By 1945, Una Marson was experiencing a nervous breakdown. The BBC decided there was no option but to assist Marson back to Jamaica… In a state of distress, she was forced aboard a ship bound for Kingston <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
Though her career had been cut short, Marson had every reason to be proud of what she\u2019d done for the corporation. She\u2019s remembered now for launching Caribbean Voices<\/em>, a series that continued almost uninterrupted until 1958 and established itself as a vital source of patronage for countless Caribbean authors.<\/p>\n
Before this, Marson had produced and presented another Overseas Service programme, Calling the West Indies<\/em>. Broadcast four times a week, it featured heart warming messages to families back home from the thousands of men and women who had left the Caribbean to come and work for the Allied cause in Britain.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t the kind of series to raise the ugly issue of racism, a phenomenon by no means absent in 1940s Britain. But in creating a personable two-way conversation between the imperial metropole and one of the colonies, Calling the West Indies<\/em> was a striking example of the BBC adapting to the urgent demands of wartime diplomacy.<\/p>\n

In focus: how Caribbean Voices put rising stars from the West Indies on the map<\/h4>\n
The literary and cultural historian Clair Wills recently wrote that, for aspiring immigrant writers in 1950s Britain, \u201cthe central character in almost all accounts of day-to-day life was the BBC\u201d.<\/p>\n
If so, one reason for this unlikely relationship was Caribbean Voices<\/em>, the radio series established in 1943 by Una Marson and edited for many years by her successor, the Irishman Henry Swanzy. The idea for Caribbean Voices<\/em> had first come to Marson when fellow producer George Orwell invited her on to his own talks programme, Voice<\/em>, and she found herself sharing the microphone with writers Mulk Raj Anand, William Empsom and TS Eliot.<\/p>\n
Marson\u2019s timely reinvention of Orwell\u2019s series began as a small segment within Calling the West Indies<\/em>. But it quickly blossomed into a thriving showcase of its own for Caribbean authors who were either unknown or only just beginning to establish an international reputation. Louise Bennett, Sam Selvon, VS Naipaul, George Lamming and Derek Walcott were just some of those who appeared regularly.<\/p>\n
Marson was a Jamaican literary figure in her own right; Swanzy was an outsider. But the Irishman was adept at providing a supportive environment for West Indian writers who had come to Britain to make a living \u2013 not just getting them on air but helping them forge valuable social connections. Under him, the programme was at the centre of a thriving new literary scene linking London with the Caribbean.<\/p>\n
As for its effect on broadcasting, a significant feature of Caribbean Voices<\/em> was the emphasis that it placed not just on what writers said but on how they said it. The powerfully expressive style that a writer such as Louise Bennett used when reading her work was a marked departure from the polite restraint with which most scripts were delivered on the BBC\u2019s airwaves. Though the series ended in 1958, the fresh, vernacular style that it pioneered would soon be heard more widely across British radio.<\/p>\n
<\/p><\/div> <\/section>
Don\u2019t miss our podcast series on the history of the BBC \u2013\u00a0listen to all episodes so far<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
Back in 1932, the Empire Service had provided a slice of \u201cold Britain\u201d to expat communities in the colonies and dominions. Now, though, a stream of foreign broadcasters \u2013 from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, the US and the African continent \u2013 were turning up in London with a different goal in mind: to help the BBC speak in a more collaborative voice with Britain\u2019s overseas allies. The result was a subtle but important cultural shift.<\/p>\n
George Ivan Smith, from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, spoke of finding an institution that he had once imagined as parochial and stiff to be far more \u201copen\u201d than he expected \u2013 keen, in fact, to learn from its new recruits. This was, he decided, a BBC becoming a global broadcaster in more than one respect: not just beaming its programmes around the world, but also increasingly cosmopolitan at home.<\/p>\n
At first, very little of this new-found cosmopolitanism washed over into programmes destined for domestic audiences. By the close of the 1950s, some 300,000 people had made their way across the Atlantic from the Caribbean. But if the \u201cimmigrant experience\u201d was covered on radio or television within Britain, the focus was mostly on instances of racial tension.<\/p>\n
Tunnel vision<\/h3>\n
Investigative reports such as The Conflict of Cultures<\/em>, broadcast in 1952, may have been well-intentioned in their attempts to expose white prejudice, but they reduced the richness of black British life to little more than a \u201cproblem\u201d viewed from the outside.<\/p>\n
Harman Grisewood, who\u2019d begun his career as an announcer in Savoy Hill<\/a> and ended it in the 1960s as the director-general\u2019s chief aide, once said that the work of the BBC was only half-done if it merely reflected faithfully \u201cwhat goes on and what motivates the present-day world\u201d. Programmes, he said, also needed to show listeners and viewers other ways of being \u2013 to \u201cdiscriminate in favour of what is vital\u201d.<\/p>\n
On the podcast<\/strong> | Colin Grant discusses tells the stories of postwar immigrants to Britain from the Caribbean:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n<hr\/>When it came to discriminating in favour of a multicultural world, there were soon glimmers of hope. John Elliot\u2019s screenplay A Man from the Sun<\/em>, shown in 1956, represented a refreshing departure for the BBC by exploring racial prejudice entirely from an immigrant family\u2019s perspective. Then in 1964, the veteran features producer Geoffrey Bridson collaborated with the Harlem poet Langston Hughes to create a sprawling 19-part series for the Third Programme celebrating African-American culture \u2013 motivated, he said, by the desire to challenge racial attitudes at home.<\/p>\nIt was in 1964, too, that the BBC began making shows especially for immigrants from the Indian sub-continent. If the BBC was at last beginning to reflect a multicultural Britain, progress had been horribly slow and uneven: its international output had set a pace that services for domestic audiences had failed to match.<\/p>\nAs for Una Marson, by 1964 her health had improved enough for her to visit London. Yet she never returned to the BBC\u2019s airwaves, and died the following year. Her remarkable broadcasting abilities were underused until the end.<\/p>\nDavid Hendy is emeritus professor at the University of Sussex. His latest book is The BBC: A People\u2019s History<\/em> (Profile, 2022)<\/strong><\/p>\nThis article was first published in the April 2022 issue of <\/strong><\/em><a href=\""https:\/\/www.historyextra.com\/magazine-issue\/april-2022\/"\">BBC History Magazine<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p><\/body><\/html>\n<hr class=\"no-tts wp-block-separator\"\/>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By jonathanwilkes Published: Wednesday, 27 July 2022 at 12:00 am In the spring of 1941, the 36-year-old Jamaican writer Una Marson was offered a job as staff producer at the BBC. It seemed a watershed moment for Britain\u2019s national broadcaster. A full seven years before the HMT Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, bringing nearly 500 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":16664,"template":"","categories":[1],"acf":{"readingTimeMinutes":"9"},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/46\/2022\/07\/from-exotic-attractions-to-changing-racial-attitudes-the-bbcs-slow-progress-to-mirror-multicultural-britain.png",620,413,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/46\/2022\/07\/from-exotic-attractions-to-changing-racial-attitudes-the-bbcs-slow-progress-to-mirror-multicultural-britain-150x150.png",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/46\/2022\/07\/from-exotic-attractions-to-changing-racial-attitudes-the-bbcs-slow-progress-to-mirror-multicultural-britain-300x200.png",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/46\/2022\/07\/from-exotic-attractions-to-changing-racial-attitudes-the-bbcs-slow-progress-to-mirror-multicultural-britain.png",620,413,false],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/46\/2022\/07\/from-exotic-attractions-to-changing-racial-attitudes-the-bbcs-slow-progress-to-mirror-multicultural-britain.png",620,413,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/46\/2022\/07\/from-exotic-attractions-to-changing-racial-attitudes-the-bbcs-slow-progress-to-mirror-multicultural-britain.png",620,413,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/46\/2022\/07\/from-exotic-attractions-to-changing-racial-attitudes-the-bbcs-slow-progress-to-mirror-multicultural-britain.png",620,413,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"By jonathanwilkes Published: Wednesday, 27 July 2022 at 12:00 am In the spring of 1941, the 36-year-old Jamaican writer Una Marson was offered a job as staff producer at the BBC. It seemed a watershed moment for Britain\u2019s national broadcaster. A full seven years before the HMT Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, bringing nearly 500…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/16663"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}