you’ve got people coming from the Caribbean, they’ve got different accents, you’ve got your French patois, Creole and what have you. A lot of people still believe in their mother tongue and they go in and they might be in pain and they communicate and because people didn’t

understand and weren’t willing to listen and they were impatient.”

Sherlene Rudder qualified as an SRN in 1967. She planned to go into midwifery and then return to the Caribbean but “as I got into it, home seemed further and further away. The patients were very friendly. A baby I delivered was named after me, so there’s a child somewhere in Southampton called Sherlene! I left Southampton as a qualified midwife and I opted for health visiting in 1971 and was sponsored by the London Borough of Brent. So I arrived in Harlesden. I think that’s when I really came into my own and found my niche. I liked the combination of health issues and the teaching … the opportunity to help out on social issues. There was dreadful housing and poverty. We had an enormous case load but there was such a tremendous spirit amongst the team of health visitors. The fact that I stayed as a health visitor for 16 years must have been positive. The work was tremendously hard but it was varied and I liked relating to individuals. I met so many individuals with sickle-cell anaemia, which I didn’t have any experience of at all. I felt, as a black public health worker, I would have to do something about it because they were just coming down the corridor with an enormous amount of problems. I worked in a health centre with an enormous amount of GPs who didn’t know anything about sickle.”

After qualifying, Denzil Nurse worked as a staff nurse. “At that time I was aspiring to the nursing

officer’s post … One of the things that impacted on about 16 of us at the time was a statement that one of the senior officers remarked to one of our nurses. He said, ‘I don’t know how the staff would react taking orders from a black man.’ One or two of my other colleagues had similar remarks made. We analysed that situation and thought there is no progression here.” Denzil Nurse came out of nursing but went into community development work in Huddersfield. “By that time there was a very large African-Caribbean community in Huddersfield and I … saw that there was quite a bit of work to do in developing different projects, like setting up a day nursery for mothers … setting up day care for the elderly, and other projects linked to Social Services.” He believes that the British Council “had mentored us well in the early days but didn’t protect us from any abuse and that is something I would want put in place now – a mentorship programme for any young person going into the NHS, so they are not disillusioned and you can pre-warn them that they are likely to come into these situations. Having said that, people are different these days. In the past you got 65 per cent of the people being abusive, it’s reversed now; it’s about 5 or 10 per cent. As they have become used to working alongside black people, understand their culture, interacted within the community, people do not see them as a threat anymore.”

Back: Getting on in the NHS