Caribbean women in the health service often had the double burden of combining work and children. Some had support from sisters and matrons; many had reorganise their working patterns, often working night shifts.

Tryphena Anderson remembers: “One of the things you didn’t do those days is get married because they didn’t have married people in nursing. Even after you finished your training it was hard to get work in the NHS at the time. I left in 1954 and I had a baby and then I started again at Grantham Hospital. Then I had my second baby while working at the same hospital. To continue nursing I had to find somewhere that would take me with two children and allow me to live out, as approximately 98 per cent of nurses were required to live in. I met this lovely lady who was working at a psychiatric hospital called the Coppice, which was affiliated to the Mapperley Hospital. She told the matron who then said, ‘I can only take five students, if they pass their exams I could have a place.’ Well I’ve never prayed for somebody that I did not know to pass so much! Come November, I’ll ask, did they pass? No! Then I had to pray again! … I was successful in the end and started at the Coppice in 1958. Even at Christmas, you had to work. Do you know Christmas is the hardest time for someone to look after your children? This Christmas I had to work and I went to matron and I said, ‘Matron, I would love to work, but I haven’t anyone to look after my children. Could I bring them to work?’ She said, ‘Yes Nurse

Anderson, of course.’ She was so nice.” Tryphena Anderson subsequently applied to the Nottingham City Hospital to do postgraduate training, qualified as a midwife and was later accepted for a year’s course in health visiting training, “the first black person on a bursary in health visiting at that time.”

For Erena Kydd, “the only way to be with the kids was to go back into nursing so I started doing nights in 1965 at Amersham Hospital for 11 months and I then transferred to Booker Hospital in High Wycombe. It was a cottage hospital for the elderly. I worked as an auxiliary in the evenings. The duties at that time was to do the washing, take the patients out of their beds, give them a bath and dress them. To me I felt as if because I am a foreigner and I’m black I was the one who was disadvantaged because every dirty part

Muriel Bussue at Lodge Moor Hospital paediatric ward, 1974

belongs to me and nobody else. So I had to keep on doing the dirty work and I felt to myself, I shouldn’t be doing it more than the others they should take a part in it as well. You had to do everything as a trained staff, put in catheters etc, but the pay was bad, for the whole month it was £25. We auxiliaries never got a raise. The majority of auxiliaries were from the Caribbean.”

Louise Ghartey decided to move into physiotherapy and started in one of the satellite hospitals of St Thomas’s as a junior physiotherapist. “It was an odd position because it wasn’t the type of hospital where a newly qualified physiotherapist would normally want to work but due to the kindness of the principal of the school who had heard about my demise of my stillborn baby, she offered me this job and I was extremely grateful. This was a job where I worked primarily with patients who had polio. You were on call and you had to work during the week and weekends. I worked at St Thomas’s for eight months and from there I applied for a job in a small general hospital called St James’s in Balham, which has now closed. I started as a junior physiotherapist but while there I was promoted to a senior physiotherapist in less than a year. I worked there until September 1973, I had my first child and stayed at home until the beginning of 1974. It was extremely difficult fitting in the hours with having a small child and taking