They came with crisp uniforms folded into battered suitcases, with certificates of training carefully tucked away, with the songs of the Caribbean still fresh in their ears. Britain had called, and the Caribbean answered. The new National Health Service, launched in July 1948, promised healthcare free at the point of use, but from its earliest days it struggled. Short of nurses, short of hands, short of the human presence that would make its vision a reality. And so the call went out across the Empire.
The British Nationality Act of 1948 gave Commonwealth citizens the right to live and work in the United Kingdom, and posters soon appeared in Jamaican and Trinidadian newspapers, offering steady wages and training. In churches, schools and community halls, the message spread: the Mother Country needs you. Thousands of young women, many in their late teens or twenties, chose to answer.
Their first steps into British hospitals were taken with pride and trepidation. They were often sent directly to the hardest wards: geriatric, psychiatric, surgical. The hours were long, the corridors draughty, the patients unfamiliar. One Jamaican nurse remembered her first night on duty: “The ward was full, the patients looked at me as if I was something strange. But I smiled. I kept working. I thought: I am here to help.”
For patients, their presence could be a blessing, the warmth of Caribbean voices breaking the chill of cold wards. But prejudice followed them in. One recalled a patient saying: “Don’t put your black hands on me,” before a white colleague was called to take her place. Another remembered staff joking bitterly about “the plantation”, with the sting of “We’re here and you’re there, we progress, you don’t.” The cruelty could be casual, but it was real. And still, they endured.
Among them was Nazerone, known to friends as Neddie, Howells. She left Trinidad in March 1966, just turned twenty-two, travelling by boat for two weeks to reach Britain. She had an aunt already working as a nurse in Shrewsbury, and it was there, at Cross Houses Hospital, that she began her training. The discipline was strict, the matrons formidable, and she quickly discovered that even off duty a nurse’s life was tightly controlled. “You had to be in at ten o’clock even after a night out,” she remembered with a laugh, though at the time the hours and the rules felt unrelenting. The work was hard, the wards demanding, and she often finished shifts exhausted. Yet she found friendship and kindness too — not only from fellow recruits from the Caribbean but from British girls who welcomed her into their circle.
Shrewsbury itself, with its market town pace and surrounding countryside, struck her as gentle and manageable. “I thought it was lovely,” she recalled. “A complete contrast to the Caribbean. The weather took a bit of getting used to, but I liked that it was small, and I thought it would be a nice place to rear children if I was lucky enough to have them.” Life unfolded just as she imagined. She qualified as a State Enrolled Nurse and soon after married, for student nurses at the time were not permitted to wed until their training was complete. She and her husband raised two sons and a daughter, and she balanced night duty with motherhood, working when the children slept, caring for strangers while also caring for her own. She spent much of her career at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and at the renowned Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital in Oswestry. In the mid-1990s, determined to progress, she undertook the conversion course to become a State Registered Nurse, a recognition of her skill and professionalism earned over decades.
Her personal story is also one of love and resilience. She had left behind a sweetheart in Trinidad when she first sailed to England. Years later, after her husband passed away, she returned home and found that her first love, Peter, had waited. They spent two happy years together before he too died. Today, Neddie lives alone in the family home in Shrewsbury, surrounded by memories of both the life she built in Britain and the ties she never lost to Trinidad. Her story is one of quiet heroism: over forty years of service to the NHS, of love and loss, of family and endurance. She did not seek recognition, but she deserves it. In her life we see the essence of the Windrush nurses: duty carried with dignity, sacrifice lived with grace.
There were also pioneers whose names are now part of history. Kofoworola Abeni Pratt, who trained at the Nightingale School and became one of the first Black registered nurses in the NHS before returning to Nigeria to transform its nursing profession. Tryphena Anderson, who became Britain’s first Black health visitor in 1966. Daphne Steele, from Guyana, who in 1964 was appointed the first Black Matron in the NHS. “It did something for race relations,” she said. “And it also did something for other blacks because if one can do it, we all can do it.” Louise Da-Cocodia, a nurse and midwife in Manchester, who combined her nursing with tireless campaigning for racial justice.
For every trailblazer there were thousands like Neddie Howells, women whose names may not appear in books but who worked decades of night shifts, kept hospitals alive, and retired without honours but with the satisfaction of lives dedicated to service. They were the backbone of the NHS.
Their contribution was more than labour. They brought with them an ethic of care rooted in patience and humanity, and they reshaped the culture of the NHS itself. They were proof that diversity was not an afterthought but a foundation of the service from its very beginning. Their presence challenged ideas of who could be British, what the NHS looked like, and who it was for.
That legacy is visible in the lives of their children. Dame Donna Kinnair, born in Hackney in 1961 to Antiguan parents, is one of nine children whose family journey was shaped by the Windrush generation. She trained as a nurse at the Royal London Hospital in the early 1980s, working in intensive care and with HIV patients before becoming a health visitor in East London. Later she studied law and ethics, held senior positions in hospitals and public health, and went on to lead the Royal College of Nursing. She was made a Dame in 2008. Donna has often spoken about the barriers faced by Black nurses—promotions blocked, training limited, doors closed—and how the slow pace of change has meant that too much potential was wasted. Her leadership today is part of the inheritance of Windrush: a reminder of what was begun, of what was endured, and of what is still to be fought for.
And yet, too often the original generation were forgotten. The Windrush scandal of 2018 was a cruel reminder of how little gratitude was sometimes shown. Among those caught up in it were nurses who had served the NHS faithfully for decades. Women who had trained in British hospitals, who had worked night shifts for thirty and forty years, suddenly found themselves told they were here illegally. Some were denied access to the very healthcare system they had built, others lost jobs or pensions because they could not produce paperwork that the government itself had destroyed. One retired nurse described her humiliation at being dismissed after a lifetime of service, another spoke of the disbelief of being told she could not see a doctor in the country whose patients she had once cared for. The scandal revealed not just bureaucratic failure but something deeper — a national amnesia, a forgetting of the debt owed to those who came when Britain called. The nurses who had given their youth and strength to the health of others were forced to fight for their own right to belong. It was a betrayal, stark and painful, and it cast a long shadow over the gratitude that should have been theirs.
Still, their legacy endures. Today the NHS is one of the most diverse employers in Britain, and the sons, daughters and grandchildren of the Windrush nurses carry on their work. They are consultants, surgeons, midwives, campaigners. They embody the inheritance of service and resilience passed down through generations.
“You called and we came.” Those words are not just a line from history. They are a refrain, a testimony. They came with their hands, their hearts, their hope. They came when Britain needed them most. They came, and they stayed. And because they came, Britain was healed.