Jamaica Ten Type Beauty Contest (Transcript)
Since scholarship on the Ten Type Beauty Contest is limited, details on the pageant was taken from research conducted by Dr. Rochelle Rowe in her book, “Imagining Caribbean Womanhood: Race, Nation & Beauty Competitions, 1929-1970” and her more specified academic paper, “Glorifying the Jamaican Girl”: The “Ten Types – One People” Beauty Contest, Racialized Femininities, and Jamaican Nationalism”. Please see this episode’s page for more reading recommendations and other sources used in this paper.
Jamaica 300’s Celebration
In February 1954, minister of finance in the JLP government, Donald Sangster started working on this huge celebration that was scheduled to take place in 1955. Later it became known to the public by Sangster that it will be the commemorating of “the three hundredth anniversary of British rule in Jamaica’” As Sangster explained in a House of Representatives debate in September 1954, 'It happened that 1955 was chosen ... because it was necessary to have a date within this decade” Donald Sangster had this idea commemorating this 300th anniversary of British rule in Jamaica after he visited New Zealand in 1950 where he had seen the centennial celebrations marking the founding of the city of Christchurch. As Howard Johnson said in his paper, “The 'Jamaica 300' Celebrations of 1955: Commemoration in a Colonial Polity”, Sangster main objectives were to the industrial sector by attracting external investment capital and increase the island's tourist trade. Now since 1950, tourism, bauxite-alumina production, and secondary industries had been primarily responsible for the rapid economic growth which Jamaica had experienced. On a previous episode of Lest We Forget, we covered the rise of the Bauxite Industry in Jamaica Nevertheless, the role of the celebrations in promoting those economic activities was best articulated by Wendell Malliet, a columnist in the Daily Gleaner. Mr. Malliet stated: “Jamaica's Tercentenary should be used to show the world our need for aid, our determination to improve our lot and raise our standard of living, and our responsibility to faithfully discharge obligations assumed. Every effort should be made to bring thousands of visitors to the Island where they may see for themselves what we have to offer as an area for sound and profitable investment and a tourist paradise” By mid-year, Sangster had definite ideas on the nature of the commemorative events. An important aspect of his plan for using the celebrations as 'a marketing device' for Jamaica's manufacturing industry and tourism was to invite foreign dignitaries to visit Jamaica during the tercentenary year; such visits would direct welcome foreign attention to Jamaica and enhance its reputation overseas. In a list of recommendations, Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation (KSAC), the PNP-dominated municipal body, came out and said that they would prefer that 'The celebrations be directed towards showing the emergence of Jamaica as a Nation at the national level and on the municipal level, the establishment and growth of Kingston as the premiere metropolis in the British Caribbean.' They also proposed the 'Enshrining of national heroes e.g. Marcus Garvey, George William Gordon & JAG Smith” Florizel Glasspole (PNP Eastern Kingston) who raised the issue observed, 'I am 100% for Jamaica's existence in the British Commonwealth of Nations but I don't want to perpetuate British rule.' Percival Broderick (PNP North-eastern Clarendon) expressed the view that nations did not celebrate their conquest but accomplishments. 'The English don't celebrate the time when the Picts and the Scots used to over-run England or the time when the hordes of Austria used to sweep across the Channel.' Kenneth Hill, the National Labour Party, NLP, suggested that the celebrations be undertaken “with a motif and theme that we have got where we are in spite of Great Britain; in spite of imperialistic rule and colonialism ... and we are emerging in spite of handicaps with which we have been faced for three hundred years” Despite the backlash, Donald Sangster went ahead with his plans. In January of 1955 he once again announced that “celebrations would mark 300 years of 'progress and development as a junior partner with Britain in her vast Colonial enterprise' In July 1954, the Daily Gleaner reported that the planning committee had decided on three principal objectives. These included attracting tourists to the island in record numbers and involving every section of the population in the festivities. Most important was 'to get Jamaicans better acquainted with the history of their island'. The committee intended to select only the positive aspects of the British historical record in Jamaica, editing out the negative features of the colonial past. In the words of the newspaper report, it would involve 'the discarding of the bad things in the history of the past 300 years and the preservation and passage into our modern life of the good things” Sangster announced celebrations on the 10th of May 1955 to coincide with the date of the arrival of the English in the island. Thus, Sangster announced in an informal meeting with members of the press on the progress of the tercentenary preparations: 'Highlight month will be May when a ceremony at Port Royal will depict the British landing at Passage Fort.' A proposal to 'ascertain and invite to the celebrations relatives of Admiral Perm and General Venables' who had commanded the English forces which landed in Jamaica in 1655 reflected this attitude. Earlier Sangster announced that both Princess Margaret and President Paul Magloire of Haiti had been invited to the island during 1955 in connection with the celebrations. Sporting events were regarded as an essential feature of the commemorative activities. Sangster reported that he had contacted several local sports organisations which had promised to stage special events during the anniversary year and that the Australian cricket team would undertake its first tour of the British West Indies in connection with the celebrations.Also announced is that a pageant should be staged in May of 1955 which will depict the 300-year history of Jamaica as a British territory. Thus, instead of cancelling the whole 300’s celebrations to happen in May and beyond, PNP rebranded it. In her paper, “Glorifying the Jamaican Girl”: The “Ten Types – One People” Beauty Contest’, notably historian Rochelle Rowe said, “The PNP, which took office in January 1955, promptly revised the tenor of the celebratory plans, changing it from a commemoration of three hundred years of British rule to a celebration of Jamaica’s three hundred years as a national entity with a distinctive history, culture, and people” Now the highlight of this celebration to commentate 300 years of national pride according to PNP, was the beauty pageant to be held in May. This beauty pageant was the “Ten Type Beauty Contest” which was designed to showcase the diversity of Jamaica.History of Beauty Contests in Jamaica
The “Ten Types” pageant was to be different. At the time, the main pageant on the island was the well-established “Miss Jamaica” beauty contest. “Miss Jamaica” began in 1929 and was sponsored by the Gleaner. This aid in the popularity and circulation of the newspaper. The pageant was very white and elite and catered to families of the upper class in Jamaica. Anyone outside of that status is not even given the ability to enter much less win. In 1947, Aimee Webster, a wealthy Jamaican, briefly acquired “Miss Jamaica” and incorporated it into her new “Miss British Caribbean” contest. The “Miss British Caribbean” contest was intended to promote Webster’s new publication, Caribbean Post. Webster sought to herald the merits of the respectable, “well- born,” brown middle-class young woman as a symbol of the modernity, sophistication, and optimism of the postwar West Indian territories. Under Webster’s direction, the winners of both “Miss Jamaica” and “Miss British Caribbean” tended to be light-skinned brown women. However, after Webster’s management of the “Miss Jamaica” contest, the pageant fell briefly into a lapse and was later resurrected by the Bodybuilder’s Association in 1954, a private health establishment, managed by Keith Rhino. The Jamaica Tourist Board partnered with the Bodybuilder’s Association to sponsor the pageant. They together professionalized the role of “Miss Jamaica” as both a national representative and a cultural ambassador. “Miss Jamaica” titleholders won lucrative prizes, foreign trips, and began to attend “Miss World” and other international beauty competitions. In this format the brown participants who had been singled out by Webster’s contest lost status, unable to compete with white Jamaicans and to rise above the occasional place in the final lineup. Black women, meanwhile, were absent from the contest In 1955, Theodore Sealy used his editorial in the Gleaner to approach “Miss Jamaica” organizers for appointing yet another white “queen” in Marlene Fenton. According to Dr, Rochelle Rowe: “Sealy called it irresponsible to encourage foreigners to associate the better part of Jamaican society with whiteness and refinement at the expense of the wider population, whom he feared was still imagined as backward. Soon after, Theodore Sealy was announced as the organiser of the Ten Types Beauty Contest. As the organizer of the “Ten Types,” Sealy set about creating a Jamaican ideal that placed the entire population on a par with the social cache of whiteness and would therefore cast Jamaicans as progressive and modern”The Ten Type Beauty Contest
The Star launched “Ten Types” in May 1955 as an inclusive beauty contest, the first of its kind, under the theme: “Every lassie has an equal chance” Primary sponsorship came from the Jamaica Tourist Board. Publicity for “Ten Types” appeared regularly in the Star and the Gleaner. The “Ten Types” competition would tour the island, “uncovering a wealth of feminine charm,” almost scouring the countryside for Jamaica’s hidden beauties. There would be seven months of preliminaries between the launch of the contest in May and the unveiling of the winners at Christmas. The Star staffed a caravan with its representatives, including a photographer, a reporter, and members of the Jamaica Federation of Women to act as chaperones and to encourage participants to enter.The Jamaica Federation of Women was modelled after the Women’s Institute. The Jamaica Federation of Women adhere to a conservative form of feminism. It was committed to the sort of social work among the “rural black poor” as outlined by the Moyne Commission The Moyne Commission consist of white British men sent by the Crown to travelled to British colonised Caribbean countries to study the cause of civil unrest which takes place throughout the region in 1938. The Moyne Commission exposed the horrible conditions under which people of the British Caribbean lived. It pointed to the defences in the education system, poor health conditions and economic and social problems of unemployment and juvenile delinquency. They recommended the expansion of the franchise and extending the opportunities for people other than the financially influential to stand for election. This recommendation from the commission would be one of the main catalysts for the 1944 Franchise Commission in Guyana and the Universal Adult Suffrage of 1944 in Jamaica. Thus, the organisation mirrored the Jamaican society; the organization was white led and although black working women could become members, they were at the bottom of the hierarchy in the organisation. The published schedule of the “Star Beauty Caravan” consists of visits to Jamaica’s villages and towns and employed local personals to distribute posters and leaflets. The public was invited to vote for its favourites based on the published photographs of entrants. However, final judging took place in private, not before an audience. The beauty contest thus ended with ten separate beauty queens: • Miss Ebony — A Jamaican girl of black complexion. • Miss Mahogany — A Jamaican Girl of Cocoa-brown Complexion.• Miss Satinwood — A Jamaican Girl of Coffee-and-Milk Complexion. • Miss Golden Apple — A Jamaican Girl of Peaches-and-Cream Complexion. • Miss Apple Blossom - A Jamaican Girl of European Parentage. • Miss Pomegranate — A Jamaican girl of White-Mediterranean Parentage. • Miss Sandalwood — A Jamaican Girl of Pure Indian Parentage. • Miss Lotus — A Jamaican Girl of Pure Chinese Parentage. • Miss Jasmine — A Jamaican Girl of Part Chinese Parentage. • Miss Allspice — A Jamaican Girl of Part Indian Parentage It should be note that although the objective of this competition was to move away from mainstream beauty contest such as Miss Jamaica, the winning beauty queens were all slim and petite in frame. In the official photograph, the women were all they are posed in a row, tiptoed, hands on hips, heads turned to face the camera. Also, to note, only one dark skin woman was in the list of ten winners: Miss Ebony. Local Reception
The Afro – West Indian Welfare League petitioned the Bodybuilder’s Association to alter “Miss Jamaica” along the lines of “Ten Types,” so that black women would be included in the contest. The league even offered to sponsor “dark-skinned” candidates “of beauty, poise, and intelligence” and to provide two black Jamaicans for the judging panel. In 1960, the Jamaican branch of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the organisation founded by Marcus Garvey, proposed its own beauty competition. Its contest would offer prizes geared toward educating and training women out of poverty. According to Dr. Rochelle Rowe in her paper: ‘So important were beauty contests as symbols of power that in 1961, Millard Johnson, a radical black nationalist and an embarrassment to the new political establishment, picketed the rounds of “Miss Jamaica.” Since 1959, “Miss Jamaica” had begun a glacial pace of change by crowning very light-skinned colored winners. Johnson protested the contest’s racial discrimination against the black majority with placards reading: Jamaica is Black, Who do these girls represent?” Down with Colour Discrimination, and, most significant to the search for black feminine icons, Beauty is Black’ In 1962, the black Gleaner sportswriter Alva Ramsay suggested in a public letter that in the year of Jamaican independence, a dark-skinned black woman should be crowned “Miss Jamaica”. She said “I suggest either we go into the hedges and byways and select a Negro girl as ‘Miss Jamaica’ for the independence year or we adopt a modified Ten Types pattern and have four queens, — one a negro girl, one a white girl, one a Chinese and one an Indian” Then two years later, Ramsay and his organisation, the Council for Afro-Jamaican Affairs, began its own “Miss Jamaica Nation” contest to rival “Miss Jamaica. The winners would be sent to Africa as unofficial cultural ambassadors and as agents of mutual learning as new African nations emerged independent from the British Empire. The first winner, Yvonne Whyte, came from a middle-class professional background but was praised at her crowning by PNP Senator Kenneth McNeill as “the first real country girl to win a beauty contest.” Whyte, who had an enthusiastic following among black Jamaicans, made a visit to the independence celebrations of Nyasaland (today known as Malawi). Dr. Rochelle Rowe notes: The “Miss Jamaica Nation” pageant therefore mobilised Africa as a “symbolic referent” of what Deborah Thomas has called “modern blackness,” which both “engaged and rejected Western visions of progress and development”International Reception
Ten Types” aroused the interest of media voices from overseas. Journalists were enthralled by questions of race in the New World at this transitional moment of civil rights activism and antiapartheid struggles. For the U.S. journalist Edward Scott, writing for the Havana Post in Cuba described “Ten Types” as a model of racial tolerance and reserved particular praise for the humility shown by Miss Ebony: “I do not know who made up that list of ten names, but it is a masterpiece of poetry, dignity and good taste. The various qualifications are beautifully prepared and I find myself admiring particularly the little Jamaican girl who does not protest that it is undemocratic to have a class for ‘Miss Apple Blossom,’ but who readily admits that she is ‘a Jamaican girl of black complexion’ and proudly enters her name in the competition for ‘Miss Ebony” The visiting South African writer Peter Abrahams stated “With line subtlety, the contest was both racial and multiracial... Black girls competed amongst themselves; Chinese and Chinese coloured amongst them- selves; the fair competed only against the fair... I wondered and asked, whether the organisers would, after they had chosen the winners from the ten types, choose a reigning queen from one of the ten. No one knew. People tended to shy away from this” Life reproduced its “Ten Types” feature in its international edition. Time informed its readers that “because of the tangled racial mixture of the island colony’s population of 1,500,000,” ten beauty queens would be chosen “for each of the racial colour group Ebony, the African American targeted magazine, sent both its chief photographer and its managing editor to Jamaica to cover the finals of the competition. The Ebony team was hosted by a Jamaica Tourist Board eager to show off the “Ten Types” success story. Marshall Wilson, Ebony’s white photographer, took “Ten Types” as a model of Jamaican racial harmony with the power to convert racists: “Jamaica is making an invaluable contribution to the development of better race relations in the United States. . . . Travelers coming to the island from the United States . . . are very much interested to find that discrimination does not exist in Jamaican hotels or night clubs. Those Americans who believe in equality of races are able to point to the island as an example of how various peoples can live together in harmony. Those who are in favour of segregation are at first amazed — and often converted. By mixing on a social level with cultured colored persons, even the most die-hard believer in segregation begins to have doubts about his conviction” For the Jamaica Tourist Board, loving the positive responses from “Ten Types” abroad, had recruited a new batch of female clerical staff to further clarify the lack of discrimination that exist in the island.The Competition And Brownness
Dr Rochelle Rowe states that this: “Ultimately, the overriding image of “Ten Types” was an expansive representation of brownness that suggested brown identity as the natural representative motif of Jamaica” In 1959, Sheila Chong was celebrated as a harmonious race relations exemplified in feminine beauty. Chong was of Chinese and black ethnicity. Her diverse racial heritage dominated the press coverage; she was cast as the “literal embodiment of Jamaicanness”. As Newday put it, “This is the first time the queen seemed to please everyone. Sheila Chong is a typical Jamaican girl. A Negro-Chinese-Syrian composite” Light-skinned brown women dominated the pageant, with few exceptions, for the next two decades and beyond. Magazines like: Vanity and Jamaican Housewife, featured brown cover girls almost without exception. They glorified the “golden-brown” skin tones of aspiring models, actresses, and singers. One Vanity travel writer in Africa, stated: “the Jamaican woman of mixed blood is the most beautiful I know in the Caribbean”. One of the most popular examples of this thinking is the widely popular 1972 Jamaica Tourist Board poster with Trinidad and Tobago native, Sintra Bronte, in the red swimsuit with Jamaica in bold black letters in it. On the eve of independence, in August 1962, the Gleaner columnist Frank Hill suggested that members of Jamaica’s brown population were the only people who were truly indigenous to the island, “the only group created out of the Jamaican environment. Out Of Many, One People
Sealy won a lead role in organising another Jamaican national event, the celebrations to mark Jamaican independence on August 6, 1962. Sealy took part in formulating the new national motto announced as “Out of Many, One People.” He later tentatively acknowledged the role of the “Ten Types — One People” beauty competitions in shaping the new national motto. “the Jamaican woman of mixed blood is the most beautiful I know in the Caribbean” The timeline of his statement is not accurate as the Legislature was not in session in when the motto was announced in 1962 however one cannot dismiss the major influence that competition had on the shaping of the new national motto. The original motto, INDUS UTERQUE SERVIET UNI, is the Latin translation for "The two Indians will serve as one", or rather "Both Indies will serve Together", in reference to the collective servitude of the Tainos to the colonisers. Many sociologists, historians and anthropologists over the years have assert the fact that national motto of Jamaica was not chosen because we are melting pot of people. Primarily just like Ten Type: it re-assured of this privilege of this racial paradise that exist in Jamaica. Thus, the leadership of the new independent Jamaica wanted to: “First, assure the wealthy and potential foreign investors that they had no need to fear the desperately poor black masses. Second, it sought to convince the poor black people that those with wealth were their genuine brothers and sisters. This was intended to head off violent expressions of the ever-present class struggles and any flirtation with communism” This coming off the back of the 1959 event in Cuba which kick mark the beginning of the Cuban Revolution and the 1960 Henry Rebellion in Jamaica” This racial paradise narrative, alongside the national motto PR and events like Ten Type, was marketed in Jamaica’s tourism packages and to tell persons that we are this wonderful place to come visit because we are what a majority black society look like when done right. Dr. Martin Luther King coming to Jamaica in 1967, said “In Jamaica, I feel a human” when that was not the reality of the majority of black and even Indian Jamaicans in the country. Legacy of Ten Type
The “Ten Types” competition began in 1955 and resumed in 1959 until its demise in 1963. The Gleaner claimed that six thousand women had their photographs taken for entry into the competitions. Jamaica 300 would go on to influence the annual Jamaica Festival Celebrations beginning in 1963. Safe to say, Ten Type, would influence the accompanied Jamaica Festival Queen Competition.