Librarian’s relationships with the readers they encounter is often reciprocal – not only do we recommend books, we also have them recommended to us. Most recently, I had Evelyn Dove: Britain’s black cabaret queen by Stephen Bourne recommended to me, and I’m very glad I did. I’d heard of Evelyn Dove – mainly thanks to the Google Doodle dedicated to her on her 117th birthday – but I had no idea that for a short time in her life, she lived in Battersea – specifically at 25a Barnard Road.
Evelyn Dove (1902-1987) was the first Black singer broadcast on BBC radio – though sadly none of her BBC recordings survive. She was educated at the Royal Academy of Music. In his biography, Bourne tells us she had ‘hoped for a career on the concert platform, or as an opera singer, but for a Black singer of her generation, the world of jazz and caberet was more welcoming’. She became a world renowned singer and theatre performer, performing throughout Europe and America, and enjoyed the same sort of success as Vera Lynn as a forces sweetheart.
Evelyn’s father, Francis Dove, was a barrister from Sierra Leone, and her mother, Augusta Dove (nee Winchester) was British. It not known how Evelyn’s parent’s met, but her father was admitted into the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn in 1888, and enrolled as a Barrister of the Supreme Court in 1897. He and Augusta married in 1896.
While her Father provided for the education of Evelyn and her brother Frank, he ran his practice in Accra, while Augusta brought Evelyn and Frank up in Britain. In the 1911 Census, Evelyn and her mother are living at 25a Barnard Road:
With them, a 16 year old servant called Beatrice. Evelyn’s brother, Frank, was boarding at Cranleigh School in Surrey when the census was taken.
The family where there for a relatively short time – by the time the 1912-1913 street directory is published, they have moved on. They would later live in Sussex with Augusta’s second husband, Frederic Montague Ansom Ram following she and Francis’ divorce in 1920. But I was rather thrilled to find out that Evelyn Dove lived in a street so close to my place of work that I have walked past often.
Stephen Bourne’s biography of Evelyn Dove documents some of the more painful elements of her career and life – she spent the last fifteen years of her life in a care home, with her death in 1987 undocumented in theatrical publications such as the Stage. The book contains several previously unseen archive photographs and cuttings rescued by Evelyn’s fried, Isabelle Lucas, and can be borrowed from several branches of Wandsworth Libraries.
Wandsworth Heritage Service 