About this website

This website was started in 2009, in part a response to what I regarded as ill-founded articles on history and also to make available images and documents that I had been accumulating since the late 1970s. I had published several articles since 1982 (the year that my Edmund Thornton Jenkins: The Life and Times of an American Black Composer, 1894-1926 had been published by Greenwood Press). Nearly fifty images were used in my Black Edwardians. Black People in Britain 1901-1914 which Frank Cass published in 1998. My continuing research brought other matters to my attention, and as the computer age made on line research more popular than seeking my articles in academic journals such as Immigrants and Minorities, Journal of Caribbean History, New Community, Black Perspective in Music and Storyville this website became my main method of disseminating information. Its focus was on the activities of black people in Britain ca 1830-ca 1940.

Find the list of articles in the top right menu.

 

Recent work

In 2011 my Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Musical Life was published by Pickering and Chatto, and a less expensive and more generously illustrated Coleridge-Taylor. A Centenary Celebration appeared in 2012 (History and Social Action Publications, 6 Oakhill Road, London SW16 5RG) and was reprinted in 2019. Black Americans in Victorian Britain was published by Pen & Sword (Barnsley) in 2018.

The number of articles on this website expanded and they are in the order of creation rather than historical chronology. 

Researchers, often family historians, found their relatives mentioned on this site, and made contact. New information was often supplied and details exchanged. Such contacts were in Australia, Cayman Islands, Sierra Leone, the USA, France, South Africa and all over Britain

In late 2014, aware that contacts had information that had yet to be published in an on-line format, the site was opened to invited contributors and this facility still interests people.

Biography

Born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire in 1944, Jeffrey Green was raised in London, worked there and in Uganda for Grindlays Bank, crossed America by Greyhound Bus in 1970-1971, and worked for two British manufacturers as an export manager which provided further opportunities for global travel. He has presented research papers in Charleston SC, Chicago, Houston and Atlanta (USA), in Sweden, France, and in Britain — in Edinburgh, Liverpool, East Yorkshire Record Office, Oxford, Hatfield, Reading, Gloucester, Birmingham and several times in London. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has published over thirty of his articles, and he has contributed to several American reference works and was nominated for a Grammy in 2015 for his part in the 44 CD boxed set Black Europe produced by Bear Records of Germany.

In 2020 the site was taken on by the British Library as part of the national UK Web Archive. The open UK Web Archive is accessible at Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, Wales, Edinburgh and the British Library. It is also available on The Africanist.