Cy Grant

Cyril Ewart Lionel Grant, known professionally as Cy Grant, was born on 8 November 1919 in Beterverwagting, British Guiana, into a middle-class family. His mother was a music teacher from Antigua and his father served as a Moravian minister. He had two brothers and four sisters. At the age of 11, Grant relocated with his family to New Amsterdam. After completing high school, he worked as a clerk in the office of a stipendiary magistrate, though limited finances prevented him from pursuing legal studies abroad.

In 1941, Grant enlisted in the Royal Air Force, which had opened recruitment to non-white candidates following significant losses in the early years of the Second World War. He was among approximately 500 Caribbean men recruited as aircrew, and after training in England as a navigator, he was commissioned as an officer. Assigned to 103 Squadron at RAF Elsham Wolds in Lincolnshire, he served as part of a seven-man crew aboard an Avro Lancaster. In 1943, during his third operation over the Netherlands in the Battle of the Ruhr, Flight Lieutenant Grant was shot down. He parachuted into a field south of Nieuw-Vennep, where a Dutch family initially sheltered him before a policeman handed him over to German forces. He spent the following two years as a prisoner at Stalag Luft III, a camp 160 kilometres east of Berlin known for the escape attempts depicted in the films The Great Escape and The Wooden Horse. Allied forces liberated him in 1945. In 2008, BBC London Special Correspondent Kurt Barling filmed Grant's return to the Netherlands after 65 years, where he met Joost Klootwijk, a local who had been 11 years old when he rushed to the crash site in 1943 and had spent years tracing the crew. Grant also participated in the filming of the documentary Into the Wind, released in 2011, in which he discussed his wartime experiences as a navigator.

Following the war, Grant pursued his ambition to study law, joining the Middle Temple in London and qualifying as a barrister in 1950. Unable to secure work at the Bar despite his war record and legal qualifications, he turned to acting, viewing it initially as a means of refining his diction for eventual work in Chambers. His first acting role came through a Moss Empires tour in which he starred in a play titled 13 Death St., Harlem. His career advanced significantly after he auditioned successfully for Laurence Olivier and his Festival of Britain Company, which brought him to the St. James Theatre in London and the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York City, where he appeared alongside Jan Carew. His Broadway appearances in 1951 included Antony and Cleopatra and Caesar and Cleopatra.

Recognizing the scarcity of roles available to Black actors, Grant expanded into singing, drawing on skills he had developed playing guitar and singing during his childhood in Guiana. He performed Caribbean and folk songs at cabaret venues including Esmeralda's Barn in London and appeared on BBC radio's Third Programme and Overseas Service. His concert appearances extended internationally, including the Kongresshalle of the Deutsches Museum in Munich in 1963, the New Stanley Hotel in Nairobi in 1973, and Bricktops in Rome in 1956, as well as performances for British armed forces in Cyprus, the Maldives, Singapore, and Libya. He also performed for the GTV 9 station in Melbourne, Australia.

In 1956, Grant became the first Black person to host his own television series in Britain, For Members Only, broadcast on Associated Television, on which he combined interviews with singing and guitar playing. That same year he appeared in the BBC television drama Man From The Sun alongside Nadia Cattouse, Errol John, and Earl Cameron. In 1957, he starred in the World War II film Sea Wife with Richard Burton and Joan Collins. From 1957, Grant was a regular presence on the BBC's daily topical programme Tonight, where, with journalist Bernard Levin supplying words, he performed the news as topical calypso. His appearances on Tonight made him the first Black person to feature regularly on British television. After two and a half years, not wishing to be typecast, he left the programme. Later in 1957, he appeared in the television drama Home of the Brave, written by Arthur Laurents, and in 1958 traveled to Jamaica to film Calypso, in which he played the romantic lead.

In 1964, Grant appeared in the musical The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Smell of the Crowd, in which he was the first performer to sing the song Feeling Good, a number later recorded by many other artists. He included his own version on his 1965 album Cy & I. The following year, he played the lead role in Shakespeare's Othello at the Phoenix Theatre in Leicester, a part that white actors of the period routinely performed in blackface. Between 1967 and 1968, Grant voiced the character of Lieutenant Green in the television series Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. A brief return to the Bar in 1972 ended after six months when Grant concluded he no longer had a passion for law.

In the 1970s, Grant established the Drum Arts Centre in London, and in the 1980s he was appointed director of Concord Multicultural Festivals. In 2008, he founded an online archive dedicated to tracing and commemorating Caribbean airmen of the Second World War. A published poet and author, his works included the 2007 memoir Blackness and the Dreaming Soul, as well as other writing reflecting his interest in Taoism. In 1997, he was made an Honorary Fellow of Roehampton University, and in 2001 he became a member of the Scientific and Medical Network. Grant lived in Highgate, London, with his wife Dorith, born in 1927 and died in 2018, and was the father of four children. He died on 13 February 2010.