[Edmund Thornton Jenkins (1894-1926)]
Jeffrey Green is the English historian who authored the work Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Musical Life; Pickering and Chatto (2011). He writes:
The death of Edmund Jenkins, Paris 1926
It is thirty years since my Edmund
Thornton Jenkins: The Life and Times of an American Black Composer,
1894-1926 was published by Greenwood Press. How he died remained
uncertain despite the cooperation of the authorities at the Hopital
Tenon, Paris. French death registrations did not name the cause of
death. The hospital’s files noted he was admitted on 15 July 1926
for an operation for appendicitis. He died at 9:15 pm on 12 September
1926.
A veteran, Trinidad-born,
London-trained physician Dr Felix Leekam, recalled Jenkins died in
great pain possibly from cancer of the throat. The family in South
Carolina had heard Jenkins had fallen out of bed and lay unattended
on the floor. His weak state following the surgery led to his death
from pneumonia. The New York Age noted Jenkins had been
operated on for appendicitis ‘a few days before’. The two months
in hospital does not make sense – if the operation for appendicitis
was in July why was Jenkins still there weeks later?
I thought that tuberculosis, which was
not rare in the Jenkins family, may have been a cause for his lengthy
period at the Hopital Tenon. The poor conditions in Parisian
hospitals were to be described by novelist George Orwell in his essay
‘How the Poor Die’, so the fall from the bed could not be
dismissed.
British historian Howard Rye has
located an interview, in Philadelphia, of 10 March 1927, given by
Nora Ray and published in the Pittsburgh Courier on 12 March
1927 (pp 1 and 8). She said
I spent many hours in a French hospital
with Edmund Jenkins, a budding
composer, who died in Paris recently.
The poor kid had an operation for appendicitis and then
developed an ulcerated stomach. No medical skill could save him. The three last days of
his life were continual hours of pain and I visited him on each of
those days and tried to ease his mind as much as possible.
Veteran musician Arthur Briggs, who
first met Jenkins in London in 1919 and became a resident of Paris,
told me that Jenkins had a bad stomach and so ate simple food. US Consul files for 1926 recorded the hospital said cause of death was peritonitis.
Jeffrey Green
19 August 2012
"African Americans in Britain 1850-1865"
is the title of my talk to be presented at Senate House, London
University, on 4 December 2012. No charge. 6 to 7.30. Room S261, second floor. Please let me know if you might be able to attend.
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