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Trinidad-born bandleader who made Latin American music popular in postwar Britain

The seductively orchestrated Latin-pop songs that set British feet tapping in the 1940s and 50s made the Trinidad-born bandleader Edmundo Ros a household name. But beside such musical success, Ros, who has died aged 100, made a remarkable reinvention of his life: the mixed-race "outsider" successfully challenged the British class system, to become, as he put it, "a respected gentleman".

When he went to London in June 1937 to study at the Royal Academy of Music, he felt racially categorised by being sent to lodgings for colonial students. A tall, strikingly handsome man, he was determined to crash through such restrictions. Within five years, he had deployed his talents, charisma and charm to good enough effect to find himself performing for the future Queen of England – and was himself developing a cut-glass accent.

Ros began this transformation as soon as he arrived in the capital. On his first night there, he went to the Nest club in Soho to join pianist Don Marino Barreto as a drummer in Cuban songs. The next day, he was hired to play drums and sing on the Mayfair circuit of fashion salons and supper clubs, and in 1938 recorded with both Barreto and Fats Waller.

Ros often ran Barreto's Dance Orchestra, modelled on the influential Havana band, the Lecuona Cuban Boys. He opened Mayfair's Embassy Club, sporting ruffle-sleeved "rumba shirts", and led Edmundo Ros's Rumba Band in the New Cosmo and other clubs. A 1939 Melody Maker headline declared, with the popular new dance in mind, "He came… he saw… he conga'd!" Ros's first recording, Los Hijos de Buda (Sons of Buddha, 1941) was authentic Cuban rumba.

During the second world war, Ros briefly drove ambulances before launching his own 16-piece dance orchestra to play at the Coconut Grove Club at 177 Regent Street. He alternated between that and the Bagatelle Club off Picadilly, where members included Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, and the heads of Europe's allied forces. Most significant to Ros, Princess Elizabeth danced there with her friend Captain Wills.

Ros's popularity escalated in postwar Britain through live radio concerts, produced by Cecil Madden. In 1948, he supported Carmen Miranda for a year at the London Palladium, while still playing the Coconut Grove, and the following year The Wedding Samba sold 3m copies in Britain and entered the US charts.

Its success coincided with a highly publicised high court adultery case involving him and a Dutch army officer, both known to an upper-class English couple. Instead of protesting his innocence, Ros remained silent during the trial, but was still fined ?1000 for having befriended the lady in question, whereas the truly guilty party was fined ?300. Ros understood the racial implications but saw it as his big break, since in discussing the case, Queen Elizabeth, the later Queen Mother, apparently described him as "a gentleman". In 1950, her husband, King George VI, invited him to perform at Windsor, and he took his fiancee, the beautiful Swedish aristocrat Britt Johansen, whom he married that year.?

Ros was famously cagey about the royals, but he did once reveal to me, in a stage whisper, that he later lent his office at the Coconut Grove to Princess Margaret and Captain Peter Townsend "for private drinks". By then, his clothes were from Jermyn Street and he performed only to the upper classes. But his hit records – including Melodie d'Amour, Tico Tico, Her Bathing Suit Never Got Wet and The Cuban Love Song – and radio shows, still produced Madden, broke all social boundaries.

Latin music was by then a significant part of postwar Britain's dance scene, but fellow bandleader Victor Silvester suggested to Ros that he needed to adapt his music to get people dancing to it. By hooking a Latinised military beat to a familiar song, he produced an experimental version of Colonel Bogie in the style of the dance known as the merengue and proved the point: "It fitted beautifully," Ros recalled. That became "The Ros Sound" - flattened rhythms, catchy melodies and sophisticated arrangements, all fronted by his risque word-plays and tongue-twisting rhymes, carried on a soft Caribbean lilt.

In 1951, Ros bought the Coconut Grove's expiring lease and reopened as Edmundo Ros's Supper and Dance Club. It became the playground for an exclusive international membership of kings and admirals, Hollywood stars and British aristocrats. Its door policy was legendary, with both Peter O'Toole and King Hussein of Jordan refused admission for over-casual dress. Ros's holding company incorporated a talent agency, dance school and photo-lab for printing guests' portraits. On the radio, his hit records were a constant presence on programmes like Housewives' Choice and Two-way Family Favourites.

In 1953, Decca hired a young Belgian producer, Marcel Stellman, to wo

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