St. Joan

Birth was recorded in Toxteth Park in 1892. (Incorporated into Liverpool 1895.)
His death was recorded in Montréal, 1955.

Verification:

• Birth - online copies of birth registration, baptismal records, enlistment declarations given in his own hand.
• Death - online newspaper archive of obituary, provincial registration of death records, public online grave location service.

This was a volunteer Sunday choir in a St Peter's Church, used as a pro-Cathedral, a temporary home for the young diocese; it is not regarded as "Liverpool Cathedral" by the Liverpool Cathedral archivists. It did not have a choir school, or a program of daily evensong.

Press clippings of the era indisputably demonstrate that young Coller is active in greater Liverpool through the age of fourteen, not in a residential Oxford choir school. The Oxford choir school at that time admitted probationers from ages nine through eleven, so the claim made above is beyond implausible. The confusion may arise because there are other contemporaneous individuals named Percy (not E.B.) Coller, including one born the same year on the correct side of England, and particularly a Percy Collen from the Oxbridge area who some years before was a lay clerk of the University, not Cathedral, choir. [The archivist of Christ Church Cathedral Oxford has found no record of him, though most CSA records were lost to bombs in WW2. The Christ Church Cathedral School does not include Coller in its 1900 Register listing of choristers, a year he would have been eight.]

He was not sub-organist at Liverpool Cathedral according to the Cathedral's archivists, and at age fifteen, there wasn't even a Liverpool Cathedral for him to be sub-organist of; the diocese was using a local church serving as a pro-cathedral and Coller was a student at an exam-level high school. It would be yet another three years before the newly finished Lady Chapel was consecrated, the first phase of the now-complete Cathedral, a year in which he appears on a passenger manifest as arriving in Philadelpha.

He began study in architecture but did not complete a degree. Following the first world war, he started a program for a B. Arch. at the University of Liverpool, making use of the government benefit covering full or partial fees for returning servicemen. He withdrew after 1½ years, according to ULIV archivists; their search of later years confirms he did not receive a degree prior to his emigration to Montréal. At the time of his withdrawal, he was 29 years of age, had been married but two years, and his second child had just been born.

In 1924, a passenger manifest reveals Coller returning from Africa, giving the Gold Coast as his address for a period of 'at least a year,' and listing his inbound return address as "c/o Canon David Dorrity." This was an uncle, an older sibling of his mother Susan Dorrity, and the celebrated rector of St Ann's Manchester and non-residentiary Canon of Manchester Cathedral. Canon Dorrity was active in an African Missionary society, a noted preacher, chaplain of two schools for children with special needs, and a social activist. It is reasonable to infer that after the war, following his father's passing, Coller and his kin found a patron in Canon Dorrity. The very next year, he sailed to Montréal - declaring himself a "professional musician" on the manifest - his passage paid by yet another benefactor who similarly appears as the destination address, this time a Canadian business magnate, the glue between his formative years in Liverpool and his post-war career in the Montréal enclave known as the Town of Mount Royal, at St. Peter's Church.