Jewish refugees and the British nursing profession: A gendered opportunity

By Jane Brooks

This book follows the lives of female Jewish refugees who fled Nazi persecution and became nurses. Nursing was nominally a profession but with its poor pay and harsh discipline, it was unpopular with British women. In the years preceding the Second World War, hospitals in Britain suffered chronic nurse staffing crises. As the country faced inevitable war, the Government and the profession’s elite courted refugees as an antidote to the shortages, but many hospitals refused to employ Continental Jews.
The book explores the changes in the refugees’ status and lives from the war years to the foundation of the National Health Service and to the latter decades of the twentieth century. It places the refugees at the forefront of manoeuvres in nursing practice, education and research at a time of social upheaval and alterations in the position of women.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 7, 2024
• ISBN: 9781526167415

Jane Brooks

Jane Brooks is a Lecturer in Nursing at the University of Manchester and Deputy Director of the UK Centre for the History of Nursing and Midwifery

Book preview

Jewish refugees and the British nursing profession

NURSING HISTORY AND HUMANITIES

Series editors: Christine E. Hallett and Jane E. Schultz

This series provides an outlet for the publication of rigorous academic texts in the two closely related disciplines of Nursing History and Nursing Humanities, drawing upon both the intellectual rigour of the humanities and the practice-based, real-world emphasis of clinical and professional nursing.

At the intersection of Medical History, Women’s History and Social History, Nursing History remains a thriving and dynamic area of study with its own claims to disciplinary distinction. The broader discipline of Medical Humanities is of rapidly growing significance within academia globally, and this series aims to encourage strong scholarship in the burgeoning area of Nursing Humanities more generally.

Such developments are timely, as the nursing profession expands and generates a stronger disciplinary axis. The MUP Nursing History and Humanities series provides a forum within which practitioners and humanists may offer new findings and insights. The international scope of the series is broad, embracing all historical periods and including both detailed empirical studies and wider perspectives on the cultures of nursing.

Previous titles in this series:

Mental health nursing: The working lives of paid carers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries    Edited by Anne Borsay and Pamela Dale

Negotiating nursing: British Army sisters and soldiers in the Second World War    Jane Brooks

One hundred years of wartime nursing practices, 1854–1953    Edited by Jane Brooks and Christine E. Hallett

‘Curing queers’: Mental nurses and their patients, 1935–74    Tommy Dickinson

Histories of nursing practice    Edited by Gerard M. Fealy, Christine E. Hallett and Susanne Malchau Dietz

Nurse writers of the Great War    Christine Hallett

Beyond Nightingale: Nursing on the Crimean War battlefields    Carol Helmstadter

African nurses and everyday work in twentieth-century Zimbabwe    Clement Masakure

Who cared for the carers? A history of the occupational health of nurses, 1880–1948    Debbie Palmer

Colonial caring: A history of colonial and post-colonial nursing    Edited by Helen Sweet and Sue Hawkins

Ellen N. La Motte: Nurse, writer, activist    Lea M. Williams

Jewish refugees and the British nursing profession: A gendered opportunity    Jane Brooks

Jewish refugees and the British nursing profession

A gendered opportunity

Jane Brooks

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Jane Brooks 2024

The right of Jane Brooks to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 52616742 2 hardback

First published 2024

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Lee Fischer (Liese Einstein) in her nurse’s uniform. With the kind permission of the family of Liese Fischer.

Typeset

by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire

Contents

List of figures

Preface

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction: Nursing: gender, migration and opportunity

1Escape

2The nursing world

3War nurse

4From the post-war world to a nursing legacy

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Figures

0.1 Susan Charles’s (Ingelore Czarlinksi’s) identity document for young person admitted under the Inter-Aid Committee for Children.

0.2 Hortense Gordon ( right ) and her younger sister with the family dog, c. late 1920s?

1.1 Ruth Rawraway with a cradle of babies, probably during her employment at the Berlin B’nai Brith mother and baby home, c. 1930–34.

1.2 Maria Fuchs’s (Mia Ross’s) passport.

2.1 Aviva Gold in her Princess Margaret Rose Hospital uniform.

2.2 Cartoon showing the push and pull between Communist Russia and Nazi Germany, Nursing Times , Christmas edition, 1935.

3.1 Lisbeth Hockey in her London Hospital uniform, c . 1938–39.

4.1 Annie Altschul with her Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing (FRCN) medal, 1978.

Preface

In February 2022, I was privileged to attend a masterclass with the eminent Holocaust historian, Professor Marion Kaplan. In the introduction to this fascinating workshop, she asked all the participants about their research interests. I informed her that I was writing a book about female Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Europe and entered the nursing profession in Britain. She admitted that whilst she knew about domestic service as a means of escape and employment, she did not know about nursing. I hope that I did not bore her and the other participants when I briefly outlined the story. The profession of nursing provided a critical opportunity for escape, valued work and financial independence for this group of women. The offer of nursing as employment was also opportunistic on the part of the Government and the profession’s elite. As the war approached, Britain’s hospitals were in the grip of severe nursing shortages. The refugees could help alleviate that crisis.

As I spoke, the critical rationale for the research I was undertaking became clearer. In the middle years of the twentieth century the nursing profession and its members were beset by multiple challenges. These included difficulties in recruitment and even worse problems with retention, alongside criticisms of petty discipline, poor pay and harsh working conditions, all of which will be examined throughout this text. Yet, despite this, nursing was a useful vehicle for this cohort of women refugees to regain some self-respect, self-worth and independence. The personal testimonies of the refugees whose stories comprise this book tell of the camaraderie of the Nurses’ Home, the joy of working with patients and the wide variety of opportunities the profession offered once qualified. They also identify antisemitic and anti-German sentiments and at critical moments a complete lack of sympathy to their plight. Nevertheless, working as a nurse gave the women the chance to recoup a sense of social justice after the persecution of their co-religionists in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. It was also a highly gendered opportunity. For those who had been doctors or medical students prior to their escape it also offered the chance to retain an interest in healthcare. Nursing may not have had the status of medicine, but at least women refugees were given the chance of escape and a future supporting the health of the community. Male refugee doctors were offered no such option. I hope I can do justice to their stories.

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank the Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Historical Nursing Inquiry at the University of Virginia, USA for supporting this project through its Barbara Brodie Fellowship which I was awarded for 2019–20. My sincere thanks also to the American Association for the History of Nursing (AAHN) for honouring me with the H15 research grant in 2020 which also supported this project. These grants were invaluable in my ability to access relevant archives and libraries and to attend the Florence Nightingale Bicentenary International Conference in Italy in 2020. It was just after this conference that the world went into lockdown for two years as the COVID-19 pandemic reeled through the globe. Both the Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center and the AAHN were generous enough to extend the timeline of my grants until the world returned to near-normal. I should also like to extend my thanks to the School of Health Sciences at the University of Manchester for awarding me pump-priming funding. This money enabled me to carry out all my oral history interviews and to attend archives in the UK.

I am grateful to the following archives, museums and libraries and their staff for preserving the oral histories and documents which have been so central to Jewish Refugees and the British Nursing Profession: A Gendered Opportunity. The British Library, the Friends Meeting House Library, the Imperial War Museum, the Jewish Museums in both Manchester and London, King’s College London Archives, the London Metropolitan Archives, the People’s History Museum, the Royal College of Nursing Archives, Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives and the Wiener Library in the UK. My thanks also to the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of Nursing History, Philadelphia, the Leo Baeck Institute for their online oral history archive and Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, in the USA. Much of the material used in this monograph comes from the archives in these institutions. I have reproduced extensive quotations from both their printed and oral sources, all of which have been vital to my research. I am most grateful to the Board of Jewish Deputies for permitting me to view their restricted access material at the LMA. These documents have been critical to my understanding of the work of the Jewish Refugee Committee.

My profound thanks to all those retired refugee nurses and their families who enabled me to conduct some of the most powerful and moving interviews of my academic life. To Heidi Cowen (pseudonym), Lee Fischer, Hortense Gordon, Cilly Haar, Susi Loeffler, Leonore Lowton (pseudonym), Kitty Schafer and Ruth Shire. My sincere thanks to all their family members who supported the interviews and the relationships that were built around them. I remain deeply grateful also to all those family members whose late mothers and aunts had been refugee nurses and who sent me details of their lives, documents about their nursing work and images related to them. To Susi Loeffler’s nephew Cameron Woodrow and Aviva Gold’s daughter, Dina, to the families of Susan Charles, Eva Flatow, Charlotte Hoxter, Ruth Rawraway and Mia Ross. Several of the images donated to me are reprinted in this book with their kind permission. The contributions of all those who spoke to me and sent me documents have played a crucial role in any success this book may find. Their generosity will support the legacy of the women about whom I have written. My thanks also to Dina and her husband for taking care of me in Washington and inviting me to the Jewish Film Festival as their guest – it was delightful.

I should like to thank several academic colleagues who have offered advice and archival material which have proved essential to the book. My thanks to Professor Paul Weindling at Oxford Brookes University for giving me complete access to his Biographical Database of European Medical Refugees in Great Britain, 1930s–1950s. Not only has this archive enabled me to engage with the biographical information related to a number of refugee nurses, it also contains the memoirs of Trudie Moos, Marianne Parkes and Margaret Marflow. My sincere thanks to Professor Peter Nolan for taking time to talk to me about Annie Altschul. An especial thanks to Dr Jennifer Craig-Norton for all her unfailing support and for facilitating my access to oral histories and written testimonies from her own archive and those of the Parkes Institute at the University of Southampton. I am most grateful to Professor Eva-Marie Ulmer for her advice on the Jewish nurses from Frankfurt am Main. A huge thanks to my colleagues at the University of Manchester Centre for Jewish Studies, Professor Emeritus Philip Alexander and Professors Alex Samely and Daniel Langton, for their support and assistance with my studies and to Laura Mitchell, the previous Centre administrator. My gratitude to Professor Michael Berkowitz at University College London for his kindness and enthusiasm towards my project. Finally, my thanks to Martin Sugarman, the archivist for AJEX – the Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women, who helped me locate a number of narratives and documents in their archive.

This book would not have been possible without the support of Professors Christine Hallett and Jane Schultz, the editors for the Nursing History and Humanities series published by Manchester University Press. This is the third book of mine in the series. Their unfailing enthusiasm and dedication to promote the best of academic nursing history is essential to the discipline across the globe. My thanks also to Meredith Carroll, the commissioning editor at MUP, for her patience and excellent advice throughout the process. I am grateful to the whole production team for making this monograph possible.

I am indebted to the anonymous reviewers for the book. Their critical eye and constructive advice have been invaluable in helping me make the volume worthy of the memory of the refugee nurses. My thanks to Dr Helen Sweet for acting as my critical reader. I should also like to thank my dear friend Katherine Wackerbarth for proofreading the book for me. Her keen eye has saved me many long hours correcting bizarre syntax.

I should finally like to thank all my colleagues and friends in the Division of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work for supporting my work in the history of nursing. To Professor Dawn Dowding, my manager and to Professor Hilary Mairs, the head of the division, both my good friends. My thanks to all my colleagues and friends who form the global community of historians of nursing. Thank you to my friends and family for your love and support. Finally, my most special thanks go to my husband James Campbell for his love, support and patience throughout the writing of this book.

Abbreviations

FRCN Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing

NHS National Health Service

QNI Queen’s Nursing Institute

RCN Royal College of Nursing

SMA Socialist Medical Association

Introduction: Nursing: gender, migration and opportunity

Hortense Gordon fled Nazi Germany for England at the end of May 1939, just three months before the start of the Second World War. In her oral history Gordon recalled that she had suggested to her parents she emigrate to England on a domestic service visa: ‘And to seek, or help, work on my parents and sister also coming out.’¹ She was never able to rescue her parents or younger sister, all of whom perished in the Holocaust. Gordon was fortunate to find work with a family, even though it was work for which she was totally unsuited.² Having been brought up in a household with servants, Gordon was now required to become one herself. On 3 June 1939, she took the train to Surrey to take up employment as the ‘cook general … And I stayed with the family until October 1941 when I was able to start training as a nurse.’³

Gordon’s story is in many ways typical of Jewish and ‘non-Aryan’ refugees whose narratives comprise this book.⁴ Most refugees had least one family member who was murdered in the Holocaust. Gordon came from a relatively affluent background and had ambitions to become a medical doctor. Other refugees had similar professional aspirations. Trudie Moos and Annaliese Pearl, like Gordon, had wanted to study medicine. Lisbeth Hockey and Josephine Bruegel were medical students when they were forced to escape. Annie Altschul was studying mathematics with a view to teaching. Eva Flatow wished to be a concert pianist. Margaret Marflow’s interest was chemistry. Despite Charlotte Kratz’s assertion that nursing was a ‘non-job’ in Germany, several of the refugees whose stories are told in this book either had ambitions to be nurses or were already nurses before they escaped.⁵ Cilly Haar and Kitty Schafer stated that nursing had long been their ambition. Ruth Rawraway, Elisabeth Katz and Margot Hodge were all nursing in Jewish hospitals in Germany before they fled. Erna Harding’s parents had given her permission to train as a nurse during the First World War, although they had refused to allow her to work full-time on qualifying. In this her parents followed the accepted position of middle-class domesticity in which men went out into the public world of work and women’s domain was firmly that of the home environment.

Jewish Refugees and the British Nursing Profession: A Gendered Opportunity explores the personal and professional lives of female Jewish refugees who chose nursing as their method of gaining independence and for some, escape. Having fled Nazi Europe for Britain, many young women refugees found themselves without family, friends or financial security. At the most fundamental level, nursing offered a pragmatic method of escape and independence. It provided accommodation, training and a ready-made family in the environment of the Nurses’ Home. Even those refugees who had not considered nursing before arriving in Britain could see the opportunity it offered as the country faced the imminent threat of war. When conscription was extended to women in 1941, nursing also became one of a limited number of jobs that were accepted as war work.⁶ As will be discussed in Chapter 2, nursing was seen as positive action in support of the Allied effort against Nazism.⁷ It gave refugees the chance to help the sick and in need.⁸ Gertrude Roberts’s analysis of nursing’s liberating purpose is clear: ‘I was kind of making up for not nursing my parents; I was at last able to help someone.’⁹

The purpose of the book is to give a voice to women who supported our healthcare system during the war and gave service as nurses in the early years of the National Health Service (NHS). It bears witness to the gendered nature of ‘refugeedom’ and the determination of women refugees to forge successful careers into the latter half of the twentieth century. Finally, it foreshadows their legacies to the profession and the nation’s health. The courting of refugees by the profession and encouragement by the British Government, was not, however, entirely altruistic.

From the reforms of the nineteenth century, nursing had been highlighted as work that could offer women geographical and social mobility, independence and a professional future. Anne Summers argues that by the 1850s, middle-class women’s philanthropic zeal led them to value their place in the public arena, which had hitherto excluded them from agency. Middle-class and upper-class women started to care for the poor as lady visitors, members of religious sisterhoods and nurses.¹⁰ Some ‘lady nurses’, anxious about the loss of social status which a salary would engender, continued to refuse remuneration for their ‘work’.¹¹ The changing demographic of Britain led to a growing disparity in the number of women requiring a husband to support them and the number of men available. These changes meant that for many women seeking nursing work, a salary was a necessity.¹² As medical science and hospital expansions gathered apace in the latter years of the nineteenth century, more nurses were needed.¹³

The influx of thousands of young Voluntary Aid Detachment recruits (VADs) into nursing during the First World War might have heralded a golden age for the profession. But the end of the war also ended their interest in nursing work.¹⁴ Only a few VADs decided to undertake formal training for the newly regulated profession.¹⁵ Despite ongoing rhetoric by the nursing elite as to the profession’s value, it never managed to recruit and retain sufficient women to staff the nation’s hospitals. Reports conducted in the 1930s into the staffing crises that beset nursing highlighted multiple problems with the profession.¹⁶ However, none were able to suggest strategies for improvement that were acceptable to government finances, the medical profession’s desire for hegemony or the matrons’ determination to maintain control of their nursing staff. Most of the Jewish refugees whose narratives comprise this book came from educated and cultured homes and were keen to forge professional careers for themselves. Once in Britain, their options were severely curtailed by limited finances, gender restrictions and their alien status.¹⁷ The nation’s need for nurses opened an occupational route that could lead to a professional future, or at least a useful training during hostilities. They would therefore comprise a small but significant pool of recruits from the late 1930s and throughout the war.

Of the 55,000 Jews who fled to Britain, 20,000 were women, the majority of whom entered domestic service.¹⁸ As historian Jennifer Craig-Norton argues, they comprised the ‘largest single bloc of refugees’ who were admitted to Britain.¹⁹ The number of refugees who became nurses was never as large as those who worked in other people’s homes. In 1940, the Home Office recorded that there were 941 nurses, probationer nurses and midwives working in hospitals across the country.²⁰ Nurse historian John Stewart argues, however, that even at this early juncture of the war there were probably more.²¹ By the middle years of the war, nursing was advocated as a valuable destination for the most able women refugees. While male refugee doctors and dentists struggled to gain access to their respective professions, women doctors and medical students were encouraged to retrain as nurses and midwives.²² The story of Jewish refugee women who became nurses in Britain thus informs the gendered space between the elite male refugee and the female servant. Nurses theoretically had a professional training. It was, however, one that was founded in a highly disciplined and harsh apprenticeship system, away from the exalted world of the university. Whilst all hospital nurses were notionally under the auspices of the matron, the medical staff and hospital committee held the ultimate authority. The expectation was that nurses would be obedient and subservient. The long-heralded vocational element meant that the profession was imbued with a religious dedication to service. As one British nurse who trained at St Thomas’s Hospital in London maintained, ‘students in 1938 were told to polish their brasses to the glory of God’.²³ These attributes perpetuated the ambivalent nature of the professional status of nursing and made it unpopular with British women.

By the 1930s the crisis in nurse recruitment and retention was at a critical point. The ‘courting’ of female refugees by the profession and the Government was an undeniable case of opportunism. The nation needed nurses. Neither the country, nor the Committee of the Central Office for Refugees – the organisation established to support Jewish refugees – could afford to finance all those fleeing Nazi Europe. Nursing was essential work for a nation facing war and female refugees were ideally placed to care for the sick and needy of Britain. What could not be predicted in the 1930s was that despite the relatively low numbers of refugees who became nurses, they would contribute significantly to nursing practice, education and research. The book therefore reflects on the contribution of female Jewish refugees to nursing in a century of conflict and considerable scientific and professional change.

Migration past and present

As I began writing this book in 2020, the world was facing refugee crises on multiple fronts. Five years earlier, in 2015, it was estimated that there were 65 million refugees across the globe, a figure that approximates to one in every 113 people world-wide.²⁴ Across the African continent people fled hostile regimes and famine. Europe and its many constituent nations faced a refugee crisis, by which it meant ‘a crisis for European states, rather than a crisis for refugees’.²⁵ As historian of Jewish refugees Tony Kushner argues in the Preface to Journeys from the Abyss, ‘Isolationism and the attack of the enemy within and the enemy without in the form of the illegal/criminal alien’ were critical features in the successful ‘Brexit’ campaign in the UK.²⁶

The nursing profession itself has not been immune from such divisive tropes. Both the Nursing Times and Nursing Standard published reports revealing the nascent racism in the nursing profession and the nation’s cared-for population.²⁷ Significantly for the purposes of Jewish Refugees and the British Nursing Profession, the profession needs to understand the impact of an anti-migrant narrative that fails to acknowledge the multiplicity of diasporic identities, especially if we are charged with caring for, and with those who might discriminate against migrant nurses.

In 2015, the British Conservative Government introduced the Immigration Health Surcharge to all migrant workers from outside Europe for their access to the National Health Service (NHS). The surcharge was instituted as part of the ‘Hostile Environment’ legislation, enacted to discourage illegal immigration, but which in a number of cases also adversely affected those whose immigration was legal.²⁸ Calls to waive the fee – originally set at £200 and increased to £400 in 2018 – for healthcare workers were refused.²⁹ The disproportionate number of COVID-19 deaths among healthcare workers from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, including those who were recent migrants, increased the calls for the surcharge to be waived. On 22 May 2020, the Government finally agreed to scrap the fee for all health and social care staff. Dame Donna Kinnair – then General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing – welcomed the volte-face, but commented, ‘it is a shame it took this pandemic for the Government to see sense’.³⁰ The ambivalence of the Government to those who come to Britain to work in the NHS and social care sector, bound as it is in a trope of both recruitment and repudiation, is not new.

Pertii Ahonen, a historian of modern Europe, argues that there are significant problems with taking a diachronic approach to understanding the current refugee crises through the lens of the Holocaust.³¹ However, we can use the past to signal ways in which the present can be understood. There are perennial problems facing refugees. First, as a body of people, refugees face the risks of being ‘denied sanctuary and continuing uncertainty’.³² Second, the necessity to escape and the influx of refugees into countries of refuge are often met with a simultaneous hardening of immigration regulations.³³ Third, and importantly for this book, refugees face ongoing difficulties in gaining access to paid employment, specifically professional employment, because of language, culture and reciprocity of registration.³⁴ Qualified migrant nurses frequently end up in ‘direct care-worker jobs’ that are not commensurate with their qualifications and experience.³⁵ In fleeing conflict and disaster, refugees may suffer the loss of documents that can prove professional qualifications.³⁶ However, as the eminent human geographer Linda McDowell argues, once they are able to re-access professional nursing, the female migrant considers that she has re-established herself in her middle-class family origins.³⁷

Current immigrants to the UK are not all victims of forced migration and it is acknowledged that there are fundamental differences in the experiences of migrants and refugees.³⁸ Nevertheless, whether economic migrants or refugees, the situation for those not living in their country of origin was, and remains, perilous. Finally, the gendered aspect of refugee crises resonates across time. There are currently 232 million women living outside the country of their birth.³⁹ Women are more likely to have suffered interpersonal violence and precarious living conditions and work choices.⁴⁰ The situation for those female Jewish refugees who escaped to Britain in the 1930s was also precarious. As I explore in Chapter 1, most were young women on their own, and most had left family and friends behind and were aware of the sort of regime under which they were living. Whilst some were cared for in their new homes, many faced exploitation at best and at worst, abuse. The opportunity to enter the nursing profession in Britain meant that refugees moved into the Nurses’ Home – a place of relative safety, despite the suspicion and unkindness sometimes experienced. In her exposition of refugees who escaped on domestic service visas, Craig-Norton describes the movement from houses where the women were treated badly, to homes where they were treated as members of the family, as being ‘pulled from the margins and into the centre of family life’.⁴¹ Those who left domestic service for nursing often saw the change in the same positive terms. Edith Menkes Wolloch maintained that the sisters in the hospital:

Were marvellous because they were understanding. I was so exhausted one day, I came off duty, I had my own room. I shared a bathroom with a group of girls, of probationary nurses. I fell asleep in the bathtub and it overran and the sister just helped me mop up the bathroom, but I never heard anything, she was really so nice.⁴²

Migrant nurses, refugee voices

Not all hospitals and their staff were sympathetic to the refugees’ plight.⁴³ Admissions from refugees about the harshness of nurse training tended to be sanguinary, acknowledging that nursing was hard for all. As Lee Fischer recalled in her oral history, ‘We were all nurses. We were all young. You know, most of us started at age 18 or 19, and the war was on.’⁴⁴ Despite Fischer’s assertion that they were ‘all nurses’, personal narratives do identify antisemitic, anti-refugee and anti-German prejudices directed at the refugees by hospital authorities and fellow nurses. Although it is difficult to decipher the specific cause of the discrimination in each case, the refugees’ ‘otherness’ marked them.⁴⁵ The image of nurses as single, white women pervaded and still pervades the profession. As Julia Hallam argues, ‘as long as nursing is presented as white, middle-class and feminine those who do not fit this ideal, even if they are 25 per cent of the nursing workforce, are marginalised as outsiders, unlegitimised [sic] and lacking in status.’⁴⁶

The nursing profession had courted immigrant nurses since before the Second World War. Whilst most of the sources discuss the use of Irish nurses to bolster the newly established NHS from 1948, Britain did employ Irish nurses during the