Brewster Hughes

Brewster Hughes (12 December 1912 – 30 September 1986), born Ignatius Abiodun Oke and who later used the name Ernest Henley Oke Hughes, was a Nigerian guitarist, bandleader and community leader who was active in Britain as a highlife performer and recording artist after the Second World War.

Biography Abiodun Oke was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, into a Yoruba family. He moved with his mother to Lagos and then to Port Harcourt, where he lived with his maternal grandfather, David Ayodele Hughes, the superintendent of the United Native African Church mission. He studied at the Hope Waddell Training Institute in Calabar before returning to Ibadan where he trained as a schoolteacher. He then worked in Lagos, and, after his mother's death, adopted her family name of Hughes. He began playing guitar in Lagos bars in the evenings, meeting fellow musician Ambrose Campbell and performing with him in the Jolly Boys Orchestra (or Jolly Orchestra).

In 1939 he left Nigeria and joined the British Merchant Navy as a stoker, using the name Ernest Henley Hughes and acquiring the nickname "Brewster". He settled in Manchester and worked as a fitter in an aircraft factory before moving to London, where he met up again with Ambrose Campbell. When Campbell was assaulted by racist thugs at a London Underground station, Hughes shot one of the assailants, and was imprisoned for 15 months as a result. The group established a residency at the Abalabi club in Soho in 1952, playing a mixture of palm-wine and jùjú music but increasingly absorbing calypso and mento influences from musicians newly arriving from the Caribbean. With Campbell on vocals and Hughes on guitar, other members of the group included trumpeter Harry Beckett, saxophonist Willy Roachford, pianist Adam Fiberesima, and bongo player Ade Bashorun. According to writer Val Wilmer:

As a leader of the Yoruba community in London, Hughes helped organise events to welcome visiting politicians and elders, and acted on behalf of community members on immigration matters, drawing on the contacts with senior British politicians that he had made when a club performer in the 1950s. He regularly performed with his group at annual dances for such bodies as The Law Society, as well as at student dances in London. He visited Nigeria in 1985, where he was treated as a celebrity.

Personal life and death Hughes lived with Elizabeth (Betty) Ogle in Manchester. They later separated, and he then formed a relationship with Thelma Clarke; they married in 1966 and had three children before divorcing. In 1974 he married Patricia Smith; they also had three children.

He died from lung cancer in London in 1986. His ashes were taken to Nigeria and buried in his mother's grave.