Edric Esclus Connor was a Caribbean singer, folklorist and actor who was born in Trinidad and Tobago. He was a performer of calypso in the United Kingdom, where he migrated in 1944 and chiefly lived and worked for the rest of his life until he died following a stroke in London, at the age of 55.
Career
Edric Esclus Connor was born in 1913 in Mayaro, Trinidad. When he was 16 he won a Trinidad government scholarship to study engineering at the Victoria Institute, Port of Spain, in his spare time he studying Caribbean folk singing. During World War 2 he worked on the construction of the American naval air base in Trinidad. Having saved enough money to go toBritain, initially with the intention of continuing his engineering studies, he settled there in 1944, making his debut on BBCRadio two weeks later, in Calling the West Indies, a programme for listeners in the Caribbean. In 1951 he was responsible for bringing the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra – TASPO – to the Festival of Britain. In 1955, he recorded the first Manchester United Football Club song, "The Manchester United Calypso". That same year, Connor and his wife Pearl, whom he had married in 1948, set up the Edric Connor Agency, representing black actors, dancers, writers and musicians, which eventually, in the 1970s, she ran under the name of the Afro-Asian-Caribbean Agency. In 1963, they set up the Negro Theatre Workshop, one of the UK's first black theatre groups. Connor appeared on stage at London's Prince's Theatre in 1956 in Summer Song, the life told through the music of Antonín Dvořák, in which Connor was "given two of the show's most memorable moments in 'Deep Blue Evening' and 'Cotton Tail'", which he subsequently recorded. In 1958 he became the first black actor to perform for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, playing Gower in Pericles, having been recommended for the role by Paul Robeson. Connor acted in a total of 18 films, including his role as Daggoo in Moby Dick. Connor co-starred with Rita Hayworth, Robert Mitchum, and Jack Lemmon in the 1957 film Fire Down Below, directed by Robert Parrish, playing the character Jimmy Jean, who was the third man on the "boat-for-hire" along with Mitchum and Lemmon. In 1952, with his band "The Caribbeans" Connor recorded, according to the AllMusic website, a "groundbreaking LP of Jamaican folk music" entitled Songs from Jamaica. This recording of songs was based on a collection made by a British Council staff member in Jamaica, Tom Murray, entitled "Folk Songs of Jamaica", published by Oxford University Press in 1951. Murray had arranged thirty Jamican songs for voice and piano, and Edric Connor's recording generally uses Murray's arrangements. Although Connor's accent is slightly 'un-Jamaican', the recording was very influential. The group included the song "Day Dah Light", which portrayed the hard life of Caribbean field workers. The song was later recorded by Jamaican folk singer Louise Bennett in 1954, and was rewritten in 1955 by Irving Burgie and William Attaway. The version performed by Harry Belafonte became known as "Day-O", reaching number five on the Billboard charts in 1957, Connor's acting for television included roles in the espionage series Danger Man : as the character Thompson in "Deadline", and as opposition leader Dr Manudu in the series 2 episode entitled "The Galloping Major". Connor directed the "Caribbean Carnival" event held in London's St Pancras Town Hall at the end of January 1959, organised by fellow Trinidadian Claudia Jones, and televised by the BBC. He appeared on the BBC programme Desert Island Discs on 13 April 1959, when one of his choices was "Deep Blue Evening", from the show Summer Song, a track on which he was a soloist.
