Joy Bringer

Winifred Atwell - the first black superstar of British music was discovered at the Prince Edward Theatre, Old Compton Street

Prince Edward Theatre, Old Compton Street - Photograph: Jackie Hopfinger

For twelve year old Keith, the show was the highlight of his week. Just before seven on Friday evening, his mother would turn on the set to warm up. By 1956 television had only reached half of households, even fewer on the Worthing council estate where he lived.

One of the first productions on the new ITV network, the show had the grand title of Bernard Delfont Presents The Winifred Atwell Show. Every week, Keith would sit transfixed by the show’s star who played the piano with her own unique joyous style. The show centred on her hugely popular stage act that involved having two pianos on stage. She would begin by playing a well known popular classic on her Steinway grand, after which she would announce "now I'm going to play my other piano”. She walked across the stage to the other instrument, somewhat battered and out of tune which she had picked up in a junk shop. With exuberance, energy and remarkable skill, she would hammer out ragtime and honky-tonk tunes. Winifred Atwell played with a dazzling smile. And the country smiled with her.

As an entertainer and musician, her achievements were remarkable. From 1952 to 1959 she had fourteen top 20 hit records. Her single Let’s Have Another Party was the first record by a black musician to get to number one, and she remains the only woman to top the charts with an instrumental single.

Her tally of three number ones in the 1950s places her just behind Elvis Presley with his four. A further five top five singles with total sales of over 20 millions discs, makes Winifred Atwell one of the most successful music stars of the decade. Her appeal crossed social divides, appearing on the Royal Variety Performance three times, and invited by Queen Elizabeth to perform in private at Buckingham Palace.

She became the first entertainer to be the subject of a bidding war between broadcasters, with the BBC signing her up for a series once her ITV contract ran out. As writer Rob Baker comments “for a black woman of that era this was nothing short of extraordinary”. There have only been five black British entertainers with their own TV show - Winifred Atwell was the first. In short, she was the first superstar of British television entertainment.

A pharmacist from Trinidad

Her remarkable run of success began at what is now the Prince Edward Theatre on Old Compton Street. This Art Deco theatre dates from 1930 and has undergone a few transformations in its time. In 1935 it was converted to a cabaret hall called the London Casino. During the war it became a club for service personnel, then in peacetime reverted to being the London Casino for a few years, before becoming a movie theatre for widescreen Cinerama presentations (which this writer visited on two occasions). In 1974 it reverted to being a theatre which it has remained ever since (while being used as a vaccination centre during the COVID pandemic).

By 1948 thirty four year old Winifred Atwell was having some modest success as a versatile pianist and accompanist on the variety circuit. She had agreed to take part as one of a number of performers in a Sunday charity concert at the London Casino at which stage and singing star Carole Lynne was topping the bill. Impresario Bernard Delfont picks up the story:

“Winifred Atwell first came to us as an accompanist for a singer. Carole Lynne, my wife, was due to sing at a charity concert at the London Casino, but developed a bad throat at the last moment. I rang the theatre to tell them she couldn’t appear. I asked Keith Devon, another of my co-directors, if he could replace her and he said: ‘I’ve a coloured girl here who played well at rehearsals. Let’s give her a chance as a solo act.’ Winnie did so well we put her under contract.”

That night on Old Compton Street was the breakthrough. A huge hit with the audience, Delfont signed her with Decca Records, put her in variety shows across the country, and prepared her for the camera. Bernard Delfont and his brother Lew Grade, both Jewish Ukrainian refugees, were pivotal in creating opportunities for popular culture from the 1950s to the 1970s. Delfont’s eye for talent and understanding of television helped propel the careers of Morecambe & Wise, Tommy Cooper, Norman Wisdom and others into the living rooms of the entire country. He did the same with the pharmacist from Trinidad.

Born in the town of Tunapuna on the north west corner of the island, Winifred Atwell displayed a precocious musical talent from an early age. She was performing Chopin in public when she was five, and secured the role of official organist at her local church when she was just eight years old. A few years later she was playing piano to entertain British and American servicemen at a nearby airforce base, which is where she learned to play ragtime.

At her family’s insistence she trained as a pharmacist, but left the country to study music - initially to New York, then to London where she was accepted by the Royal Academy of Music in 1946, becoming the first woman pianist to gain the Academy’s highest grade for musicianship. Finding work opportunities as a classical pianist was challenging, so she earned a living by playing jazz and ragtime in small clubs, where she gained a small yet strong reputation. As a classically trained pianist, she faced the very same problems as those which determined Nina Simone’s shift into jazz. Uchenna Ngwe is a London-born oboist and music historian who has written about Atwell:

"She was a classical pianist, but some people found it difficult to take her seriously and stereotyped her as a black woman from Trinidad. So, she made her move into pop music which is where she found most success.”

This didn’t stop her trying to subvert the mass audience she had attracted with her love of classical music. No sooner had her ragtime hit Let’s Have Another Party become the Christmas number one in 1954, than her recording of Rachmaninoff's 18th Variation on a Theme by Paganini came in at number nine on the chart. She also sold out the Royal Albert Hall as a soloist playing Grieg's piano concerto and George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue accompanied by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Throughout her career, the core of her stage act remained that of combining classical and ragtime musics.

According to music producer Norman Newell, Atwell’s initial success was all to do with timing:

“Winnie was around at the right time. Immediately after the war there was a feeling of depression and unhappiness, and she made you feel happy. She had this unique way of making every note she played sound a happy note. She was always smiling and joking. When you were with her you felt you were at a party, and that was the reason for the success of her records.”

From the late 1950s her style of music became less fashionable as rock and roll began to dominate the pop charts. She spent increasing time in Australia where her popularity remained undimmed, eventually settling there in the early 1970s. This was just at the time when the sound of her playing returned to British television, as her recording of Black and White Rag was used as the theme tune for the BBC2 snooker tournament programme Pot Black. She retired in 1981, but continued as organist in her parish church in the Sydney suburb where she lived. She died of a heart attack in 1983.

A lasting legacy

As a Black woman in a predominantly white and male-dominated industry, Winifred Atwell was a trailblazer and pioneering figure, whose success helped to pave the way for other Black and female musicians to gain mainstream success. Her music was popular in Britain’s predominantly white working-class communities and in the Caribbean where it was played on the radio. At a time when Britain and its former colonies were undergoing profound changes, Winifred Atwell’s ebullient music was a common thread enjoyed by these quite different cultural communities. Her musical style fused a variety of genres and influences - classical, boogie-woogie, blues and calypso - which was in itself unique. This, combined with her exuberant stage persona, is one of her lasting legacies.

Twelve year old Keith loved Winifred Atwell’s TV show, and he loved the instrument she played, which he was learning at his Saturday morning piano lessons. With no instrument at home, Keith rehearsed on the piano in his school hall. At times his exercises would attract the school bullies, but he quickly defused things by segueing from Handel into honky tonk. But Winifred Atwell’s inspiration didn’t just help Keith avoid the bullies.

Fourteen years later with his new group playing at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, Emerson Lake & Palmer’s (ELP) rock interpretation of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition displayed how Keith Emerson had used the fusion of musical styles, first introduced to him by Winifred Atwell, as one of the defining characteristics of progressive rock. This helped make ELP one of the top rock acts of the early 1970s, and the first act to attract a single audience of over 250,000. At most of ELP’s concerts during this period, Keith Emerson would entertain his audience with a brief piece of ragtime. As he said later “I’ve always been into ragtime. In England—and I’m sure Rick Wakeman would concur—we loved Winifred Atwell, a fantastic honky-tonk and ragtime player.”

Emerson wasn’t the only person to be enthralled by Winifred Atwell. In Pinner, north west London, another schoolboy living on a council estate would look forward to her Friday evening TV show. As Elton John says in a BBC radio interview: “I loved her… I wanted to be like her. She was a hero. She played the piano so joyously.” For the 1970s keyboard kings of the worlds of rock and pop, Winifred Atwell provided inspiration and aspiration.

The racism of 1950s Britain confined Winifred Atwell to a relatively restricted field of music and entertainment. However, her own unique talents, charisma and stagecraft successfully pushed at the boundaries of those constraints and left a legacy that goes way beyond the musical genres she is associated with. Winifred Atwell is one of the key musical foundations upon which popular music in Britain from the 1960s onwards is built. She showed how popular music could cross cultures and mix genres. She demonstrated how music could begin to challenge that very racism, and open doors for future black artists. She pioneered the use of television to connect with her audience. Above all, she brought joy to millions.

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Key Sources

In addition to the main sources we have listed elsewhere for this project, we also made use of the following:

Rob Baker (2012) The Honky Tonk Woman – Winifred Atwell and the Railton Road in Brixton. http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/2012/10/the-honky-tonk-woman-winifred-atwell-and-the-railton-road-in-brixton/

Lucy Cotter (2020) Winifred Atwell: The most successful black artist you've probably never heard of https://news.sky.com/story/winifred-atwell-the-most-successful-black-artist-youve-probably-never-heard-of-12110231

Bernard Delfont (1963) You make the stars, TV Times, 25 August 1963

Andrew Haynes (2015) Winifred Atwell: pharmacist and world renowned musician, The Pharmaceutical Journal https://pharmaceutical-journal.com/article/opinion/winifred-atwell-pharmacist-and-world-renowned-musician

London County Council (1966) Survey of London: Volumes 33 and 34, pages 193-201

Jessica Morgan (2020) Unforgotten Women: Una Winifred Atwell, Black History is Now https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/black-history-month-una-winifred-atwell

Uchenna Ngwe (2019) ‘My Other Piano’ – the classical side of Winifred Atwell https://blogs.bl.uk/sound-and-vision/2019/07/the-other-piano-the-classical-side-of-winifred-atwell-.html

Mayer Nissim (2022) Winifred Atwell facts: The songs, life death and influence of the musical trailblazer https://www.goldradiouk.com/news/music/winifred-atwell-pianist-songs-death/

Sussex History Forum (2015) Keith Emerson, a Worthing prog rocker http://sussexhistoryforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=8615.0