Bow Street police court, opposite the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden, was presided over by Sir John Bridge (1824-1900), the Chief Metropolitan Police Magistrate from 1890 to 1899. On Saturday 7 September 1895 he dealt with a group of black Americans – thirteen or fourteen young lads, an assistant and their leader who had reached London a few days earlier with the idea of playing their brass band instruments in the street and collecting donations. The lads were aged between five and twelve, and English law did not allow those aged under eleven to work in this way. The group needed one pound a day for their costs. Their leader, Parson D. J. Jenkins, explained the problem and that the American embassy was unable to assist.
Their plight was mentioned in many English newspapers – the London Daily Telegraph (9 September 1895) noted “to let loose a brass band of thirteen negro children upon an urban population suffering with nerves is likely to create almost as many orphans as it would relieve”. Most of the reports, as was the style at that time, repeated a basic report. These can be found in London newspapers including the Morning Leader of 9 September page 2, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (8 September page 3), St James’s Gazette (9 September page 5), and the Evening Standard of that date (page 2). Provincial newspapers also copied the report – Bristol Times page 3, York Herald page 5, Boston Daily Chronicle (page 4), and South Wales Echo page 3 all on 10 September. In Somerset several newspapers repeated the details, as can be seen in the Western Gazette of 13 September (page 2).
Most noted that Sir John gave, from his own pocket, a sovereign (£1) coin to assist Jenkins. Jenkins, a Baptist minister of Charleston, SC, was aided by fellow Christians, and the lads sang at Spurgeon’s Tabernacle – a very large Baptist church in south London. They were reported as “coloured lads in London” in the London Daily Chronicle 21 September page 3, and the Echo of that date (page 3). The London weekly The Baptist carried an announcement seeking contributions. The news reached Charleston, SC and was printed in that city’s paper. The city did not contribute anything to Jenkins’s orphanage for another two years, and then it was $200 per annum.
Daniel Jenkins visited several long established British orphanages. He seems to have arranged for his assistant to attend a school for Africans in North Wales (he did, into 1899). See page 009. He became the US agent for a British manufacturer of brass band instruments (see page 035), and his son Edmund was to study at London’s Royal Academy of Music from 1914 to 1921, having been a leading member of an orphanage band which played at a major exhibition in London in 1914 (see page 013).
John Chilton, A Jazz Nursery. The Story of the Jenkins’ Orphanage Bands (London: Bloomsbury Book Shop, 1980).
Jeffrey Green, Edmund Thornton Jenkins. The Life and Times of an American Black Composer, 1894-1926 (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1982).
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Jeffrey Green. Historian 