Evelyn Dove
*This date celebrates the birth of Evelyn Dove, a Black British cabaret and jazz singer, in 1902.
Dove was born in London, the daughter of Francis Dove, a barrister from Sierra Leone, and his British wife, Augusta. Francis Dove was the son of William Dove, who had made a fortune from trading out of Freetown, Sierra Leone. At the Royal Academy of Music, Evelyn Dove studied singing, piano, and elocution. When she graduated in 1919, she was awarded a silver medal. As a contralto, she hoped for a career on the concert platform, but jazz and cabaret worlds were more welcoming.
In the early 1920s, the all-Black jazz revues popular in America were recreated in Europe. In 1925, the cast of The Chocolate Kiddies, starring Adelaide Hall, was sent to Europe to allow overseas audiences to see some of America’s top Black entertainers. Dove was invited to join them in Britain, and with the company, she toured Western Europe for a year. Soon after, she went to Russia to play in Leningrad and Moscow, where the audience included Joseph Stalin. After replacing Josephine Baker as the star attraction in a revue at the Casino de Paris, Dove traveled to New York in 1936 to appear in cabaret at the famous nightclub Connie’s Inn. This rivaled the Cotton Club as a showcase for top Black talent in America.
In 1937, her travels took her to Bombay, India, where she performed successfully for white colonials at the Harbour Bar. The following review of her opening night appeared in the Evening News of India on October 7, 1937: ‘She is an artist of international reputation, one of the leading personalities of Europe’s entertainment world. She is described as the closest rival of the great Josephine Baker herself. Dove didn’t get just the big hand. She got an ovation, a roaring welcome.’
Dove’s greatest professional success was her work with the BBC. From 1939 to 1949, she took part in broadcasts of many popular music and variety programs, including Rhapsody in Black (1940) with Elisabeth Welch. She also made over fifty broadcasts with the Trinidadian folk singer Edric Connor in Serenade in Sepia (1945 - 1947). This series was so popular with listeners that the BBC produced a television version, with Dove and Connor, at the studios at Alexandra Palace.
After leaving the BBC to work in cabaret in India, Paris, and Spain, Dove found it challenging to find employment when she returned to London. Despite her experience and talent, in 1951, she was the understudy for Muriel Smith in the role of Bloody Mary in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Then, in 1955, short of money and desperate for work, Dove applied for a Post Office telephone operator job, asking the BBC for a reference. In 1956 the BBC cast her as Eartha Kitt’s mother in a television drama, Mrs. Patterson. More television work followed, and she returned to the West End musical stage as one of the stars of Langston Hughes’s Simply Heavenly.
In 1972, Dove was admitted to a nursing home in Epsom, Surrey, where she died of pneumonia in 1987.
Black Londoners In The Dictionary Of National Biography
By Stephen Bourne
Photograph courtesy of Carl Van Vechten
