Una Marson Podcast

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.

Load more