George Lattimore

George William Lattimore (born 1887 – after 1931) was an American lawyer, sports manager, manager of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra,[1] and a theatrical and cinema impresario.

George Lattimore
The Philharmonic Hall, London, as it appeared in 1917.
Advertising for the Southern Syncopated Orchestra in The Times, 13 Dec 1919.
A scene from the stage show of Cradle of the World, 1923.

Basketball

Lattimore was the founder and manager in 1906 of the Smart Set Athletic Club of Brooklyn, the first independent African-American basketball team who were the winners of the first World's Basketball Championship for Afro-people.[2] The New York Age, a leading African-American newspaper, reported that the club was reorganised as the Smart Set Athletic Club Incorporated in 1916 with J. Hoffman Woods as Chairman, William F. Trotman as Treasurer and George Lattimore as Secretary.[3]

Southern Syncopated Orchestra
Main article: Southern Syncopated Orchestra

The New York Syncopated Orchestra was formed by Will Marion Cook[4] in January 1919 with Lattimore as the manager. In May and June 1919, the orchestra, renamed the Southern Syncopated Orchestra (SSO), sailed for Britain on a six months' tour. The tour was a notable success. The orchestra was complimented for its varied repertoire and performed for the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII) at Buckingham Palace.[5][6]

In 1919, Lattimore and Cook and others from the orchestra attended an event in London organised by a black student organisation, The Coitere of Friends, of which one of the founders was Edmund Thornton Jenkins who taught at the Royal Academy of Music. The event had a pan-African flavour and the room was decorated with the flags of Liberia and Haiti. Music by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was played.[7]

An internal split within the orchestra meant that at one point two different Southern Syncopated Orchestras were toured Britain at the same time, one led by Cook and the other by Lattimore, resulting in legal action in 1920.

The tour was interrupted by tragedy on 9 October 1921 when the SS Rowan, on which the orchestra were travelling from Glasgow to Derry, was involved in an accident and eight musicians were drowned.[6] Lattimore was in Dublin at the time. The orchestra, in various forms, continued touring until 1922.[5] A late incarnation of the SSO was Lattimore's Symphony Orchestra which appeared in Vienna in 1922 featuring trumpeter Tommy Smith, trombonist Ted Heath, Buddie Gilmore on drums and William Burns as vocalist.[8]

Wildest Africa

Wildest Africa, shown at the Philharmonic Hall, Great Portland Street in London in 1922,[9] recorded a zoological expedition to Central Africa led by Prince William of Sweden.

Cradle of the World

In 1923, Lattimore was promoting with Pathé, Cradle of the World, the "most marvellous and thrilling travel film ever screened". In a letter to the pan-Africanist W.E. Du Bois, Lattimore reported that he was having a "successful run" with the film at the Philharmonic Hall, where the SSO had also performed. Lattimore's letterhead by then boasted of the patronage of William of Sweden.[10] In fact, the show received indifferent reviews and lasted only one month.

The show, which seems to have been based at least partly on Wildest Africa, included a musical interlude to enliven the proceedings and to cover up the changing of the film reels. Sol Plaatje, the first General Secretary of the South African Native National Congress (later the African National Congress), who was desperately in need of money, was recruited by Lattimore to take the role of an African tribesman.[11]

Family

Lattimore's brother, Robert P. Lattimore, was also a lawyer and practiced from the same office as George at 26 Cortlandt Street, New York City.

In 1926, Lattimore married the British artists' model Dolores (Norine Schofield) in London, her third marriage.[12][13][14] The marriage was described as "secret" in more than one American newspaper. The couple quickly separated but never divorced.[15] Dolores died in 1934.[12]

Death

The date of Lattimore's death is unknown, however, sources for Dolores make no mention of his death and an article about Lattimore appeared in the New York Amsterdam News, 24 August 1932.[16]

References
  1. Howland, John W. (2009) Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, p. 216. ISBN 0472033166
  2. Amateur Ideals, Pt. 1. Black Fives Foundation. Retrieved 12 October 2014.
  3. "Smart Set Athletic Club Reorganizes", The New York Age, 9 March 1916, p. 1. newspapers.com Retrieved 12 October 2014. (subscription required)
  4. Blake, Jody. (1999). Le Tumulte Noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris, 1900-1930. Penn State Press. p. 63. ISBN 0-271-01753-8.
  5. Brooks, Tim. (2004). Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. pp. 297–298. ISBN 978-0-252-02850-2.
  6. "London's jazz legends". BBC, 15 May 2008. Retrieved 11 October 2014.
  7. "The Negro Renaissance: Harlem and Chicago Flowerings" by Samuel A. Floyd Jr. in Darlene Clark Hine & John McCluskey (2012). The Black Chicago Renaissance. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. p. 22. ISBN 978-0-252-07858-3.
  8. Storyville, Issues 144-152. Storyville Publications, 1990, p. 231.
  9. Cinema publicity programme: Philharmonic Hall, London / Wildest Africa The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter. Retrieved 15 October 2014.
  10. Letter from George W. Lattimore to W. E. B. Du Bois, August 21, 1923. Archived August 12, 2018, at the Wayback Machine W.E.B. Du Bois Papers, credo. Retrieved 13 October 2014.
  11. Topp Fargion, Janet. "Sol t Plaatje: The hidden recording" in Playback, Bulletin of the British Library National Sound Archive, No. 12, Autumn 1995, pp. 2-4.
  12. "Dolores Dies In Poverty", The Daily Express, 9 August 1934, p. 1.
  13. Whittington-Egan, Richard. (1972) The Ordeal of Philip Yale Drew: A Real Life Murder Melodrama in Three Acts. London: Harrap, p. 260. ISBN 0245597301
  14. England & Wales marriages 1837-2008 Transcription. findmypast.co.uk. Retrieved 10 October 2014. (subscription required)
  15. Whittington-Egan, 1972, p. 261.
  16. " "30 Negroes (Ladies and Gentlemen)": The Syncopated Orchestra in Vienna". Konrad Nowakowski, Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 229-282.
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