Tryphena Anderson’s “first impressions of England were, ‘Oh god how dreary!’ The chimneys I didn’t believe they were houses. ‘What were they? Were these factories?’ I realised straight away that reading English literature I didn’t understand a thing. I would have to read it again and consider, because these were the chimney tops that you read about in Grimm’s fairy tales; people going down the chimneys and Dickens’s books. I thought, I’m going to really appreciate it now; it’s not just words.

“White people were not dressing like you’re used to seeing them dress in Jamaica. So it was like a camera going, click, click, click!.”

But Tryphena Anderson’s biggest shock was “seeing ordinary white people doing ordinary work. You were sort of made to believe that they lived in a more aristocratic way, that they didn’t clean floors and they didn’t sweep streets. I couldn’t understand any of what they were saying! Frankly, I think I spoke better English than most of them!”

For Elizabeth Yates, “the terraced houses … were strange because, back home, so to speak, we don’t have joined-up houses. I thought it was really weird that people wanted to live all joined up next to each other. The second thing was the food: kind of no taste, lack of spices. The third thing that struck me was when you’re in the West Indies in the

1960s and you saw English people they were in positions of power and it was really strange to see white people sweeping streets and doing manual jobs. I had not seen that before.”

Lucy Martin-Burnham found it all “quite strange really because I suppose I was comparing England with Jamaica: the brightly coloured buildings, nice and clean looking, then of course I came into this docklands and it was very drab and I suppose in a way I was disappointed. It was quite different to what I expected.”

Gloria Falode found the British accents strange: “In the West Indies all you hear about is BBC English, I was never exposed to any other dialect. They would say, ‘Yes me duck’ and those sorts of things and I couldn’t understand what they were saying!”
Derek Harty’s first impression of Britain was that “it was a very strange place. I just didn’t like it at first. I really went through a terrible period where I wanted to go back. For the first two or three weeks I was very upset. I really wanted to go back to my country.”

Leila Ghartey found public transport confusing. “The fact that you had to plan your route before leaving home was quite something and several times I got lost, I wasn’t used to using public transport and that was something I had to learn and understand how to do.” She also “had my first attack of chilblains that made my life absolutely intolerable!”

Tryphena Anderson (second from right) with colleagues at Coppice Hospital, 1961