One person who deserves the fullest of mentions during this Black History Month is Ambrose Adekoya Campbell, the leader of Britain's first ever Black band, the West African Rhythm Brothers, in London during the Second World War.

His first public appearance was at the VE Day celebrations around Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus in May 1945.

He went on to become a celebrated figure in the 1950s, playing his unique brand of African music to fascinated audiences up and down the country, but his very existence in the annuls of British musical history has always been a miss. Nicknamed ‘Ambrose’, he was born with the Yoruba name Oladipupo Adekoya in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1919, where he sang in the church choir.

Campbell worked as a printer, as well as a musician, when he met guitarist Brewster Hughes and performed with him in the Jolly Boys Orchestra. When World War II started, he signed on with a convoy ship bound for Liverpool.

“If you went to England, when you got back home to Nigeria you were famous,” he recalled. In 1940, Campbell jumped ship in Liverpool and headed for London.

After the war, he and his newly formed band made their debut at the VE Day celebrations, before they were employed as backing for the Black ballet company, Les Ballets Negres, on the London stage. Campbell became a natural leader.

By 1952 he added a couple of Barbadians to his band and gained a residency at the Abalabi club in the heart of Soho. “There were very few Nigerians in London, so I played with West Indians and English people,” he once recalled. “But we all felt connected and part of the same body.”

Campbell recalled his contribution to VE Day when he said: “Everybody had been waiting for that day, so everybody was happy and jumping around and dancing and kissing each other, so we thought we'd join the celebration.

“We had a huge crowd following us around Piccadilly Circus. You could hardly move.” In post-war Britain, Ambrose and his West African Rhythm Brothers offered a welcome dose of sunlit escapism.

Campbell and his band recorded for Melodisc, throughout the 1950s and early ‘60s, with their music combining elements of urban West African palm-wine, a style that developed in the 1920s and 1930s across Ghana, Sierra Leone and Nigeria with a Yoruba juju dance rhythm.

He formed a production company before recording an album for Columbia, then going to Los Angeles in 1972. There he recorded as a percussionist before touring worldwide then settling in Nashville.

He returned to Britain in 2004, to live in Plymouth, when Honest Jon's Records included some of his Melodisc recordings on the ‘London Is the Place for Me, Vol.3.’ compilation CD.  Campbell died in 2006 at the age of 86.