OTD in early British television: 10 August 1931
John Wyver writes: In the line-up for the Baird 30-line transmission on the morning of 10 August 1931, along with jazz drummer L. Ash-Lyons and monologist Janet Barrow was Avril Coleridge-Taylor giving for the third time on television a demonstration of classical dancing. Now increasingly celebrated as a composer, with two of her short compositions played last week at the BBC Proms, Coleridge-Taylor would appear to be the first person of colour to appear on television in Britain. *
Born in 1903, Avril Coleridge-Taylor (above) was the daughter of feted composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who was himself the son of Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor, a Creole man from Sierra Leone. Samuel was apparently known by white musicians in New York as the ‘African Mahler’ when he toured the United States in the early 1900s. He was especially famous for his immensely popular trilogy of cantatas ‘The Song of Hiawatha’, the first section of which premiered in 1898.
Although she is not known otherwise as a dancer, Avril Coleridge-Taylor’s first 30-line appearance was on 9 June 1931, and this was followed by a spot in July; after her August presentation, she returned twice in September. There are no other recorded television appearances by her, but she was featured as a soprano on several occasions on radio in the 1930s.
By 1931, however, she was becoming known as a composer, having begun to write at the age of 12. She studied piano and composition at Trinity College of Music, and her first orchestral work, ‘To April’, is dated to 1929.
She made her formal debut as a conductor at the Royal Albert Hall in 1933. She was the first female conductor of H.M. Royal Marines and a frequent guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra. For her later career and especially her connections with the Royal Albert Hall, see Sarah Whitfield’s blog post from May.
See also, ‘Composer’s family call for greater recognition’ from the BBC blog:
The descendants of composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor are calling for wider recognition of her music… Her family said being a female composer and a woman of colour may have “held her back”.
Also, per Wikipedia:
Coleridge-Taylor was invited on a tour of South Africa in 1952, during the period of apartheid… Originally she was supportive of, or neutral to the South African apartheid system; she was taken as White and was mostly White-European in ancestry. When the South African government learned that her father was not White (being biracial, he would have been considered Coloured under its system), it denied her work as a conductor and composer.
*I believe this to be the first occasion that this has been noted in print.
[OTD post no. 236; part of a long-running series leading up to the publication on 8 January 2026 of my book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain, which can now be pre-ordered from Bloomsbury here.]
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