Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor in 1905
Born	Samuel Coleridge Taylor (1875-08-15)15 August 1875 Holborn, London, England
Died	1 September 1912(1912-09-01) (aged 37) Croydon, Surrey, England
Occupation	Classical composer and musician

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (15 August 1875 – 1 September 1912) was an English composer of part Creole descent who achieved such success that he was once called the "African Mahler".

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born in 1875 in Holborn, London, to Alice Hare Martin (1856–1953), an English woman, and Dr. Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor, a Creole from Sierra Leone, of mixed European and African descent. They were not married, Alice Hare Martin herself being an illegitimate child. Daniel Taylor returned to Africa by February 1875 and did not know that he had a son born in London. Alice Martin named her son Samuel Coleridge Taylor after the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his mother and grandfather called the boy Coleridge Taylor.

Taylor was brought up in Croydon, Surrey by his mother and her father Benjamin Holmans. Martin's brother was a professional musician. Taylor studied the violin at the Royal College of Music and composition under Charles Villiers Stanford. He also taught, soon being appointed a professor at the Crystal Palace School of Music; and conducted the orchestra at the Croydon Conservatoire.

The young man later used the name "Samuel Coleridge-Taylor", with a hyphen, said to be following a printer's typographical error. His father Daniel Taylor was later appointed as coroner for the British Empire in the Gambia in the late 1890s.

In 1899 Coleridge-Taylor married Jessie Walmisley, whom he had met as a fellow student at the RCM. Jessie had left the college in 1893. Her parents objected to the marriage because Taylor was of mixed-race parentage, but relented and attended the wedding. The couple had a son, named Hiawatha (1900–1980) after a Native American immortalised in poetry, and a daughter Gwendolyn (1903–1998). Later their daughter took the name Avril and became a conductor-composer in her own right.