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.

While one teacher hero-worshipped Livingstone, the head of music idolised Benjamin Britten, still alive in those days, and whose very surname declared his unassailable Britishness. It took me until 2020 to find out that the black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor had lived and died in St Leonards Road, right around the corner. If only those teachers could have read this book, re-published to mark the centenary of Taylor’s death.

Born in London in 1875, the composer was the product of a relationship between Daniel Taylor, a doctor from Sierra Leone, and the unmarried daughter of a Holborn farrier. Taylor’s mother, Alice Hare Martin, named her son Samuel Coleridge-Taylor after the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Her father was a keen amateur fiddler, and taught his little grandson to play the violin.

In 1887, Alice moved to Croydon. From the age of fifteen her mixed-race son, a genuine musical prodigy, was able to commute from there to the Royal College of Music. There he learned composition under Charles Villiers Stanford, and was able to snag prestigious jobs in the musical world straight after graduation. In 1899 he married a fellow RCM student, Jessie Walmisley; by this time he was already being noticed as a composer.

In 1898, Stanford conducted the premiere of Taylor’s Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast. The cantata and its two sequels proved to be wildly popular – the Taylors even named their son Hiawatha. Elford describes how, when Hiawatha was played at the Royal Albert Hall, the vast room was decked out to give ‘the impression of a wigwam’s interior but of a cathedral’s scale’. 

Elford’s immersive, fictionalised account of Taylor’s life was published too late to have any impact on my education; but surely one of my teachers could have hunted down a copy of WC Berwick Sayers’ biography, published in 1915? Then we might have had an assembly where we learned that yes, famous people could come from Croydon, that boys could be good at music, and that there were black people in History as well as Geography.

It would not have been impossible to buy a record of part of Hiawatha in the sixties: the conductor Malcolm Sargent recorded the Wedding Feast in 1961. But today, thanks to the work of, among others, the Chineke! Foundation, much more of Taylor’s music can be heard.

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