‘It’s very strange – sometimes when I see them on television or a concert I have to pinch myself’
One of the UK’s most talented families, between them the Kanneh-Masons have performed at a royal wedding and on primetime TV – much to the pride of the Welsh grandmother who helped nurture their musical leanings. Laura Clements reports
THE average family in Britain comprises two children and no prodigies – few, if any, can match the Kanneh-Masons.
This exceptional household includes seven children, aged 11-24, all of whom are immensely talented musicians who variously have appeared on Strictly Come Dancing and Britain’s Got Talent, and even performed at a royal wedding.
Amazingly, tucked away in a quiet cul-de-sac in Caldicot, near Newport, Megan Kanneh is the woman who may have sparked the musical genius of the Kanneh-Masons, who have been dubbed “Britain’s most musical family”.
They have won many prizes and awards and appeared on numerous television shows. The five eldest performed at the Bafta awards in 2018 and all seven appeared on the December 2019 Royal Variety Show.
All the children attend or have attended London’s Royal Academy of Music, except pianist Jeneba, who has progressed to London’s Royal College of Music for her undergraduate studies.
Sheku, the third-eldest of the family, is probably the best-known Kanneh-Mason after becoming a household name in 2018 when he played at the royal wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
The cellist also won the 2016 BBC Young Musician of the Year award, becoming the first black musician to win the award since its launch in 1978.
Ask them where they’re from and they’ll say they’re half-Antiguan, a quarter Welsh and a quarter African, says Megan.
The proud mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother sometimes stops when she sees her family on TV and thinks: “Wow, I’m related to this family.”
But the story of the Kanneh-Masons started with a 1960s love story between Megan, during her teacher training days, and Bernard, a fellow teacher in training who came from Sierra Leone.
The pair met at a college dance – Bernard was studying in Birmingham and Megan was at Hereford College – but after he’d finished his training Bernard had to return to his home country.
A year later Megan followed him out there. After a nine-day journey by ship, she landed in the port of Freetown and the very next day the couple were married.
It was 1963, Megan was just 22, and it was all “good fun” she says in a sparkling voice that belies her 80 years. It was “very, very different” from her life in Britain and her first impression was that it was incredibly hot.
“My husband had told me a lot about it and I was well-prepared,” says Megan.
“He hadn’t hidden anything from me. I arrived in the port of Freetown and in those days there was a train so after we got married, on that same day, we got on the train. It took all day and we eventually arrived where we would be living – right in the middle of the country, really.”
Both worked as teachers while the young couple started a family. Steven arrived first, then Kadiatu.
“I loved it there, it was lovely,” says Megan.
By 1970 they had four children, but then tragedy struck. Their youngest, James, was born in April 1970 and five months later Bernard sadly died with a heart condition.
Aged 29, and with four children under the age of seven, Megan decided to go back to the UK to be closer to her own family. This time taking the plane, she can remember the cold and the fog when they touched down on English soil.
“It was going to be very hard on my own – it wouldn’t have been easy,” she says.
She stayed with her parents, who were by now living in Essex, and went straight back to teaching.
But she yearned to move back to south Wales, where she was born, and Megan found a house and a job in Caldicot four years later.
Megan started her children off on the piano.
“Because I had had piano lessons as a child, I knew enough to start them off,” she says.
She’s not musical at all, she says, adding: “There’s a lot of music in the Sierra Leone family, but not in the traditional sense.
“They can all sing and have a good sense of rhythm. In my Welsh heritage there’s a lot of music there, too, but it’s bypassed me. I can’t even sing, I’m afraid to say.”
While the other three drifted away from music, Kadiatu stuck with it.
As an adult, Kadiatu went on to lecture in literature at the University of Birmingham and married Stuart Mason, an Antiguan who worked for a luxury hotel chain.
The Kanneh-Masons were born. First came Isata, then Braimah, followed by Sheku, then Konya, Jeneba, Aminata and Mariatu.
Growing up in Nottingham, all the children showed signs of their musical talent from an early age. In the family’s memoir, The House of Music, Kadiatu writes how she was determined “never to remark on the lack of black people in classical music”.
The expense – financial and emotional – of realising each child’s dream of a life in music has been considerable.
To read the book is an insight into the fortitude and determination of their parents: “Insisting on careful equality between the children dropped us into the chaos of escalating
debt and unmanageable promises.”
And yet they were promises that they kept, and Megan couldn’t be prouder.
“They were always musical right from the start,” says Megan about her grandchildren.
“With Isata you could see it from when she was a tiny baby. She wasn’t even walking, still lying in her pram, and she had a little hanging mobile which played a tune.
“We were all sitting around one day with Kadie and Stuart with this little baby lying there and she suddenly sang these notes and we recognised it – that was the tune she’d been hearing on the mobile.
“I remember Stuart looking across at me, saying, ‘Did we really hear that?’.”
Their talent came naturally to them and there’s not an ounce of competitiveness between the siblings, says Megan.
“They’re not rivals at all. They play different instruments at all different levels and the older ones are very supportive of the younger ones. If one does well it’s as if they’ve all done it, which is very nice.
“I remember when Sheku won Young Musician and I was sitting there in the audience with Isata, who was sitting behind me, and I turned round and she was in floods of tears because she was so excited. She’s not known for her emotions.”
Sheku, who was awarded an MBE last year, “takes everything in his stride”, Megan added.
“He’s very cool. He doesn’t get visibly nervous – he’s just very, very focused and just wants to perform.
“He was like that as a little boy. If I was staying with them he was always happy if somebody was there watching him and listening to him.
“I’d go into the room where he was practising and I’d sit and listen and watch him – he’d play away very earnestly.
“This was a tiny little boy of six or seven and he’d be looking up at me to make sure I was really watching, and that was all he wanted to do was perform.”
If it wasn’t for the coronavirus pandemic the children would be visiting their grandmother in south Wales and she would be packing her bags to watch them all at their various concerts and performances.
In March last year she was due to fly out to Antigua with them all and had even packed her bags ready to go.
Two days before the flight Covid hit the island and the trip was cancelled.
The family often say they’re Antiguan and Welsh and African, says Megan.
“I think they’re proud of all their bits of heritage,” she adds. “They do love coming to Caldicot. They’ve always come. When they’ve been little, I’ve always had them here for half-term. They can ride around on their bikes and take trips up to Caldicot Castle and just run about and enjoy themselves. And they always found Bob Marley to play on my stereo.”
Megan is proud of their work ethic, which she says comes from Kadiatu and Stuart.
But Megan is doing herself a disservice. The active octogenarian hasn’t exactly sat around all her life either, I suggest, and she begrudgingly agrees.
“If you want to get on, it doesn’t just happen,” she says.
“Kadie and Stuart instilled in them that if you’ve got talent you must put the work in, too, and have the willingness to keep at it. They’ve all had to learn when things don’t go well they’ve got to keep at it.”
Megan’s already had her first Covid jab and is hoping things get back to normal so she can once again watch her family perform all over the country.
She’s pinning her hopes on Sheku performing at a rearranged concert in Cardiff in June.
“It’s very strange and sometimes when I see them on television or in a concert or something I have to pinch myself – ‘They really are your family’,” she says brightly.
“What would my husband have thought?
“He would have been absolutely bursting with pride – he would have loved it.”