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 having divorced. She worked first at the University of Alberta and then in 1969 joined the history department at Dalhousie University in Halifax, where she remained for more than twenty years. At Dalhousie Mary pioneered the teaching of Caribbean history and also of women’s history, introducing a course on ‘Women in Socialist Society’. She was also an active member of the Canadian Association of University Teachers and in November 1988, shortly before her retirement, she participated in a twelve-day strike of Dalhousie academic staff, over salaries, workload and gender pay equity.
As well as her work on missionaries and the 1831 rebellion, Mary was particularly interested in thinking through slavery as a system of labour. Riffing off and to some extent contradicting Sidney Mintz’s idea of the Caribbean slave as a ‘proto-peasant’, while pressing home his emphasis on the plantation as a form of industrial production, she argued that enslaved people on plantations acted as ‘proto-proletarians’, their actions demonstrating the kind of solidarity that historians more usually expected to find among traditional industrial workers. Her two classic articles, ‘Chattel Slaves into Wage Slaves: a Jamaican Case Study’ and ‘Slave Workers, Subsistence, and Labour Bargaining, 1805–1832’, used plantation records to show that enslaved workers undertook actions that, she convincingly argued, were effectively strikes for better working conditions. In particular, conflict erupted in response to the arrival of new overseers who attempted to increase the pace of labour or interfered with customary work practices. In this context, she interpreted the 1831 rebellion as a general strike.
Although she never lived for any length of time in the Caribbean after the 1950s, Mary maintained close connections across the region, particularly in Jamaica and Cuba. She was a regular participant at the conference of the Association of Caribbean Historians. To the end of her life she peppered her speech with Jamaican phrases, beginning phone calls cheerily with ‘Hello Man!’ After retiring from Dalhousie she returned to London, where for more than twenty years she was Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Commonwealth Studies. She convened the Institute’s seminar on Caribbean Societies (more recently in collaboration with colleagues at the Institute for the Study of the Americas), which became a meeting place for London’s community of Caribbeanist scholars, and a port of call for visiting researchers from elsewhere in the UK and the world. Mary was keenly interested in who was passing through London, and was very active in mentoring younger scholars. She was generous with invitations to lunch, to dinner, and to her home off the Caledonian Road in North London, where she would ply visitors with tea, wine and rum; share gossip about mutual friends and acquaintances; and, most significantly, would talk history and politics for hours at a time. She is survived by her brother and sister and their children, to whom she was a beloved aunt, and by many friends.
