after I left school. My mother first of all came to the UK six or seven years before I did, she was employed here. She managed to borrow some money to book my passage to come to this country.”

Thelma Lewis “was a nurse in Guyana at St Joseph’s Mercy Hospital, a Roman Catholic hospital, so I was already qualified. I did my training for three years and then I did staffing for one year. I came to do further nursing and I’m still here! I came over on the 10 December 1955 by boat, the SS Colombie and I was 22 years of age. I had one friend who was here, we were batch mates from nursing, she came up a year ahead of me and I thought I would follow her.”

A teacher at Siburnie Ramharry’s school inspired her to take up a career as a dietician. “We had a teacher who had just come back from England who was a domestic science teacher and when I was wondering what I really ought do she said there was a career in dietetics and maybe I would like to apply for that. She got me a lot of information. I wrote around to a lot of different colleges and universities and the one that I was interested in was in Scotland because they offered two courses a year, one in September and one in January and because my A level results came out quite late to get into the September course anywhere I decided to take the January one rather than waste time.”

“We had a teacher who had just come back from England who was a Domestic Science teacher and when I was wondering what I really ought to do she said there was a career in dietetics and maybe I would like to apply for that.” Siburnie Ramharry

Leila Ghartey initially worked in the Guyana civil service in the central medical laboratory attached to the main hospital in Georgetown. “It was technical work primarily in bacteriology. I enjoyed it very much.

“I became very interested in bacteriology and I thought it might be very interesting to pursue studies in it. I had already done four years in the civil service and at that time the annual leave entitlement was very generous in that you worked for four years and you were allowed six months’ leave. So I then took the opportunity to come to Britain and I resigned my post at the hospital and came here to hopefully start studying.”

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