Derek Harty (left) photographed for Medical Laboratory Technician Handbook

hospital staff had a meal and there was a kitchen downstairs where they sent the meals up in the lift and you had to serve and collect the meals, wash up, dry and clean up afterwards. I was the only Caribbean worker there.”

Olivine Benjamin was 18 when she joined the NHS as an auxiliary. “It was looking after patients

and you did everything except medicine but you had to undertake all the roles that the nursing staff did. The staff were very friendly … There was an Italian lady who adopted me as her niece, she’s still my auntie! Then a white lady who was my mum! … They really did look after me. We had two weeks’ training when you first started; they showed you how to make beds and things like that. There was a group of us who were just giggling, so they got fed up and said, ‘You there, you there,’ and that was the training. It was a geriatric ward. We used to do 30 baths per week, Monday to Wednesday was bath day and you were assigned to a certain ward each week and the routine never changed, you knew what you had to do … It was very hard work … we had a patient who never used to put his feet on the floor and we used to get him up in the morning and get him to the side of the bed and he used to sit there and two people had to lift him bodily to get him in the chair and then at night he would just get up and get back in bed. He would never get out of bed and he did that for years! We had no training in lifting patients.”

Hazel Watson found her first few weeks at Leavesden Hospital “a bit frightening … because I had never seen anybody have a fit before and seeing people fall on the floor and shaking. I was really petrified. I soon got used to that.” She comments that fortunately, because she had younger brothers and sisters, she was working
with children.

Caswell Jeffrey applied to work as a carpenter at the General Hospital, Birmingham. “I saw somebody and he said, ‘oh yes, we need a carpenter.’ We went and saw the foreman and he wasn’t too impressed by a black man, from the West Indies, asking for a carpentry job in this country. He asked me if I was in the union, and I said ‘No’, and how I knew about the job and I said ‘I saw it in the paper’ … We went across the yard over to a next building and he told me to stay outside … I could hear he was saying to the person that a black man is outside asking for a job. It ran through me, what chance do I stand? The door opened and they said to come in and when I got in the man just got up and shook my hand. I was surprised. He asked if he could help me and I told him I saw a job advertised and I am a carpenter, he said, ‘Yes there is a job going here.’ He asked where I was working and about the wages I was getting, he said he couldn’t afford that money here but if I need the job it’s here for me. So he asked when I could start and I said Monday … It was general building, repair and making anything new … The hours were 48 hours, that was the basic hours, then Saturday afternoon to Sunday all day that was overtime. I worked with the first person that I saw when I went in on the Monday and … he took me under his wing. I think he needed a bit of experience about black people, he started to ask me a lot of questions and things like that, but he was quite a nice person.”

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