Grenadian musician Leslie Hutchinson was BOTD in 1900. Born in Gouyava, at the time part of the British Windward Islands, he studied piano as a child and won a scholarship to study medicine in New York. While a student, he began playing the piano and singing in bars. When his all-Black band members became targets of the local Ku Klux Klan, he moved to Paris, playing in Joe Zelli’s club, where he had an affair with Cole Porter. He then moved to London, where he became a major star, playing at the Café de Paris and making popular recordings of These Foolish Things and Porter’s Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love). He became the toast of smart London society, buying a Rolls-Royce, a grand house in Hampstead and was on friendly terms with the Royal family, though was often required to enter grand houses via the servants’ entrance. He also appeared in films Happidrome and Brass Money during the 1940s, and performed for British troops during World War Two. His personal life was complicated and often highly publicised. He married Ella Byrd in 1923 in New York, with whom he had a daughter, and had six further children with multiple partners. He is also thought to have had affairs with Carl Van Vechten, Ivor Novello, Tallulah Bankhead and Merle Oberon. His 1930 affair with British debutante Elizabeth Sperling ended badly when Sperling became pregnant, eventually giving the baby up for adoption because it was mixed-race, leading her outraged father to sue Hutchinson in court. His ongoing affair with Lady Edwina Mountbatten became a tabloid sensation, prompting the Mountbattens to sue a newspaper for libel. The resulting scandal ruined Hutchinson’s reputation: his recordings were removed from radio broadcasts and he was shunned by his high society friends. Penniless and forgotten, he suffered from ill health for many years, dying in 1968 aged 69.