Marion Patrick Jones

Marion Patrick Jones (16 August 1931 – 2 March 2016) was a Trinidadian novelist, whose training was in the fields of library science and social anthropology. Living in Britain during the 1960s, she was also an activist within the black community. She graduated from St Joseph's Convent — an exclusive Roman Catholic girls' school in Port of Spain run by Irish nuns, the Sisters of Cluny

In the 1950s Jones went to New York City, where she earned a diploma in library science, paying for her education by working in a ceramics factory painting the wares. She worked with Manny Spiro to create a trade union. She then returned home to become a chartered librarian, working as Senior Librarian at Carnegie Library, San Fernando, Trinidad. In the 1960s she continued her studies in Britain, graduating with a BSc degree from the University of London. She did postgraduate studies in social anthropology at the London School of Economics, writing a thesis on the Chinese community in Trinidad. and "contributed to a series of statements by post-colonial activists on 'race' in the run-up to the 1964 UK general election, published by Theodore Roszak, editor of Peace News." As Kalbir Shukra describes in The Changing Pattern of Black Politics in Britain (1998): "After the election, Glean brought together Alan Lovell and Michael Randle, who were pacifists and former members of the Committee of 100, with other friends who had written for Peace News including an Asian woman, Ranjana Ash (an active member of the Movement for Colonial Freedom), C. L. R. James and Barry Reckord (African-Caribbean playwright and actor)." According to The Guardian′s report at the time: "Mrs Glean, together with Canon L. John Collins, hastily assembled about 30 Indians, Pakistanis, West Indians, and Africans...at the Hilton Hotel in London, where Dr King spoke for only a few minutes. The whole discussion lasted only an hour and a half, but at the end of it the new movement was formed and Mrs Glean appointed secretary."

Writings, 1970s She worked as Director of Social Science Programmes for UNESCO in Paris from 1965 to 1990, She was in charge of the anti-apartheid programme at UNESCO.

As Marion O'Callaghan she wrote "Introductory Notes" for a symposium, Sociological Theories; Race and Colonialism, published by UNESCO in 1980.

Her first novel, Pan Beat (1973), was about steelband and the involvement of women in its development. Her other novel, J’Ouvert Morning, was published in 1976, and examines middle-class predicaments in a society with a colonial heritage.

After retiring from UNESCO in 1990, she lived in Trinidad. She died aged 84 at her home in Port of Spain on 2 March 2016.

Family Her father Patrick Jones (1876–1965), of African/Chinese heritage, was a leading Trinidadian trade unionist and socio-political activist at the turn of the 20th century. He was also a well known calypsonian who used the sobriquet "Cromwell, the Lord Protector" (popularly called "Chinee Patrick"), and sang what he called "the first political cariso" in 1920. In addition he is notable as the first pyrotechnist in Trinidad and Tobago, manufacturing fireworks from the end of the 1920s.

She was married to Benedict Glean, and to the late Maurice O'Callaghan, who came to Trinidad from Cork in Ireland to help establish the Presentation Brothers' school, Presentation College, in San Fernando at the end of the Second World War.