This is the thirtieth article in our series on famous Guyanese
On January 13, 1949, The Daily Agrosy carried the story 'Guianese Actor to Visit W. I. [West Indies].'
That article referred to Robert Adams and described him as the "well-known actor of stage, screen, and radio." The article also stated that Adams was "a Guianese who had left for England during the late 1920s to "study music and to read for the Bar."
By 1949, he had achieved both goals and much more.
In Arthur and Elma Seymour's Dictionary of Guyanese Biography, Adams' many accomplishments are listed-schoolmaster, wrestler, barrister, actor, minister of religion, and engineering draughtsman.
Adams was educated at Mico College, Jamaica; University of London; Middle Temple, London; New College Divinity School, and the A.M.N. Institute (Eng.). He also became a wrestler, who was known as the Black Eagle.
Wilfred Robert Adams
"When the money ran out in London in the 1930s as he pursued legal studies, he turned to professional wrestling as a means of livelihood," wrote the Seymours.
Adams, who was born in British Guiana circa 1900/1902, spent more than four decades in the United Kingdom and left an indelible mark on British theatre, film, radio, and television.
He first attracted critical attention for his performance in the May 1935 London run of Paul Peters and George Sklar's Stevedore at the Embassy Theatre, London. That performance launched an influential career that lasted well into the mid-1960s.
"His achievements have been largely forgotten," said a commentator, "yet he was a highly successful actor in theatre, films, radio, and television, as well as the founder and director of the Negro Repertory Arts Theatre, one of the first professional Black theatre companies in Britain."
The Negro Repertory Theatre organised many successful shows in London during the 1930s and 1940s, among them All God's Chillun Got Wings, Calypso, and Deep are the Roots. Calypso which opened in London in 1948, "was the first musical based on a West Indian subject with a predominantly West Indian cast."
Robert Adams was a contemporary of the critically acclaimed African American actor Paul Robeson. He appeared with Robeson in several films, including Song of Freedom (1936) and King Solomon's Mines (1937).
During the 1930s and 1940s, Adams had several leading roles. Among them were Mesty in Midshipman Easy (1934) and his celebrated role as Kisenga in the 1946 film Men of Two Worlds.
In 1959, Adams played Horace Big Cigar in Sapphire, a trailblazing example of British realist cinema. "Sapphire was made shortly after the 1958 Notting Hill riots," said Ann Ogidi. "The film was also on the cusp of the more permissive 60s. As such it is a cultural and social litmus of the age."
Guyanese were among the pioneers of British pre-war television (1936 - 1939). On the opening day of BBC's television service, November 2, 1936, "the Guyanese racing tipster and showman Prince Monolulu made an appearance in the first edition of the magazine series Picture Page." Adams also joined this illustrious experiment and by 1938 was acting on BBC television.
BBC television resumed broadcasting on June 7, 1946. On September 16, 1946, BBC television aired Eugene O'Neil's All God's Chillun Got Wings starring Adams and Jamaica's Pauline Henriques.
When BBC aired the Merchant of Venice on July 1, 1947, with Adams playing the role of the Prince of Morocco, he became the "first black actor to play a Shakespearean role on British television."
Adams also had a presence on BBC radio. He is remembered for his December 23, 1957 performance in the Cindy-Ella or I Gotta Shoe-the Cinderella Story retold through African American spirituals and gospel music. This performance drew upon Adams' established talent as an operatic tenor.
During World War II, Adams was active on the British concert stage. I recently obtained from Richard Noblett, an important scholar of West Indian culture in the United Kingdom, a copy of the programme for the concert 'Grand Recital of Songs by Robert Adams.' The concert was held at the Stafford Street Congregational Church, Swindon on Sunday, November 1, 1942. The concert was in aid of the Congregational Reconstruction Fund for Bombed and Damaged Churches.
Adams' repertoire for the concert included Handel, Lambert, Liddle, and a finale titled "A Story in Spirituals." It included "Ole Time Religion," "Go Down Moses," "Scandalizing My Name," "Nobody Knows de Trouble I've Seen," "Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child," "Battle of Jericho," and "Dawn at the End of the Road."
As Arthur and Elma Seymour have written, Adams was a man of many worlds. He also had a political dimension. He used his art to make social commentary. He was a member of the Unity Theatre, a working people's group that used drama to build working class solidarity. In 1939, Adams appeared in Godfrey Treaser's The Colony, a play about the exploitation of sugar workers in a Caribbean island.
Adams was a founder member and member of the executive of the League of Coloured People (LCP), which was founded in March 1931, by the Jamaican medical doctor Harold Moody in response to his experiences with racial prejudice and discrimination in London when he was a student during the first decade of the 20th century. One of the aims of LCP was to improve race relations.
Peter Lauchmonen Kempadoo, who was a close friend of Adam's son Handel, remembers when Adams "came back to Guiana as a British Council 'scholar,' the very first person of colour to tour the colony giving talks on behalf of the British Council."
He also recalled that prior to Adam's visit, "a documentary film of him was shown all over the place."Â
Kempadoo recalled being introduced to Adams "after he had finished giving a talk to a packed audience from schools around Berbice county, at the Globe cinema in New Amsterdam."
Adams has been criticized for many things. Some felt that some of his film roles reinforced caricatures of black people. Some felt that his politics, especially his relationship with the LCP, which refused to accept people from India was reactionary.
One should not use contemporary criteria to evaluate Adams as this would lose sight of his entire body of work and his influence.
Cy Grant wrote that Adams opened the way for black actors in the United Kingdom. He opened a space in which many Guyanese such as Norman Beaton, Harry Baird, Cy Grant, Carmen Munroe, Ramjohn Holder, Dan Jackson, Thomas Baptiste, and many others have shone.
Information on his last days are sketchy. He returned to Guyana during the early 1960s and practised law. The Seymours and Kempadoo reported that he returned to England. "I am under the impression that he returned to the U.K where I gathered he was starting on studies for the clergy," said Kempadoo.
British sources report that he died in Guyana in 1965.
Robert Adams was a trailblazer and is a Guyanese cultural hero. Like so many of our cultural heroes, there is need for much more work on him. Should you have additional information on Robert Adams, please send it to me at cambridg@ohio.edu
Sources:
"Guianese Actor to Visit W.I." The Daily Argosy (British Guiana), January 13, 1949.
Arthur and Elma Seymour. Dictionary of Guyanese Biography. Georgetown, 1985.
E-mail to Vibert Cambridge from:
Cy Grant, June 30, 2004.
Peter Lauchmonen Kempadoo, July 10, 2004.
Carl Lewis, June 30, 2004
Richard Noblett, July 4, 2004
Gwen Worrell, June 30, 2004
For further information on Robert Adams, visit the following web sites: