went to Croydon and worked for seven years as a district midwife. After that I could see there were things I wanted changing within the system. I would go to my boss and I was doing teachers’ courses and so on. They were saying, ‘We can’t give you the time off you have to do it in your own time.’ So I did it in my own time and paid for those courses. I thought, ‘I need to try my hand at management.’ In fact, I wanted to become a health visitor … I applied for a job in South London and they said they didn’t take black people, we don’t think the people would accept you, that sort of thing. I got my first nursing officer post in Greenwich District Hospital in 1973. I was there for four years. I was in charge of all the gynaecology and the antenatal services. I went there and implemented continuity of care and things like that. I must have had a good reference because I saw this job going as a senior nursing officer at St George’s, Wandsworth. They must have liked what I said at the interview.”

Joyce Bleasdille-Lumsden’s matron supported her decision to do SRN training: “She was leaving the hospital to go to Colindale Hospital in London and she said to me, ‘Follow on from me and when you finish your training you wouldn’t need a reference.’ The tutor of the student nurse training … wanted me continue with the student nurse training because I used to come first. He advised me to take the General Nursing Council test and

said they would like to keep me to do my student nurse training in the group, but the nurse tutor was from South Africa and we learned that she didn’t like black nurses … she was encouraged to take me and I came first in all my exams. I did my combined training for BTTA (British Tuberculosis and Thoracic Association) and SRN (State Registered Nurse) with Edgware. I got on very well with the patients, having done chest nursing in Grenada I got used to tuberculosis patients.

The nurses were mainly from Malaysia and China and I got on well with them. I went to do my SRN training in Edgware Hospital until 1966. From Edgware I went on to do my midwifery training at Luton Maternity from 1966 to 1967. I got married and had a break, did a little agency work. I was at the Royal Northern as ward sister until 1974. I had problems getting to work on time and at night time getting home, so I thought the district nursing would be much better. I applied to St Thomas’s Group … and I was accepted and started in 1974 as a community sister.”

Caswell Jeffrey, in his position as carpenter, soon showed that black people could work as well, if not better, than whites. “The people I worked with were a bit cautious for a black person to come in and expected that perhaps I didn’t know the job. Of course I didn’t prove them wrong they proved themselves wrong. I

could remember that myself and another man were hanging some doors. Of course I was a young man and he was much older, I wasn’t trying to show him up, I did mine well before him and one of the blokes that was coming from the engineer shop perhaps didn’t think that a black man could hang a door! When he passed and saw that I hung the door, he didn’t go where he was going, he turned back and before long a lot of them surrounded me and I couldn’t even move! I remember that.”

Racist election literature from the 1964 British general election. Pic courtesy of Lambeth Library