When the Jamaican feminist and poet Una Marson arrived in England in 1932, she was helped by Dr Harold Moody and his family who offered her a room in their home at 164 Queen’s Road, Peckham. She was employed as the secretary for the League of Coloured Peoples. In 1939 she became involved in broadcasting and joined the staff of the BBC.

During the Second World War she became the BBC’s first black woman programme maker. Una’s pioneering work for BBC radio spanned just over five years, from 1940 to 1945. Through her popular weekly series Calling the West Indies, she broadcast messages from servicemen and women in England to their families and friends in the Caribbean.

Despite air raids and other wartime dangers, Una and her guests broadcast from BBC Broadcasting House near Oxford Circus and, although it was dangerous, Una understood the importance and value of Calling the West Indies. Una was very conscious of the struggles faced by West Indians in Britain at that time, and on radio she had the ability to infuse her broadcasts with her personality as well as having a sense of the literary and the cultural. 

In 2009 Una Marson was honoured with a Southwark Heritage Association Blue Plaque. It can be seen on the outside of her former home in Brunswick Square, Camberwell.

This information is from Stephen Bourne's books Mother Country: Britain's Black Community on the Home Front 1939-45 (The History Press, 2010) , The Motherland Calls: Britain's Black Servicemen and Women 1939-45 (The History Press, 2012) and War to Windrush: Black Women in Britain 1939-48 (Jacaranda Books, 2018).

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