One of the most remarkable stories in the chequered history of British music is the fact that an underprivileged black boy from a broken home rose swiftly to become one of the best-known of all British composers and the first to win acclaim in the US – only to die an early death from overwork and be slowly, though never completely, forgotten.

Samuel Coleridge Taylor
Samuel Coleridge Taylor

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (the hyphen was a clerical error, but he found the double-barrel worked to his advantage) was born in Holborn, London, the illegitimate son of Daniel Taylor, a Creole doctor from Sierra Leone who practised in Croydon, where he met Samuel’s mother, Alice Martin. Contrary to the story that Daniel returned to Africa because...