Una Marson - London Years (1938-45)

London Years (1938-45)

Marson returned to London in 1938 to continue work on the Jamaican Save the Children project that she started in Jamaica, and also to be on the staff of the Jamaican Standard. In 1941, she was hired by the BBC Empire Service to work on a programme in which World War II soldiers would have their messages read on the radio to their families.

By 1942, she became the programme's West Indies producer. During the same year, she turned the programme into Caribbean Voices, as a forum in which Caribbean literary work was read over the radio. Over two hundred authors appeared on Caribbean Voices, including V. S. Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, George Lamming and Derek Walcott. Through this show, Marson met people such as Clare McFarlane, Vic Reid, Andrew Salkey, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Jomo Kenyatta, Haile Selassie, Marcus Garvey, Amy Garvey, Nancy Cunard, Sylvia Pankhurst, Winifred Holtby, Paul Robeson, John Masefield, Louis MacNeice, T. S. Eliot, Tambimuttu and George Orwell. The latter helped Marson edit the programme before she turned it into Caribbean Voices. She also established a firm friendship with Mary Treadgold, who eventually took over her role when Marson returned to Jamaica. However, "despite these experiences and personal connections, there is a strong sense, in Marson's poetry and in Jarrett-Macauley's biography, that Marson remained something of an isolated and marginal figure".

Nevertheless, her radio show, Caribbean Voices, was described by Kamau Brathwaite as "the single most important literary catalyst for Caribbean creative writing in English". Since on radio the poems could only be appreciated orally, Caribbean Voices helped to influence later Caribbean poetry in having a more spoken form; as Laurence Breiner notes, through the medium of radio "much West Indian poetry was heard rather than seen".