Overview

Thomas Baptiste was an actor and singer, born in British Guiana (now Guyana) as the son of a wealthy landowner. He moved to Britain in the late 1940s and enrolled at Morley College in Lambeth to study music, followed by scholarships to the National School of Opera and Royal Academy of Music. Baptiste joined Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop early in its existence.

Baptiste appeared in a production of Noël Coward's Nude with Violin for two years from 1956 with John Gielgud, Patience Collier and Kathleen Harrison, first in Dublin and then the West End. In 1960, he played Riley in the first professional production of Harold Pinter's The Room and in a production directed by Pinter himself who had wanted to cast Baptiste in the role. It became an episode of ITV's Television Playhouse broadcast in October 1961. In 1963, Baptiste played the first Black character to appear in Coronation Street, a bus conductor who was falsely sacked as a result of a racist altercation with Len Fairclough.  Later in his career, he played Paul Robeson, who he admired greatly, in Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? at the Birmingham Rep in 1978.

He maintained a close friendship with the designer Oliver Messel and a place at the centre of Princess Margaret’s Mustique “set” in the Caribbean.

In the 1960s, he co-founded an advisory committee of the British Actors' Equity Association, to represent black actors in Britain. In an interview which appeared in 1992, Baptiste said that he thought black actors were having even more difficulty beginning their careers than he had done forty years earlier.

 

What the collection holds

The collection held at the Theatre Collection comprises 23 boxes of papers plus outsized material relating to Thomas Baptiste’s career and life, including correspondence, scripts, posters, photograph albums, scrapbooks, posters, books and av material. It also covers material relating to his political activities. The collection contains material relating to his appearance in The Room including correspondence with Harold Pinter.

The Thomas Baptiste collection is currently uncatalogued. Please contact the Theatre Collection (theatre-collection@bristol.ac.uk) for more information.