Una Marson
1905 — 1965 · Jamaican poet, playwright and editor; first Black programme producer at the BBC; founder of the Caribbean Voices radio service
Una Maud Victoria Marson was born on the sixth of February 1905 at Sharon, in the parish of Saint Elizabeth, Jamaica, the youngest of nine children of the Reverend Solomon Isaac Marson — a Baptist minister of the Sharon Baptist Church — and Ada Mullings Marson, a teacher. The Marson household was Black, middle-class and devoutly evangelical. She was educated at the Hampton High School at Malvern from 1915 to 1922 — among the very few Black students on a scholarship — and worked from 1922 as a stenographer for the Salvation Army at Kingston.
She founded in May 1928 the literary monthly The Cosmopolitan — the first Jamaican magazine edited and published by a woman of any race. She edited the Cosmopolitan until 1931 and across the same period produced two volumes of poetry, Tropic Reveries of 1930 and Heights and Depths of 1931, that established her in the Kingston intellectual circles of the early 1930s.
She emigrated to London in 1932 at twenty-seven and took employment as secretary to the League of Coloured Peoples under Harold Moody. She wrote the play At What a Price of 1933 — performed at the YMCA Hall at Tottenham Court Road — the first work by a Black Caribbean playwright produced in London.
She joined the BBC in 1939 as a programme assistant. She was promoted in 1941 to the position of programme producer — the first Black producer at the BBC. She founded the same year the Calling the West Indies radio service, which she reorganised in March 1943 as Caribbean Voices. The Caribbean Voices broadcasts — running until 1958 and producing the early radio work of George Lamming (placed in this archive), Sam Selvon (placed in this archive), V. S. Reid, Derek Walcott (placed in this archive) and Andrew Salkey (placed in this archive) — were the principal nursery of the post-war Anglo-Caribbean literary canon.
She returned to Jamaica in 1946 and continued to work in radio and the women's-club movement.
She died of a heart attack at Kingston on the sixth of May 1965, at sixty.
She is honored here as the founder of Caribbean Voices.
Curated with honor.
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