum. The reading-scheme children were also all white, though there were black and brown children in every class in the school. We learned about ‘darkest Africa’ (yes, really) and one of our teachers encouraged us to hero-worship David Livingstone. We were also shown films about the work of modern Christian missionaries among the benighted Africans.
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