People, Places, Events   

Sancho was born aboard a slave ship in 1729 and was orphaned soon after. His mother died in the Spanish colony of New Granada and his father committed suicide rather than live in slavery . He was baptised, Ignatius and brought to England at the age of two. He was “given” to three maiden sisters in Greenwich. The three women added “Sancho” to his name, after the Don Quixote’s companion. His life with them was unhappy as they often psychologically abused him by threatening to r

In 1951, Henderson travelled to England to study piano tuning at the North London Polytechnic. He settled in England and founded Britain's first steelband combo (The Russ Henderson Steel Band) with Mervyn Constantine and Sterling Betancourt in late 1952. They played their first gig at The Sunset Club at 50 Carnaby Street. Other compatriots Henderson worked with in the early London days were calypsonians Lord Kitchener and Young Tiger.

Sterling Betancourt, has had his services to the steel pan culture recognised in many quarters and in many countries.  He received the Sunshine Award, from the USA Folk Art Institute, Brooklyn and was the first steelpan musician to be honoured by a British University for his contributions to the Caribbean musical art.

Francis Sydney Dove MM (3 September 1897 – 10 February 1957) was a British (mixed race) boxer who competed in the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium. In 1920 he was eliminated in the quarter-finals of the heavyweight class after losing his fight to the upcoming silver medallist Søren Petersen. After the outbreak of World War I, Dove joined the British Army and won the Military Medal for bravery during the Battle of Cambrai (1917).

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (15 August 1875 – 1 September 1912) was a British-Sierra Leonean composer and conductor. Of mixed-heritage, Coleridge-Taylor achieved such success that he was referred to by white New York musicians as the "African Mahler" when he had three tours of the United States in the early 1900s.

In his early teens Sheppard went to work as a miner in the Ferndale and Maerdy area of the Rhondda Valleys, and became one of the rare group of Black miners, men who were almost written out of the history of the Welsh coalfields.

In Dahomey: An all black cast Musical Comedy is a landmark 1903 American musical comedy described by theatre historian Gerald Bordman as "the first full-length musical written and played by blacks to be performed at a major Broadway house." It features music by Will Marion Cook, book by Jesse A. Shipp, and lyrics by poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. It was written by Jesse A. Shipp as a satire on the American Colonization Society's back-to-Africa movement of the earlier nineteenth c

Marson returned to London in 1938 to continue work on the Jamaican Save the Children project that she started in Jamaica, and also to be on the staff of the Jamaican Standard. In March 1940, Marson published an article entitled "We Want Books - But Do We Encourage Our Writers?" in Public Opinion, a political weekly, in an effort to spur Caribbean nationalism through literature. In 1941, she was hired by the BBC Empire Service to work on the programme Calling the West Indies

Una Maud Victoria Marson: Part 1 (6 February 1905 – 6 May 1965) was a Jamaican feminist, activist and writer, producing poems, plays and radio programmes. She travelled to London in 1932 and became the first black woman to be employed by the BBC during World War II. In 1942, she became producer of the programme Calling the West Indies, turning it into Caribbean Voices, which became an important forum for Caribbean literary work.