Migration has long been at the heart of nursing. Well before the NHS, Nightingale nurses journeyed across the globe, while several RCN founders travelled as military nurses, in South Africa and beyond.
The British Empire and its legacy lay at the heart of these movements. British nurses migrating from the UK tended to move to British colonies. In turn, nurses from these countries – colonial British citizens – were motivated to train and nurse in the “Mother Country”.
Today, around a quarter of the 794,000 registered nurses in the UK are nationals of other countries. As nursing shortages show no signs of decreasing, health care in the UK relies on the expertise of these migrants, just as it did in past decades. International nurses bring much-needed experience, while the skills of students and nursing support workers from abroad are essential to our health care system.
This exhibition explores the stories of some of those who have moved to care, from the 19th century to the present day.
Nursing overseas and the British Empire
Early migration of nurses to and from the UK was rooted in British Colonialism. Unlike doctors, British nurses abroad only started to be sent abroad in large numbers in the mid-19th century. By this time, the British Empire ruled over 400 million people and nursing was just becoming a recognised profession.
Influenced by Florence Nightingale, the ideal nurse embodied cleanliness, a good moral character and Christian values. Nightingale and contemporaries and her contemporaries made the racist argument that these qualities were lacking in colonised countries. Nursing was seen as a tool to “civilise” the local population. Soon, programmes training local nurses in European-style healthcare were introduced across the British Empire.
Challenging conventions
British nurses moving overseas were enterprising and unconventional – travelling to faraway places and working in male-dominated environments. But they also upheld racist hierarchies in colonial hospitals – treating local nurses with prejudice and dominating senior positions. Some had religious motives, working for Christian missionary organisations.
Yet, despite discrimination and intrusive entry assessments, many overseas nurses used their British education to seek training or employment in the UK. Others stayed and developed the nursing profession in their own countries.
Far from Home: Refugees, war and recruitment
By 1940, there were nearly a thousand refugee nurses and probationers working and training in Britain, many Jewish. For young women, like Annie Altschul and Lisbeth Hockey, nursing and domestic service visas were the main route out of Nazi-occupied Europe. Others, like Edith Bown and Rosa Sacharin, arrived on the Kindertransport.
As teenagers, both saw nursing as a route towards independence far from home. While life for Jewish refugees was not easy, and all recounted experiences of discrimination, many made significant contributions to their new profession. Hockey became the first UK professor of nursing in 1971, while Altschul influenced the growth of nursing in the university sector, long before nursing became the graduate profession it is today.
Jewish refugee girls passing through UK customs, December 1938. Credit: The Wiener Holocaust Library (Above)
A hostile environment
During the Second World War, nursing shortages worsened and the British Government relaxed restrictions on “foreign” nurses. Yet, even in the late 1940s, some hospitals still had a “colour bar”, refusing to recruit black students and staff. Faced with discrimination, many nurses who responded to the Government’s recruitment drive and migrated to the UK, were pushed into State Enrolled Nursing or into learning disability, mental health or geriatrics – areas of nursing seen as less prestigious at the time.
Student nurses from Nigeria arriving in Southampton onboard the HMS Almanzora, 28 May 1946. Credit: Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images (Above)
Edith Bown (née Jacobowitz)
Edith was fourteen when she arrived in England on the Kindertransport with her brother Gert in 1939. The pair were sent to Millisle Refugee Resettlement Farm in Northern Ireland. They enjoyed the countryside but struggled with homesickness.
Finding limited opportunities as a young woman, Edith started her nurse training in County Down in 1942. As a Jew and “enemy alien”, it took more than a year for her to be offered a place.