Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

The British composer enjoyed major celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic, only to be cut off just as he reached his peak, reveals Terry Blain

- Terry Blain

A narrow suburban road, framed on one side by a row of modestly proportioned terraced houses, and on the other by a railway line where trains trundled regularly to and from West Croydon Station. Puffs of steam wafted across the tracks, along with waves of stench from the livestock slaughterhouse and bone-boiling sheds in the vicinity. 67 Waddon New Road was not, perhaps, the most salubrious of addresses in the Greater London area (it was demolished in the 1970s). It was, however, a happy and productive boyhood home for the young Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who lived there well into his teenage years.

Coleridge (as his family called him) had actually been born 12 miles north of Croydon at 15 Theobalds Road in Holborn, central London, on 15 August 1875. His mother was Alice Hare Martin, who was 18 when he was born. The father was Daniel Taylor, an African who was nine years Alice’s senior. Taylor had come to London from his native Sierra Leone to study medicine at King’s College. The couple were unmarried, and when Taylor returned to Sierra Leone in early 1875 it is possible he did not know that Alice had fallen pregnant. He never met his son.

The young Coleridge-Taylor’s illegitimacy was to some extent cloaked by the fact that Alice was living with her father Benjamin Holmans (a farrier), his wife Sarah and their children when he was born. Coleridge was soon absorbed within this broader family unit. But there was another layer of subterfuge at play: Alice was herself illegitimate, the product of an extramarital liaison when Benjamin already had four children with Sarah.