Mary Turner, 1931–2013

Mary Turner was one of the pioneers of a new Caribbean historiography produced in the context of the nationalist movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Her work as a historian included both archivally based reconstructions of the history of Caribbean slavery and its aftermath, that changed how historians think, and synthetic interpretive writing aimed at students. She was also a facilitator of others’ work, through the friendship, support and mentorship that she offered to generations of younger historians, especially women.

Mary grew up in East Yorkshire, the eldest of three children. She studied at Manchester University, where she did a BA in Politics and Modern History and then an MA in History, graduating in 1953 with a thesis on ‘The imperialist controversy in the United States 1895–1900’. While a student, she met Barry (Barrington) Reckord, then an aspiring playwright who had come from Jamaica to study English at Cambridge. They married in 1953, and she moved to Jamaica with him.

In Kingston Mary taught history at the elite Wolmer’s Boys School, and became involved in Jamaican politics as a sympathizer of the People’s National Party (PNP), then led by Norman Manley. For a while she helped produce the PNP’s weekly, Public Opinion. It was an exciting period, as Jamaica, along with other parts of the Caribbean, moved towards the creation of a Federation of the West Indies, which nationalists hoped and expected would soon become an independent federal nation. A new nation would need a new history, and Mary participated in its creation, initially through compiling documents that she used to teach her students at Wolmer’s, and later through participation in the production of the textbook The Making of the West Indies, which she wrote in collaboration with Roy Augier, Shirley Gordon and Douglas Hall. The book, aimed at secondary-school students, provided for the first time the means by which Caribbean history could be placed at the centre of the history curriculum in Caribbean schools. Despite her commitment to the new West Indian nation, however, her politics were more socialist than nationalist. She welcomed the Cuban Revolution, of which she became a lifelong supporter, and later despaired at the ravages inflicted on Jamaica by neoliberalism.

In the late 1950s Mary returned to Britain with Barry Reckord in order to further both their careers. He wanted to develop his work as a playwright in London, where he established a relationship with the Royal Court Theatre, while she enrolled for a PhD in History at King’s College London. Under the supervision of Gerald Graham, the Rhodes Professor of Imperial History, Mary immersed herself in the archives of the missionary societies, particularly the Wesleyans, and was awarded her PhD for her thesis on ‘Missionary activity in Jamaica before emancipation’ in 1964. Although she enjoyed the research, and Graham was supportive of Mary’s work and that of other historians of the Caribbean, her time at King’s was not entirely happy. She would later recount stories of the marginalization she experienced, as not only a woman PhD student but a married one, already nearly thirty when she began her research, at a time when married women were still not expected to pursue their own careers.

Mary’s decision to focus her research on the non-conformists flowed from the availability of sources as well as her interest in the missionaries. But the work she did in the missionary archives quickly led her to new interpretations of the major event of the late slavery period in Jamaica: the rebellion of 1831. As Mary Reckord, she published an article on the rebellion in Past and Present in 1968, and by 1982 had revised and refocused her PhD as a book, Slaves and Missionaries: the Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787–1834. This work remains the definitive study of the 1831 rebellion. It established the significance of enslaved people’s struggles to participate in missionary-led congregations, and of the 1831 rebellion itself, for the subsequent abolition of slavery.

After her PhD Mary moved to Canada, she and Reckord...