Paul Henriques

The first Black woman to produce programmes for the BBC was a Jamaican poet who arrived in London in 1932 and could not find anyone who would rent her a room. She ended up running the radio programme that launched Caribbean literature. Then she had a breakdown and was put on a ship home. Una Marson. She was already an editor and playwright in Jamaica when she came to Britain. She documented the experience of looking for lodgings in a city where the signs said no coloureds, and wrote a poem about it called "Nigger" that is still hard to read. She worked for the League of Coloured Peoples, then for Haile Selassie when he was in exile in London after the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and sat behind him at the League of Nations. In 1941 the BBC took her on. By 1942 she was producing "Calling the West Indies," which began as a programme reading servicemen's messages home and which she turned into "Caribbean Voices" — the programme that broadcast and paid a generation of Caribbean writers including Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul, Samuel Selvon and George Lamming. It is not an exaggeration to say modern Caribbean literature was partly built in that studio. She was the only Black woman in the building, in wartime, producing for an organisation that was not always sure it wanted her there, and the strain was enormous. She had a breakdown in 1945 and returned to Jamaica. She kept working — journalism, publishing, social work — and died in 1965 at fifty-nine, largely forgotten in Britain until scholars rediscovered her in the 1990s. She gave the Caribbean its literary voice from inside Broadcasting House and went home on a ship with a nervous collapse.