didn’t think I would get the job but being short-listed was good enough for me … I told my secretary to cancel any appointments … because I would not be shifting until Greenwich rings … the phone rings and a voice said, ‘Am I speaking to the newly appointed assistant director of nursing?’ I just whooped with joy … You didn’t have black assistant directors of nursing.” Later she became the first black professional private secretary of the Chief Nurse of England. “There were no books to show me what to do … I seized the opportunity for a number of reasons … as a career progress [and] … because I wanted to show other black nurses that opportunities exist beyond aspirations.”

Thelma Lewis left psychiatric nursing and qualified as a laboratory technician. She worked at St Paul’s Hospital, Coventry, covering “five aspects of medical technology, histology, haematology, biochemistry, bacteriology, parasitology … From there I went to St George’s Hospital, Hyde Park Corner in 1958 to 1968 as a technician and went up to senior grade. You had to go to the wards to take the blood and you tested them depending on the level you were at. I also did antenatal clinics and blood transfusion work. It was a very wide field. Then I spent some time in the Eye Institute of Ophthalmology from 1968 until 1970. Then they called me back at George’s and I went to the Royal Dental in Leicester Square from 1970 to 1984 and did

haematology there until the age of 50 when I took early retirement.” She thinks that “Maybe because people from the Caribbean are very adaptable and open-minded about things; if one door closes another one opens … All was well with the hospitals that I worked because at that the time the students from Africa used to come over to write their exams, although their work was of a similar standard over there. So one could see fellow black students ahead of me because they came to write their finals.”
Having qualified as a dietician, Siburnie Ramharry worked at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, then felt the time had come to move up. She thought of specialising in paediatrics, “with children on special diets … also St Mary’s had a renal unit and I used to cover that, dealing with special diets for renal patients and dialysis as well. So it was quite an exciting time to be at St Mary’s … I applied for various jobs and one very nice dietician who worked at St George’s said, ‘Why are you applying for a senior 1 job, you’re really more experienced than this.’ I stated I had been abroad and I didn’t really know what I should be aiming for. So she invited me to come and have a chat with her and she suggested that with my experience in Bermuda I could now apply for manager’s jobs.

“A job came up with the Liverpool Health Authority as a dietetic manager and I was successful in getting it, they wanted someone to build up their community services. I really

enjoyed it. You arrive in Liverpool from Bermuda thinking, ‘What am I doing here and I can’t even understand their accents!’ I think somebody asked, ‘Why did you apply for the job in Liverpool?’ and I said, ‘it was because that’s where the Beatles came from, so it can’t be all bad!’ I really loved it there and it was quite a large area to cover. I started in 1980 and was there for about eight years.”
Nelson Auguste progressed from general porter to theatre porter and supervisor “I liked to work in that hospital and enjoyed my job. I became supervisor because when you’re dealing with patients you had to be careful and there were Spanish and Moroccans who couldn’t speak English properly so it was felt best that I took the job because sometimes you might take the wrong person to theatre; especially blood, plasma and oxygen, you’ve got to be careful not to use the wrong thing. I used to prepare the patient, make sure the gloves, oxygen were ready and if the patient arrested everything is prepared on that trolley. There were Dominicans, Trinidadians and other people from different islands as well as other nationalities at the hospital.
“I became a shop steward because I was a union member and the present shop steward was

a chef and they decided he was not on the staff’s side but on the management side. So they nominated me and that was it.”