Mirroring Multicultural Britain

From its inception the BBC has featured entertainers of colour, but they were often reduced to "exotic” attractions. David Hendy explores how the corporation tried to include diverse voices, from the 1930s to the postwar years

- By David Hendy. Photographs by Alamy, Getty Images and BBC

In the spring of 1941, the 36-year-old Jamaican writer Una Marson was offered a job as a staff producer at the BBC. It seemed a watershed moment for Britain's national broadcaster. A full seven years before the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, bringing nearly 500 British citizens from the Caribbean to their “Mother Country, the corporation was opening up one of its much-sought-after editorial posts to a woman of colour. Yet by the time Marson left her job - in deeply troubling circumstances - less than six years later, she had every reason to conclude that the BBC's commitment to racial equality had much further to go.

The BBC had never been exclusively white - on the airwaves, at least. In the 1930s, the Guyanese bandleader Rudolph Dunbar had made numerous appearances on the wireless with what the Radio Times called his Coloured Orchestra”. The singer Elisabeth Welch had her own series, Soft Lights and Sweet Music, while many other music programmes featured what were billed as “Negro spirituals”. As for television, the African-American double-act “Buck and Bubbles” were among the stars of Alexandra Palace's opening night in November 1936.

What's striking in this list of names is that it consists entirely of entertainers - people presented largely as exotic” attractions. And despite a formidable CV that included publishing poetry and running a literary magazine, Una Marson had also been treated as an exotic even problematic - presence in the BBC workplace. Before installing her in the post, managers at the Overseas Service had thought it prudent to check with the Colonial Office in Whitehall that there would be no objection on their part to our appointment of a coloured British subject”. Her arrival was described - by broadcasters and civil servants alike – as an experiment”.