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Marion Jean Lyon

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Marion Jean Lyon (married name Raven-Hill; 15 January 1885 – 20 February 1940) was a British advertising executive, particularly known for her long association with the magazine Punch (1910–40), as its advertising manager from 1922 – the first woman advertising manager of a major British periodical. She was the founding president of the Women's Advertising Club of London and a director of the feminist literary magazine, Time and Tide.

Early life

Lyon was born on 15 January 1885 in Townhead, Strathaven, Lanarkshire, Scotland, to Marion (née Young) and Andrew Wallace Lyon, a solicitor. She had three sisters and two brothers.[1] She worked in Glasgow before moving to London by 1906, where she initially worked at Remington & Co.[1][2]

Advertising career

Lyon's first advertising job was at the Paul E. Derrick agency.[1][2][3] She moved to Punch in 1910, in the role of assistant to the advertising manager, Roy V. Somerville, and assumed more responsibility than was usual because of his ill health. In 1921, she was promoted to assistant advertising manager, and on Somerville's death the following year, became the advertising manager of Punch.[1][2] She was the first woman advertising manager of a Fleet Street periodical,[1] or of any major British publication.[2][3] Her appointment was noted in a letter to The Spectator, which described the position as "one of the most important and highly paid in Fleet Street".[1][4] Under her leadership, the publication's advertising revenue increased.[5]

She was one of the funding members of the Advertising Association of Women and – after this had either expanded to include other industries or become defunct – in 1923, was one of nineteen founding members, and first president, of the Women's Advertising Club of London.[1][6] Other founding members included Jessie Reynolds (later chair of the Samson Clark agency) and Florence Sangster (at W. S. Crawford's).[7] The impetus for the club's foundation was to prepare for a major international convention on advertising in Wembley, planned for 1924 as part of the British Empire Exhibition, and Lyon was also on the executive council of the convention. During the convention, she hosted an event at the Savoy Hotel on 13 July 1924, with more than 400 women in the advertising business from various countries, and was the welcoming speaker; her speech was covered in The Times and The Daily Telegraph, as well as specialist publications such as Advertising World and Advertiser's Weekly.[1][2][8] After the Wembley convention, the club continued to foster women sharing expertise with each other, for example, organising an all-woman session at the male-dominated Advertising Association's annual conventions, and worked to increase the profile of women in advertising.[9]

In 1929, she was one of the few women to speak at the International Advertising Association convention in Berlin.[1][10][11] She spoke about opportunities for women in Britain, and was quoted as saying "Women by self-education, by realization of their responsibilities, by adaptability, are winning their way to the forefront in almost every sphere of modern life."[11]

Other roles and personal life

Lyon joined the board of directors of the feminist literary magazine, Time and Tide, in 1926.[1][2] Its owner, the prominent feminist Margaret, Lady Rhondda, considered Lyon to be very able.[12] The academic Catherine Clay speculates that Lyon was a factor in increasing the magazine's advertising revenue by the end of that decade.[13] Through the magazine, Lyon met several prominent women writers, including Cicely Hamilton and E. M. Delafield.[2] Lyon was also associated with the Business and University Committee, a body founded by Lady Rhondda and Caroline Spurgeon that aimed to improve recruitment of female university graduates.[1][2] She was a committee member of the Women's Provisional Club, also founded by Lady Rhondda, in 1925–27.[2]

On 20 October 1923, she married the Punch cartoonist, Leonard Raven-Hill (1867–1942), a substantially older man whose first wife had died eighteen months earlier.[1][2][12] Unusually, she not only continued to work, but kept on using her maiden name professionally.[1][12] Lyon died on 20 February 1940 in Bournemouth, after becoming ill the previous year.[1] Her memorial service was held at St Columba's Church in Knightsbridge, London.[1][14] Her papers are archived at the British Library.[1]

She was described during her lifetime by Advertiser's Weekly as "one of the best-known and best-liked women in advertising".[5] A colleague wrote after her death that Lyon made advertising appear "a gentlemanly thing in the richest sense of that mishandled word".[5] In a 1957 history of Punch, she is referred to as being "still remembered with awe and discomfort, as one of the first women to blast their way into the advertising world and to rule over the clients as firmly as the Editor ruled over the contributors".[1][15]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Lizzie Broadbent (2023). Lyon [married name Raven-Hill], (Marion) Jean. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press) doi:10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.013.90000380812
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Helen Walasek (2023). Marion Jean Lyon: Marion Jean Lyon brought skills from the world of advertising to the pages of Time and Tide, Time and Tide: Connections and Legacies project (accessed 20 October 2023)
  3. ^ a b Thomas, p. 95
  4. ^ E. W. (21 October 1922). Women in Business. The Spectator, p. 37
  5. ^ a b c Brittaney Kiefer (1 October 2018). The Unsung Women of Advertising. Campaign pp. 106–7
  6. ^ Gordon, Doughan, p. 155
  7. ^ Haughton, p. 85
  8. ^ Haughton, p. 93
  9. ^ Haughton, p. 95
  10. ^ Women Taking Part in Berlin Ad Convention. The Kansas City Times, p. 6 (20 August 1929)
  11. ^ a b Pennsy Woman is "Ad" Group Head. The Windsor Star, p. 28 (23 August 1929)
  12. ^ a b c Martin Ferguson Smith, Helen Walasek (2019). Clive Bell's memoir of Annie Raven-Hill. English Studies 100 (7): 823–54 doi:10.1080/0013838X.2019.1658944
  13. ^ Catherine Clay (2011). 'WHAT WE MIGHT EXPECT – If the Highbrow Weeklies Advertized like the Patent Foods': Time and Tide, Advertising, and the 'Battle of the Brows'. Modernist Cultures 6 (1): 68 doi:10.3366/mod.2011.0005
  14. ^ Memorial Service: Miss Marion Jean Lyon. The Times (48560) (9 March 1940)
  15. ^ Price, p. 256

Sources

  • Peter Gordon, David Doughan. Dictionary of British Women's Organisations, 1825–1960. (Routledge; 2014) ISBN 9781136897702
  • Philippa Haughton (2019). Fashioning Professional Identity in the British Advertising Industry: The Women's Advertising Club of London, 1923–1939. In Fashioning Professionals: Identity and Representation at Work in the Creative Industries (Leah Armstrong, Felice McDowell; eds) (Bloomsbury) ISBN 9781350129276
  • Richard Geoffrey George Price. A History of Punch (Collins; 1957)
  • Graham Thomas. The Biggest and Best: The Story of an Advertising Agency. A History of Advertising (SAGUS; 2022) ISBN 9781911489627
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