34 Facts About Una Marson

Una Maud Victoria Marson was a Jamaican feminist, activist and writer, producing poems, plays and radio programmes.

Una Marson travelled to London in 1932 and became the first black woman to be employed by the BBC, during World War II.

British civil rights leader Billy Strachan credited Una Marson with educating him on political and racial issues.

Una Marson was born on 6 February 1905, at Sharon Mission House, Sharon village, near Santa Cruz, Jamaica, in the parish of St Elizabeth, as the youngest of six children of Baptist parson Solomon Isaac Marson and his wife Ada Wilhelmina Mullins.

Una Marson had a middle-class upbringing and was very close to her father, who influenced some of her fatherlike characters in her later works.

At the age of 10, Una Marson was enrolled in Hampton High, a girl's boarding school in Jamaica of which her father was on the board of trustees.

Una Marson finished school at Hampton High, but did not go on to a college education.

In 1926, Una Marson was appointed assistant editor of the Jamaican political journal Jamaica Critic.

Una Marson's articles encouraged women to join the work force and to become politically active.

In 1930, Una Marson published her first collection of poems, entitled Tropic Reveries, that dealt with love and nature with elements of feminism.

When she first arrived in the UK in 1932, Una Marson found the colour bar restricted her ability to find work, and she campaigned against it.

Una Marson stayed in Peckham, south-east London, at the home of Harold Moody, who the year before had founded civil-rights organisation The League of Coloured Peoples.

From 1932 to 1945, Una Marson moved back and forth between London and Jamaica.

Una Marson continued to contribute to politics, but now instead of focusing on writing for magazines, she wrote for newspapers and her own literary works in order to get her political ideas across.

Outside of her writing at that time, Una Marson was in the London branch of the International Alliance of Women, a global feminist organization.

Una Marson returned to Jamaica in 1936, where one of her goals was to promote national literature.

Una Marson founded the Jamaica Save the Children Fund, an organization that raised funds to give poorer children money for a basic education.

In promoting Jamaican literature, Una Marson published Moth and the Star in 1937.

Una Marson herself had been affected by the stereotype of superior white beauty; her biographer tells us that within months of her arrival in Britain she "stopped straightening her hair and went natural".

Also in the feminist vein, Una Marson wrote Public Opinion, contributing to the feminist column.

In 1937, Una Marson wrote a poem called "Quashie comes to London", which is the perspective of England in a Caribbean narrative.

The poem shows how, although England has good things to offer, it is Jamaican culture that Quashie misses, and therefore Una Marson implies that England is supposed to be "the temporary venue for entertainment".

Una Marson returned to London in 1938 to continue work on the Jamaican Save the Children project that she started in Jamaica, and to be on the staff of the Jamaican Standard.

Orwell helped Una Marson edit the programme before she turned it into Caribbean Voices.

Una Marson established a firm friendship with Mary Treadgold, who eventually took over her role when Marson returned to Jamaica.

Details of Una Marson's life are limited, and those pertaining to her personal and professional life post-1945 are particularly elusive.

Author Erika J Waters states that Marson was a secretary for the Pioneer Press, a publishing company in Jamaica for Jamaican authors.

Una Marson then went to Israel for a women's conference, an experience that she discussed in her last BBC radio broadcast for Woman's Hour.

Una Marson has been criticized for mimicking European style, such as Romantic and Georgian poetics.

Denise deCaires Narain has suggested that Una Marson was overlooked because poetry concerning the condition and status of women was not important to audiences at the time the works were produced.

Regardless, Una Marson was active in the West Indian writing community during that period.

Una Marson's poetry was included in the 1992 anthology Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.

On 10 October 2021, Una Marson was honoured with a Google Doodle.

The Una Marson Library was opened by Southwark Council near the Old Kent Road in south London on 2 February 2024 as part of the redevelopment of the Aylesbury Estate in south London, recognising Marson as a "local hero".