She was born in South Norwood, London, the daughter of composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and his wife Jessie Walmisley. They had met as students at the Royal College of Music. She had an older brother Hiawatha. Gwendolyn wrote her first composition, Goodbye Butterfly, at the age of twelve. Later, she won a scholarship for composition and piano at Trinity College of Music in 1915, where she was taught by Gordon Jacob and Alec Rowley. In 1924 Coleridge-Taylor married an Englishman, Harold Dashwood, in the Croydon parish church. She composed and conducted using her maiden name. After their divorce she dropped her first name, thereafter going by Avril professionally. In 1933, Coleridge-Taylor made her debut as a conductor at the Royal Albert Hall. She was the first female conductor of H.M.S. Royal Marines and a frequent guest conductor of the BBC Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra. She was the founder and conductor of both the Coleridge-Taylor Symphony Orchestra and its accompanying musical society in the 1940s, as well as the Malcolm Sargent Symphony Orchestra. In 1939, she moved to Buxted in East Sussex where she had views over the South Downs. Her compositions include large-scale orchestral works, as well as songs, keyboard, and chamber music. They include a Piano Concerto in F minor, To April, the Spring Magic suite, Sussex Landscape, op 27, From the Hills, In Memoriam R.A.F., Wyndore for choir and orchestra, and the Golden Wedding Ballet Suite for orchestra. Sussex Landscape was revived in 2019 by the Chineke! Orchestra at a Queen Elizabeth Hall concert on 22 April, 2019. Wyndore, composed in Alfriston in 1936 and inspired by an Aldous Huxley poem, is a seven minute song without words. The first performance was organised by the Philharmonic Society and took place at Birkenhead on 16th February 1937, conducted by Dr Teasdale Griffiths. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra will give its first UK performance in 82 years on 7 March 2020 at Boxgrove Priory, Chichester. Coleridge-Taylor had a tour of South Africa in 1952, during the period of apartheid. Originally she was supportive of, or neutral to the racial segregation; she was taken as white as she was at least three-quarters white in ancestry. When the government learned that she was one-quarter black, it would not allow her to work as a composer or conductor. In 1957, Coleridge-Taylor wrote the Ceremonial March to celebrate Ghana's independence. In later life she wrote a biography of her composer father, The Heritage of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. The book includes her life and memories of her father. She also published compositions under the pseudonym Peter Riley. Coleridge-Taylor died in a nursing home in Seaford on the Sussex coast in late 1998.
