As the oldest of four siblings, Marriott sold his creations to help family finances, including busts of famous people such as King George V and Governor Richards.

He gained travel experience, going to Panama to do carpentry in 1940 and then to the US in 1944 as a farmworker, where his artistic skills were celebrated locally and he did a bust of president Franklin D. Roosevelt.

He received a scholarship from the British Council in 1947 to enrol at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in London for his first-ever formal artistic training.

He then began work on carvings for the restoration of the UK Houses of Parliament to replace the wartime bomb damage.

He left for England to sculpt the statue "Athlete" based on Jamaica's first Olympic gold medallist, Arthur Wint.

[1] The Jamaican Government commissioned him to sculpt a statue of the recently deceased reggae star Bob Marley in 1984, after uproar over the abstract first monument.