Meet the museum fighting the erasure of multiracial history with audio

Throughout the podcast series on Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, we call him Samuel. We hope he wouldn’t mind.

This decision was born from a deep sense of affection that came from learning about his life and achievements in the early days of the museum. Our Director, Dr Chamion Caballero, began researching his life for a project in which we told the story of his 1908 visit to the English seaside town of Brighton. We quickly came to admire his modern outlook and couldn’t help but feel we were meeting an old friend, so calling him Samuel, as we did between us, stuck.

Who was Samuel Coleridge-Taylor?

Born in 1878 to a Black Sierra Leonean father and a white English mother, Samuel was proud of his Black identity, friends with African American abolitionists and Pan Africanists, and brought Black influences into his astonishingly popular compositions.

This was despite growing up in a completely white family in late 19th century London, when most of Africa and the Caribbean remained under European colonial control, and when the lives of Black Americans and Black South Africans were brutally restricted by segregation and apartheid.

Why was a podcast the right medium?

When we started exploring how to share his story with our audience, we wanted a personal, reflective perspective. Though the museum was new to the podcast world, the intimacy of an audio series seemed fitting, particularly given the opportunity to showcase Coleridge-Taylor’s incredible music.

The TMM team noticed that every single one of the UK’s top ten history podcasts was presented by a white man with a Southern English, middle-class accent. As Black mixed-race women, we were determined to ensure that our series included other voices that might not ordinarily be heard speaking about British history – including our own.

Despite his global fame, Coleridge-Taylor always struggled financially, and much of his income came from the jobs he took on as a conductor and musical adjudicator, travelling across the country by rail. With the 200th anniversary of Britain’s rail network coinciding with Coleridge-Taylor’s 150th anniversary year, a project exploring his train travels felt fitting.

We were delighted to secure funding from Great Western Railway, one of Britain’s many private train operating companies. Supported by their Customer and Community Improvement Fund, an external production company, Front Ear Podcasts, helped us with the technical aspects of recording, editing and distribution, allowing us to focus on the storytelling.

How did we retrace the rail journeys of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor?

We had three key ingredients: our historical knowledge of Coleridge-Taylor’s life and contribution to classical music; our knowledge about the social and racial context of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain; and the intention of ensuring that our voices told the story. How could we bring it all together in a way that made sense to audiences?

We needed a mission.

Our work at TMM is about ensuring that Britain’s multiracial past is better known, fighting against the erasure of historical figures like Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. By putting ourselves in the composer’s position, we could transform his archived history into an immediate, physical experience. Our mission became to record ourselves making and reflecting on the same journeys he made from London Paddington roughly 125 years earlier. The process of literally following his footsteps and bringing knowledge of his presence back to those locations was a powerful way to fight his erasure and connect the past to the present.

Dr Caballero identified visits that would tell the story of his early years: his first commission at the Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester in 1898 after graduating from the Royal College of Music; the coup pulled off by the Newton Abbot Choral Society by securing him for their 1902 anniversary concert in their small Devon market town; and his visit to a Swansea chapel to conduct a fully Welsh choir for the first time at the height of his global fame over the Christmas of 1902.

I then set about finding local history experts who could give us access to the halls, chapels and theatres he visited, offering listeners the sense that we as the presenters were taking them on a voyage of discovery.

How can a podcast fight the erasure of Britain’s multiracial past?

We found dedicated people in every location who were willing not only to show us around but also to share their incredible local history knowledge. We supplemented this on-location material from our visits with interviews recorded online with academics and other experts chosen for their knowledge of classical music, the railways and race in 19th century Britain.

At the same time, we worked with our web developer to create an interactive digital map as a landing page for the project. This map supplements the audio series with additional information on Coleridge-Taylor’s travels alongside archive imagery, and solves an accessibility issue by housing the episode transcripts. The Mixed Museum’s Artist in Residence, Kinga Markus, was engaged to provide illustrations for the digital map and the podcast artwork.

Through the combination of travel, community history, and digital tools, we hope that the life and work of this trailblazing composer, and the story of Britain's multiracial past, will continue to resonate with a wider audience. As for Coleridge-Taylor himself – our friend Samuel – we gave him a voice, finding a mixed-race London voiceover artist who could bring to life the feelings he expressed in letters and contemporary newspaper coverage.

The series ends with a voiceover, letting Coleridge-Taylor have the final word on the universality of music:

“There is music everywhere. In the hoot of the locomotive, in the wails and shrieks of the winds at sea. In the tender call of a mother to her child, in the answer of the little voice to its mother. Every sound in the world is music. If only a tuneful ear hears it and can transcribe it.”

Find out more

Visit Tracks of a Trailblazer to access the audio series, digital map and archive imagery. Listen to the series on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or search ‘Tracks of a Trailblazer’ wherever you get your podcasts.