contributed by Christian Høgsbjerg.

Rufus Elester Fennell was born in Savannah, Georgia, in the United States on 7 November 1874. Part of his family possibly hailed from the British West Indies, as Rufus Fennell, a ‘tailor by trade’, once described himself as ‘a citizen of the U.S.A., but not necessarily a full-blooded American’ (Liverpool Echo, 12 November 1917). In 1910, Fennell enlisted in the US Army in Vermont, but after ten months was dishonourably discharged for pawning his military revolver and was convicted to serve a year in prison (Newcastle News, 23 December 1910). In 1913, he married a black woman Bessie Lee and it seems likely he trained at a medical school or pharmacy college.

After leaving America to look for work in 1915, during the early stages of the First World War, Fennell served in the British merchant marine, and in 1917 described himself as ‘an American subject, [who] had been in the American army, and had served at the Dardanelles as a volunteer in the British Navy, from which he had got his discharge’ (Liverpool Echo, 8 October 1917). In 1915, when he was twenty-eight years old, he was listed as a ‘3rd Troop Cook’ on the Empress of Britain, transporting troops to the Dardanelles, having previously worked on the Mercia of Manchester. His exact war experience beyond this is unclear, though in 1919, he was to be described as ‘a coloured medical man … who has been in the trenches for 314 days, was wounded three times while serving in Mesopotamia, and who attended to thousands of our British soldiers’ (South Wales News, 14 June 1919).

In 1915 Fennell visited England but found it difficult to find work on the ‘Home Front’, even in the munitions industry, on account of his race. In 1917, now a father, he had gone into ‘the entertainment profession’, living in Merseyside and finding occasional work supervising the cleaning of Southport Pier Pavilion Music Hall. According to one local paper, Fennell ‘described himself as a music hall artiste, a master mechanic, tailor, and a former employee of the Admiralty Department’ (Liverpool Echo, 24 August 1917). Fennell soon moved to Bristol, and then to South Wales, and on 25 April 1919 he married Elizabeth (Eilly) Crane in Merthyr Tydfil, Glamorganshire, recording his profession at the time as simply ‘musical hall artist’. In June 1919, when race riots erupted in Cardiff, Fennell lent assistance and advice, emerging as the outstanding leader and spokesperson for the besieged local black community. Described in local newspapers frequently as being both a West Indian and a medical doctor, in June 1919 Fennell organized two joint protest meetings of Cardiff’s black and Arab populations, where he stressed that it was the responsibility of the British government to come to the aid of those on the receiving end of racist attacks. His campaigning work for civil rights meant he now became a local representative of the London-based Society of African Peoples.

In the early 1920s, Fennell moved to London and founded an apothecary, and in 1922 he
founded a new family with Marie Kathleen Lockyer, who he married that year and would go on to have five children together. By the mid-1930s he had made a successful return to entertainment, work that allowed him to appear alongside the black American star Paul Robeson on not only the London stage but also the big screen.

In April 1935, Fennell played an African in Basalik at the small Arts Theatre before appearing as Moses Venable in Stevedore at the Embassy Theatre in May. In March 1936, Fennell played Macoya in C.L.R. James’s play about the leader of the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture, performed at the Westminster Theatre and again starring Robeson. In 1938 Fennell appeared in a musical version of Edgar Wallace’s The Sun Never Sets at Drury Lane. Fennell also appeared as a north African, ‘Saoud’, in the British adventure film Wings over Africa (1936) and starred alongside Robeson in the fine film Jericho (1937), playing Sergeant Gamey, a black officer during the First World War. With ambitions to become a writer, Fennell also penned a screenplay, The Black Prophet, intended as a possible vehicle for Robeson. The Black Prophet was set in 1904 in Haiti—based it seems on a visit Fennell made to the island around this time—and its themes included a meditation on race and empire, relating Haiti’s revolutionary past to present struggles for self-determination and sovereignty, amidst a rising threat of neo-colonial intervention driven by Great Power rivalries.

In 1939, Fennell abandoned his dreams of making it as either an actor or writer, starting up as a mushroom farmer in Doncaster. By 1950 his success drew the attention of the black American magazine Ebony, which sent a reporter to do a feature on his work. ‘Fennell says he is probably the only negro commercial mushroom grower in the world’. Indeed, the ‘one-time ship’s cook, street vendor, movie actor, singer and herb shop owner says he finds mushroom farming [the] most fascinating job of all.’ (Ebony, September 1950).

In March 1951, Fennell retired from farming and decided to leave Britain to return to
America, seemingly prompted by his divorce with Marie. On 14 July 1953, now working as a doorman in Cleveland, Ohio, he re-married, to a black woman, Evanna Cotton. After a long and in many ways inspiring ‘life of reinvention’ amidst adversity, Fennell died aged 86, on 11 August 1974 in Ohio.

For more on Fennell, see the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry and C.
Høgsbjerg, ‘Rufus E. Fennell: a literary Pan-Africanist in Britain’, Race & Class, 56, 1
(2014).