The years of the first world war (1914-1918) witnessed several African American entertainers obtaining fame in London where they presented the latest American music. Night clubs had black bands playing for dancing into the small hours, appealing to the fashionable whose world was being turned upside down in the mud of Flanders.

One successful musician was Nathaniel Augustus ‘Dan’ Kildare, born in Jamaica in 1879 and raised in the United States. He was a cabaret pianist based in New York, and closely associated with leading black musicians. He was a band leader by 1914, playing for dancers. In March 1915 with six others including his brother Walter, Kildare sailed to England where he was to make his home for the next five years – and where he is buried.

The band played at Ciro’s Restaurant in central London, presenting ‘the newest ragtime and fox-trot melodies’. Ciro’s was a members-only club, and soon had over two thousand members. Kildare’s band played there for two years. They made some gramophone records, and played in other night spots. Wartime restrictions led to Ciro’s being shut in 1917. Most of Kildare’s band, now named the Seven Spades, found work in British music halls, and Kildare worked in theatres ‘two coloured artistes in an act new to London’. The demand for entertainment during the war years was intense.

Kildare married an English widow, Mary Fink in April 1918. She had two children, and owned the Bell pub near Oxford Circus in central London. The couple often argued and his name appeared in newspaper reports of quarrels including assaulting a police officer in mid-1920.

Ciro’s had reopened in late 1919, and Kildare was ‘presiding at the piano’ from January 1920. The music his band played, for dancing after dinner was over, was regarded as jazz. Dan Kildare had a well-respected place in London entertainment circles, a residency at a top night spot, and he had continuing links to people and events in America, and a fine reputation as a song writer.

Mary Kildare lived at the Bell and her husband lived at 1 Grenville Street near Russell Square. In the early evening of 21 June 1920 Kildare went to the pub, where he shot his wife, her sister Lucy Ludlow, and two other women (not fatally) and then turned the revolver on himself. The three deaths were widely reported, with journalists agreeing that jealousy played a major part. Kildare’s estate was valued at £1703 and his brother named in the will; Mary’s estate was worth £881. These are not substantial sums but the pages of probate grants show that few people left more.

Newspaper reports were widespread and often inaccurate. The Nottingham Journal (22 June 1920, p 1) had ‘coloured desperado commits suicide’, and the Lancashire Evening Post (22 June 1920, p 5) had its report headed ‘Terrible tavern tragedy. Three women shot by coloured man’. Both the Scotsman and the Edinburgh Evening News noted he was a coloured man, with the Edinburgh newspaper adding that he was the landlord in the Bell. Also on 22 June London’s Daily Mirror had ‘said to come from the West Indies’.

On 25 June the Kensington Post reported on the ‘Marylebone tragedy’ and said that Kildare was Jamaican and also a ‘native of Bermuda’. On 26 June the Marylebone Mercury called him ‘a Jamaican band conductor’ and a ‘coloured “jazz” musician who had had ‘a meteoric career in the world of syncopated music’ – and was ‘a native of Bermuda’. A third London newspaper, the Bayswater Chronicle (26 June 1920, p 2) had ‘coloured man runs amok. Triple murder and suicide by jazz band leader’.

Getting the numbers right was the Lichfield Mercury (25 June 1920, p 7) which reported ‘double murder and suicide by black jazz band leader’. Two days later the People (London: 27 June 1920, p 4) had ‘jazz musician’s mad act’ and commented that Kildare had been ‘a wonderful musician’.

At the time of his death Kildare had no monopoly of entertaining high society. There was a dance band at central London’s Queen’s Hall, which involved Royal Academy of Music student, South Carolina-born clarinettist Edmund Jenkins. They made several recordings. A large show band, the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, presented black American music and some members drifted off to work in smaller, British-led bands. Some but not the forty-plus Syncopated Orchestra made records too. And a white band from New Orleans – the Original Dixieland Jazz Band – played for dancing and made recordings.

Kildare’s grave in London’s Highgate Cemetery was marked with a memorial stone more than half a century after his death.

Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds. Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry 1890-1919 (University of Illinois Press, 2005) is the source of most of the above details.