On June 22, 1948, 13 days before Nye Bevan inaugurated the National Health Service by opening its first hospital in Manchester, HMT Windrush docked at Tilbury, bringing 802 passengers who recorded their last country of residence in the ship’s records as somewhere in the Caribbean, 693 of whom intended to stay in the United Kingdom, taking up the opportunity created by the British Nationality Act shortly to be passed. The Windrush travellers have given a name to a whole generation of West Indians who arrived in Britain between the second world war and the early 1970s, responding to government recruitment drives which invited them to help in the reconstruction of the nation. Many of them found work in the newly-formed NHS, which was struggling in particular with a shortage of nurses, and by 1954, 6 years after its inception, over 3,000 women from the Caribbean were training in NHS hospitals. They followed in the footsteps of Caribbean nurses working in Britain long before the NHS and Windrush, including famous examples such as Mary Seacole, Jamaican nurse to troops in the Crimean war, and many who are less well-known from the first half of the twentieth century.

The Windrush contribution to the NHS is part of a wider and hugely significant contribution made by migrant workers from across the world over the whole of the organisation’s 75-year history. By 2003, 29% of NHS doctors and 43% of nurses were foreign-born and today over 40% of NHS hospital doctors and 25% of nurses and midwives are of black and minority ethnic heritage. In the words of one of the essays listed below ‘the relationship between the NHS and migrants has been one of dependency – it could not have existed in the form that it took without overseas employees.’ This dependency has not always and is not now adequately acknowledged, and recent creative initiatives have sought to address this ‘collective amnesia’. In 2016 a statue to Mary Seacole was unveiled in the gardens of St Thomas’s Hospital in London in 2016, the first statue in the UK to a named black woman, and in 2021 a statue commemorating the 40,000 Windrush and Commonwealth midwives and nurses was erected at London’s Whittington Hospital. In Manchester in 2019 the Louise Da-Cocodia Trust, named after former Deputy Lord Lieutenant Louise Da-Cocodia, who came to the UK in 1955 to train as a nurse and worked for 30 years in the NHS, staged a play at Hulme’s Z-Arts, titled ‘Windrush Women: The Backbone of the NHS‘. In 2017 nurse educator Laura Serrant, wrote a poem ‘You Called and We Came’ which was selected in 2022 to accompany a new Windrush monument in Waterloo station. Jenny Mitchell’s 2018 poem ‘Caribbean Service’ also vividly captures the experiences of Windrush nurses. In the 75^th anniversary year of the NHS, the Untold Stories project reminds us of the indispensable contribution of African Caribbean migrants and the communities they founded, and of overseas staff and diasporic communities more broadly.