Edric Esclus Connor (2 August 1913 – 13 October 1968) was a Caribbean singer, folklorist and actor who was born in Trinidad and Tobago. He was a performer of calypso in the United Kingdom, where he migrated in 1944 and chiefly lived and worked for the rest of his life until he died following a stroke in London, at the age of 55. Early life and education Edric Esclus Connor was born in 1913 in Mayaro, Trinidad. When he was 16 he won a Trinidad government scholarship to study engineering at the Victoria Institute, Port of Spain, in his spare time he studied Caribbean folk singing. Career During World War II he worked on the construction of the American naval air base in Trinidad. Having saved enough money to go to Britain, initially with the intention of continuing his engineering studies, he settled there in 1944, making his debut on BBC Radio two weeks later, in Calling the West Indies, a programme for listeners in the Caribbean. In 1951, he was responsible for bringing the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra – TASPO – to the Festival of Britain. In 1947, during the UK tour of the Broadway hit Anna Lucasta, which starred the original African American cast with black British understudies, Pauline Henriques, Errol John, Earl Cameron, and Rita Williams, were inspired by Connor to co-found the Negro Theatre Company. In 1955, he recorded the first Manchester United Football Club song, "The Manchester United Calypso" (written by Eric Watterson and Ken Jones). In 1955, Connor and his wife Pearl, whom he had married in 1948, set up the Edric Connor Agency, representing black actors, dancers, writers and musicians, which eventually, in the 1970s, she ran under the name of the Afro-Asian-Caribbean Agency. In the early 1960s, they founded the Negro Theatre Workshop, one of the UK's earliest black theatre groups. Connor appeared at London's Prince's Theatre in 1956 in Summer Song, the life told through the music of Antonín Dvořák, in which Connor was "given two of the show's most memorable moments in 'Deep Blue Evening' and 'Cotton Tail'", which he subsequently recorded. In 1958, he became the first black actor to perform for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, playing Gower in Pericles, having been recommended for the role by Paul Robeson. Connor acted in a total of 18 films, including his role as Daggoo in Moby Dick (1956).