Through their work in the NHS, many Caribbean workers worked to improve life chances for other black people in Britain. Neslyn Watson-Druée worked in Brixton as a health visitor. “I went into Brixton and I had very mixed emotions because I saw young women like me with no prospects, who had possibly one or two children but living in very cramped and cold accommodation, deprived areas and I used to think. ‘My God!’ you know. I learnt a lot, I found it very distressing I remember I used to walk along the street with tears running down my face when I saw the condition in which people lived. I remember going back to the college and saying to my tutor, ‘I cannot do this.’ I identified very closely with black people and they weren’t like me, and I don’t want this reported wrongly, but I went through a stage where I was ashamed of being black, because of what I was seeing and what blackness represented in Brixton at the time. I had to come through that and I am so grateful for that tutor who was wonderful. She said, ‘Neslyn, you have to understand economics, you have to understand racism.’ I said to her ‘racism, what’s that?’ I did not know what racism was. I came out of that being proud to be black. By standing there I wanted to improve the life chances of black people as far as I can.”

Louise Garvey remembers: “There were a group of us who were always about cultural diversity and you had people who were anti it, so we were

sometimes seen as troublemakers. But as far as we were concerned, if you are saying treat each individual as an individual, and if you’ve got individuals coming from different cultures, then most of the time, they weren’t informed … If it was good for the European, it was good for

everybody else. So a lot of us had to fight to get things in place and of course that didn’t make us popular. Dietary care that took ages to come on board, skin care that took ages to come on board, communication even now there’s struggles with that. That was one of the main ones. Of course