After World War Two, there was a strong recruitment drive in the Caribbean for workers to come to Britain, not just to help the newly formed NHS but also to provide much needed labour in other fields. Contributors to this book responded.

Denzil Nurse came to the UK through British recruitment for workers. Nursing was not his first choice. He “wanted to go into the air force. In those days you had people from Britain coming to recruit from the different services, for example the army, the air force and transportation, and other services. I had a choice of nursing and air force but my first choice was the air force. When I went for the interview I was deemed immature! In fact the sergeant recruiting officer said, ‘does your mother know that you’re leaving home?’ I said, ‘Of course, she brought me here!’ Due to that, I took my second choice, which was nursing. At that time we had choices of different hospitals and places. I threw the arrow and it landed on Stanley Royd Hospital in Wakefield, Yorkshire.”

Dr Neslyn Watson-Druée says her “interest in coming to England really was as a direct recruitment through Enoch Powell, the then Minister of Health who came into the Caribbean and, as they are doing now, was recruiting from the Caribbean … ”
Dr Nola Ishmael started her working life as an infant school teacher in Barbados but changed to nursing. “I’ve always been interested in what

nurses did from the books I’ve read. So when recruitment in the West Indies was at its peak, in the late 1950s, early 1960s, some of my school friends had come to England to be nurses. They

Dr Nola Ishmael at preliminary training school, Whittington hospital, 1969

had written to me to tell me how wonderful it was and so I went to the recruitment office and sought to go to England to do nursing.”

Dr Victor Eastmond’s main interest was always dentistry, but he did not have the qualifications to enter university. He “attained a job in the government service in Barbados … I worked in the sector where we were sending immigrants to London. I realised a lot of people were getting this opportunity and I decided to enter that programme myself and I applied to work on London Transport. I left Barbados in 1964 at the age of 19 to emigrate to England, which was considered the mother country.”

After leaving school, Caswell Jeffrey trained as a carpenter in Jamaica. “They were advertising for people to come to this country from the West Indies. I had a friend and he came over and he encouraged me to come. I came over in 1960 by ship.”
Some recruitment programmes were intended to equip Caribbeans with the necessary qualifications to return and use their expertise in their homeland. Dr Anthony Lewis left Jamaica in 1962 to study dentistry at the University of Leeds. At the time “there was a big need for dentists in Jamaica and the government were offering these scholarships and I was successful. I came to the UK in 1962. I remember it was a very, very bad winter that year. I came over by British Airways and landed at Heathrow Airport.”

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