Training involved academic study and work on the wards. Trainee nurses, particularly BME nurses, did everything from cleaning wards to washing out sluices. Some Caribbean recruits felt this was not ‘proper’ nursing.

For Nola Ishmael, “academic learning wasn’t a problem, it was the physical exhaustion and requirement to manage the heavy lifting, to keep going no matter what and the early rising to go on duty at 7.30am … We had a night or home sister who would knock on the doors to get us up to start day duty. The first few weeks of the job was a certain amount of bewilderment, naivety and feeling one of a number. However, the hospital was very nurturing, they cared for us nurses from overseas.”

After six weeks of learning practical things, such as anatomy, Lena Hunt started working on the wards. “It was very, very hard work and very long hours. Nurses did a lot of the cleaning jobs, such as damp dusting, washing and ironing bandages. There were no disposable bedpans. Male ‘bottles’ [urinals], syringes, needles, tubing, waterproof mattress covers, dressing and ‘procedure’ packs, they all had to be cleaned and reused. Bed castors had to be in a straight line down both sides of the ward when the sister checked after the daily cleaning round. Gauze dressings were cut from large rolls, folded and packed in lots of 10, along with hand-rolled cotton wool balls, by the nurses – usually during night duty – into metal drums and sent for sterilisation. It was

very hard on our feet. Day shifts started at 7.30am and finished at 8.30pm. Early shift finished at 1pm and late shift was 1pm to 8.30pm.”

Erena Kydd’s first job in the NHS was as an auxiliary in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham. She was put on the ward but says,

“I was more like a domestic. They were saying, ‘you go and clean the toilets and the bedpans’ … in those days the nurses had to go on their knees and scrub the floors, so one day I went in and I did it for two weeks on a stretch … I wasn’t allowed around the patients … I said, ‘why me, everyday I come on you’re sending me to do the same thing and I haven’t seen anybody else do it … I didn’t come here to clean bedpans … I left my home and I came to this country and I thought I would better my position, but this, I’ve never done it at home’.”

As a married woman with children, M Bussue thought she would not be able to join the NHS but she applied. “When I got an interview and I took the test they said ‘your mark is good enough to do your training’, so I said I couldn’t because I’ve got a family. I decided to do six in the evening until 10pm and I never said a word to my husband. So when I got the letter with the starting date he went ballistic and there was an atmosphere for two weeks. The first day … it was strange seeing all these people in bed, when we went to do the bedpan washer I was heaving like I wanted to be sick. This woman she saw me, it was

another black woman, she said to me, ‘I was just like that before I came’, and then she was puffing away on a cigarette and said, ‘This is what it made me do!’ I said, ‘Before I do that I’ll leave!’ On the second or third day a woman who was living on my road, who worked there, she saw me and said, ‘Are you on this afternoon?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know if I’m going, and she said to me to go, and with her encouragement, I went back.”

Neslyn Watson-Druée remembers, “horrendous hours during training … my feet were sore and I went and talked to the sister and she said I should rub my feet with methylated spirits to harden my feet up! The work was hard but I came to do nursing and I couldn’t go home. My pay was seven pounds two shillings and six pence per week.”

For Margaret Knight training included “theory as well as practical. We had to learn how to make beds and how to strip-wash a patient in a bed. There were dummies that we had to practice on and so it was a lot of bed making and first aid – learning how to bandage and that sort of thing. There were no other Caribbean trainees at the time, but there was a very charming girl that I struck up a friendship with; she was from Sierra Leone and her name was Constance. I called her Connie. She and I became very fast friends because we came from a similar background.”