Una Marson was once described as "the most significant black feminist of the interwar years". Broadcaster, activist, journalist and poet she was a true pioneer, but she has often been overlooked. Listen to her story here...
Una Marson was once described as "the most significant black feminist of the interwar years". Broadcaster, activist, journalist and poet she was a true pioneer, but she has often been overlooked. Listen to her story here...
Una Marson - Transcript
When World War 2 broke out in 1939, thousands of men and women from across the West Indies were joining up to fight for the Allied cause, whilst others signed up for factory work. Many would be stationed in Britain, nearly four thousand miles from home.
The BBC realising that serving men and women would want to send messages to loved ones, launched the programme Call the West Indies, which mixed personal messages, music and inspirational stories of war work.
The young woman, who produced and presented the show was a true pioneer, the first black producer on the BBC’s payroll and once described as “the most significant black British feminist of the interwar years.” But her life and work have often been overlooked, so today we remember Una Marson:
Una was born near Santa Cruz in rural Jamaica on 6 February 1905 to Reverend Solomon Isaac and Ada Marson. She was the youngest of nine children, three of whom her parents had adopted and the family was relatively prosperous for the time.
Her father was a strict baptist preacher and even as a young child, Una was rebellious, fighting against the restrictions imposed upon on her by culture and tradition. But she was extremely bright and her sisters introduced her to poetry which she would describe as “the chief delight of our childhood days”.
Una had been born into a British colonial world and was heavily exposed to English classical literature. Early on she felt instinctively opposed to the idea perpetuated at the time that in some way her own race was inferior. Slavery had been abolished in Jamaica only 80 years earlier and she noticed that her mother and father never spoke of the past and she wondered if perhaps this was because “it was so sad”.
At the age of 10 she won a scholarship to attend Hampton High School, a prestigious boarding school in Jamaica and found that many of the staff were English and she noticed she was taught nothing about her own land.
But whilst she loved her beautiful island with its sea breezes, lush vegetation and “silent hills”, she was acutely aware of a vacuum, a feeling that the history of her people and the land had been lost and was waiting to be recovered.
Una’s father died whilst she was still at school, which plunged the family into financial difficulties, so she went to work in the island’s capital, Kingston, where she took clerical positions and shared a house with her sister Etty.
She soon found herself as assistant editor on the Jamaican Critic and it was here that she first learned skills such as writing, editing, proofreading and publishing which would enable her to enter the world of journalism.
Una made friends with poets and writers in Kingston and became an active member of the Jamaica Poetry League where she was encouraged to start writing. She soon found she was being held back by the paper’s traditional view of women, so she broke away to start her own monthly magazine, The Cosmopolitan, which contained an eclectic mix of feminism and radical politics with housekeeping tips and fashion and and there was a page dedicated to poetry, where Una would publish her own early works.
Aimed at a young, middle class, black readership, it was the very first Jamaican magazine owned and edited by a woman, but after a couple of years the magazine closed through lack of readership and Una returned to secretarial work, while writing in her spare time.
She published two volumes of poetry at this time, the first in 1930 and the second a year later. They were mostly romantic rhyming poems about lost love and loneliness, but they also revealed the realities of Jamaican life and social issues such as poverty, which visitors to the island never saw.
In 1931 Una also wrote her first play At What a Price, which told the story of a Jamaican girl who moves from the country to Kingston in order to work as a stenographer and falls in love with her white male boss. It was praised for it’s focus on Jamaican themes and characters.
The play opened at the Ward Theatre in Kingston. Proceeds from the play were enough for her to fulfil her dream to travel and as she longed to see the land of Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley and Wordsworth, she decided to come to Britain, where she hoped to develop her literary talent and experience life outside Jamaica.
But her dreams would be shattered, when after a two week crossing on the liner SS Jamaica Settler, she went quickly from being an acclaimed writer to an undesirable alien. The racism and sexism she would find in Britain was to transform both her life and her work.
On arrival she lived at 164 Queen’s Road, Peckham along with many other West Indian travellers. This large house was owned by Harold Moody, a Jamaican doctor who had come over 30 years earlier and qualified at Kings College Hospital, but who despite winning numerous awards had been prevented from getting a job at a London hospital because of his colour. Other notable residents at the house included the actor Paul Robeson, the cricketer Learie Constantine and pioneering barrister Stella Thomas.
Moody had recently founded the organisation known as the League of Coloured Peoples (or LCP) and Una soon became his unpaid secretary. She found herself organising social events, conferences and a series of lectures given by Moody around the country, through which he would address the issue of race relations.
One of the leagues chief objectives was to co-operate and work with other organisations sympathetic to people of colour and collaboration was key, so Una became well acquainted with activists, progressives and feminists and, through her role at the heart of the organisation, was able to make vital connections between the different supporters.
The organisation was very middle class. Moody would hold tennis parties and garden parties and members children would be taken for picnics in the country. He felt that its primary purpose should be Christian. This invited criticism from members who felt the organisation should be more political and there was resentment from the Indian community, who felt they were underrepresented.
Una edited the LCP’s journal The Keys. The name represented the black and white colours of piano keys and the harmony that the two create, but the ‘keys’ were also seen as a means of unlocking better racial understanding and good will and as opening the doors to people of colour.
She edited the journal for two years, but some members felt her approach was not radical enough and that it was biased towards West Indian and African politics. Some believed it should embrace communism. What also might also have been in play here was prejudice against a woman who held such a pivotal role in a male dominated organisation.
In her time as editor of the magazine Una fought against the unconscious bias prevalent in reporting, by not only doubling the ratio of women’s names used in the editorial, but by promoting women’s writing.
In one issue she published a poem by Sylvia Lowe, a Jamaican woman who also served on the committee. It was entitled “Disillusionment: After seeing the Trooping of the Colour” and contrasts the love and loyalty of black citizens toward King and country and the bitter insults they were subjected to when they arrived in what was referred to as the “Mother Country”.
Una also wanted to broaden the magazine beyond a middle-class Western-centric focus to embrace issues around the world such as the ill treatment of the Aboriginal people in Australia and the seizure of their lands.
The league also produced Una’s play At What a Price at the Scala Theatre. Critically acclaimed, it was the first black colonial production in the West End and the first written by a Jamaican.
Una resigned from the magazine and moved from Peckham to Camberwell. In 1934 at the British Commonwealth League Conference she gave a lecture in which she spoke of the ‘bars to careers’ and here she met the feminist writer Winifred Holtby, author of “South Riding” with whom she became close friends until Winifred’s early death the following year.
Una travelled to Istanbul where she delivered a speech at a conference run by the International Alliance of Women, on the effect of the colour bar on African students at English universities. She apparently brought her audience to tears, but she was feeling increasingly patronised by the progressive white feminists around her. She expressed her feelings in the poem “Little Brown Girl,” published in 1936 which evokes a walk in 1930s London streets, where there is no possibility of anonymity or invisibility for a ‘brown girl’:
Little brown girl,
Why do you wander alone
About the streets
Of the great city
Of London?
Why do you start and wince
When white folk stare at you?
Don’t you think they wonder
Why a little brown girl
Should roam about their city
Their white, white city?
Little brown girl,
Why did you leave
Your little sunlit land
Where we sometimes go
To rest and get brown
So we may look healthy?
As a white woman, even 85 years after Una wrote this poem, I find it uncomfortable to read. She evokes so vividly the image of a kindly seeming white woman, looking down upon ‘the little brown girl,’ her smile disguising a perceived superiority.
At the lecture in Istanbul she spoke of the insidious racism she had encountered in Britain:
“In America they tell you, frankly where you are not wanted by means of big signs, and
they don’t try to hide their feelings. But in England, though the people will never say what
they feel about us, you come up against incidents which hurt so much that you cannot talk
about them.”
Una became a passionate advocate for the Ethiopian cause and in 1935 she became secretary for the Ethiopian Legation in London. Una was at Waterloo station the following year to greet Emperor Haile Selassie upon his arrival in Britain and apparently she was moved to tears at the sight.
She met him again three weeks later and travelled to Geneva with him. She was the first black woman to attend the League of Nations and found herself sitting in the diplomatic gallery as Haille Selassie made his historic address.
Later that year Una became severely depressed and decided to return to Jamaica. With her health restored however, she found a renewed commitment to politics and founded the Jamaica’s Readers and Writers Club, as well as the Jamaican Drama League and the Jamaican Save the Children through which she did invaluable work She was also active with organisations such as the Women’s Liberal Club and the Birth Control League.
Her third volume of poems The Moth and the Star, was prompted by her experiences in Britain. Through them she aimed to give a voice to Jamaican people, she expressed pride in being a black West Indian and told of her connection to Africa. She also revealed the intersecting prejudices which faced black women at the time in 1930s London.
In her moving poem Cinema Eyes she writes from the perspective of a mother speaking to her child. Realising that Cinema has distorted her own idea of beauty, she warns her daughter:
I used to go to the Cinema
To see beautiful white faces.
How I worshipped them!
How beautiful they seemed –
I grew up with a cinema mind.
And then later:
I saw no beauty in black faces,
The tender light and beauty
Of their eyes I did not see;
But I know that black folk
Fed on movie lore
Lose pride of race.
I would not have you so.
Come, I will let you go
When black beauties
are chosen for the screen;
Her play London Calling was first performed in 1937 in Kingston. Set in London, it was a feminist satire based on the prejudicial and stereotypical views that she had encountered in Britain.
The following year, Una’s third play, Pocomania also opened in Kingston. It is regarded as her most important dramatic work and it centres on Stella, a bored middle-class Jamaican woman, who is attracted to the African spiritual practise of Pocomania. The play explores her search for cultural belonging.
Una returned to London and soon war had broken out in Europe. In 1941 she landed the role of programme assistant at the BBC. She was the first black female broadcaster to be employed there and started working on the programme Calling the West Indies.
The following year, she became producer and the programme evolved to become Caribbean Voices, a forum which showcased Caribbean poems and short stories, many by authors who were completely unknown, which would be read over the radio.
Through Caribbean Voices Una met suffragette and activist Sylvia Pankhurst and literary greats such TS Elliot and Louis Macneice and George Orwell, who helped edit the programme in its early days.
This was a happy time for Una. She a successful producer and presenter at the BBC and her flat was a hub of wartime social activity, with a stream of visitors and constant music. Whilst food was rationed at the time, they made the best of it and the usual sexual conventions didn’t apply.
She had fallen in love with a Jamaican RAF pilot, Dudley Thompson who was serving in Bomber Command and was stationed nearby. 12 years her junior, he was bright and ambitious and later he would win a prestigious Rhodes scholarship to Oxford to read law.
Together Una and Dudley would go to nightclubs, dinner dances and the Caribbean Club in Piccadilly. She sent letters to him daily, though sadly none of them survive and she hoped that after the war they could be together.
She was to be disappointed however, as the politically ambitious Dudley grew away from her and her literary circle and in 1944 he married a surgeon’s daughter from Manchester.
Meanwhile Una’s work at the BBC was became increasingly difficult and though managers wrote of her being an "excellent producer,”, she was being overworked. Evidence suggests that she had to deal with constant underlying racial intolerance from colleagues and a confidential report wrote of the ‘social' difficulties she faced due to “prejudices which undoubtedly exist among some of the staff".
Una began to suffer bouts of depression. She decided to take a break and accepted a five month tour of the Caribbean in which she gave a relentless stream of talks and appearances. On her return to London she was exhausted and again sunk into depression.
Her 4th book of poems Towards the Stars was published around this time. The poems were that of an independent woman, though the more recent ones were angry and gave a devastating picture of life during the war. “The heart of humanity is frozen” she said “it is too cold for poets to sing.”
Finally she suffered a breakdown and was admitted into a rest home in London, before returning home again to Jamaica. One friend remembered the heartbreaking sight of seeing them use a straightjacket to get her on to the boat.
Back home though she recovered and began to write and work again. In the early 1950s she travelled to the US, where it would appear she was shocked by the racism she witnessed when she was refused service at a restaurant. Despite this she moved there. Apparently she had fallen in love and married a dentist, Peter Staples, but little is known about the marriage and she is reported to have told her friends that it had been a mistake.
Una suffered yet another breakdown and was admitted into the St. Elizabeth's Asylum in Washington DC, after which she went home to recover.
By the early 1960s she was well again and decided to travel to Israel as part of a social work delegation, stopping off in London on the way, but friends noticed she did not look well. She made it home to Jamaica, but sadly she died soon after in 1965 from a heart attack at the age of 60.
Una has been described as a “woman ahead of her time”. A Poet, journalist and broadcaster, with a distinctive voice, which she used to promote change and work towards racial harmony. Her work at the BBC was pioneering and vital in giving the Caribbean community a voice and in doing so she changed the course of her country’s literature.
But she suffered much in her short life. Unrequited loved was a repeated pattern and as a women in a position of leadership she often felt isolated. Her debilitating depression and breakdowns are heartbreaking to read about.
But Una Marson should not just be remembered, but she should be celebrated. A woman who saw what was wrong with the world and despite prejudice and opposition, campaigned tirelessly to change it.