Jeffrey Green: 'The death of Edmund Jenkins, Paris 1926'

[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.