THIS DAY IN OUR PAST

The following events took place on September 24 in the years identified:

1936: Jamaican author, playwright and poet Una Marson returns from England, after working with exiled Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie and dealing with his correspondence and accompanying him as a member of his delegation to the League of Nations in Geneva, where he pleads for international help to order the Italians from his country. She also attends the Congress of the International Association of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship at the Sultan’s Palace in Istanbul, Turkey. She is the first black to be one of the collaborators at the League of Nations. Her two sisters, Ettie Marson, and E.L Marson-Jones, headmistress of Cardiff High School, meet her at the pier.

1954:reports The Daily Gleaner

that fashion history will be created on Saturday, November 20, when a group of six models from the House of Christian Dior in Paris will arrive in the island for a series of three shows to be held on November 22, 23 and 24, at the Myrtle Bank Hotel, Tower Isle, and Montego Beach Hotel, respectively. Under the patronage of W.A. Bustamante and in aid of the Polio Rehabilitation Fund, the shows are part of a tour of Central and South America from the establishment head by 49-year-old M. Dior, the man who has been described as being ‘able to lower 40 million hemlines by lowering his pencil’. 1990: The Ministry of Development, Production and Planning will soon be tackling the problem of pollution in Kingston harbour with a Kingston Harbour Pollution Abatement Plan. At present, 12.5 million gallons of sewage enters the Harbour daily, making it unhealthy for swimmers and environmentally unsafe. Effluent from Kingston Harbour carried by currents is the main contributor to the pollution of the Hellshire beaches in St Catherine, the Gleaner reports. Mr Ted Aldridge, the Government’s adviser on environmental protection and conservation, says cleaning the harbour is going to be a long and expensive process, and that those who use the harbour will have to bear some of the cost.