IMMIGRANTS TO LONDON: 1960s. NO IRISH

The Swinging Sixties were summers of free love, but not for the Irish lured to the nirvana of London town.

NHS adverts filled newspapers and noticeboards in church halls and post offices all over Ireland. When they got to London, the young immigrants were confused to read: “No Blacks. No Irish. No dogs.” Not just in B&B windows at the seaside on their day trips, but in corner shops in Paddington. This was all before IRA bombing began in England. 

London adults at the start of the 1960s were still the war generation. They had fought, or their close relatives had fought, and defeated the fascists. Homes, schools, places of work and roads had been bombed. The country urgently needed to rebuild the economy to cover the cost of war and deliver the promise of free healthcare for all. Hundreds of thousands of additional workers were required. The NHS and UK manufacturing industry courted the young labour of Ireland and other former colonies. Ireland was a poor economy of only 2.8 million people in 1961, each family raising 4 to 14 children.

Irish girls were leaving school with top marks in all subjects. Their choices of work were a convent or farming. If they were interested in medicine, they could not afford the study. Even to train to be a nurse in Dublin meant paying fees, buying your own uniforms, books and equipment; the waiting list for a course was 8 years long. And where would they sleep? From the late 1950s, Catholic matrons from England did the rounds of the counties of Ireland. They interviewed these girls and offered them immediate places, sometimes with a choice of hospital, training fees and everything paid, with free accommodation in nurses’ quarters. It was a source of pride and relief for Irish parents when their daughters were accepted. The training in England was good – a full medical foundation. But were they safe? The daughters would never tell. The parents would find it hard to believe.

One young girl, just turned 18, made the same journey as tens of thousands of other nurse cadets, on a cattle boat, sitting on her suitcase. It was her first time away from her local town. She was the first-born girl in her family, hard-working, accustomed to helping her parents; she would pave the way for siblings to follow.  The large concrete buildings did not resemble the London of her books, and there was no training in what to do on escalators – sit or stand, or how to tell the direction of the tubes. No cultural introduction to 1960s London or preparation for the prejudice she would face.

The Irish nurses were caring, talkative young women who warmed the bedpans and were gentle with dressings; listened to patients and provided dignity during bed baths. Despite this, some patients objected to being tended by ‘an Irish’. People insulted them openly, said they were ‘unclean’, part of the ‘pikey brigade’, which was not a term the girls knew. They were homesick, conscripted as if in barracks by the Catholic matrons. Off-shift, they might be lonely and wander into town just to be among people, but they were vulnerable outside the watchful eyes of the hospital. Offences against them were not treated seriously. Being Catholic, they were ashamed to speak up and felt guilty for the attention they attracted. As tensions grew in Northern Ireland, so did impunity to target Irish Catholic girls out alone in London. It was easy to spot them – young woman in a nurse’s uniform, especially in the parts of West London where the Irish settled. Sectarian violence was being played out in London while film crews scurried to Belfast and Derry.

Why were the Irish the sole nationality singled out in those notices?

• Neutrality in the war. Irish soldiers signed up to fight with the UK, US and Canada and those too old to fight worked in UK factories to support the war.
• Catholics in Northern Ireland staged protests to demand the same housing rights as Protestants. They were civil, not military, but as disquieting as the CND marches in Trafalgar Square.
• Belief the Irish were illiterate farmers, unskilled in urban interaction.
• The extent of pain and trauma of soldiers returning from war was not something the UK population was prepared for, the horrific injuries, suffering, TB and infectious diseases. It was the Irish nurses who cared for TB patients, with very little PPE.
• Young Irish men were spilling out of London pubs on a Friday or Saturday night, their pockets full of English pounds from excavating tunnels and tarring all week. Initially their expenses were low – sharing bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchens in boarding houses, and they did not have wives to stay home for, unlike their English counterparts. It was as if they had no care in the world.
• Unachievable body image and beauty were demanded of men and women equally, on paper and screens. Marilyn was apparently free to be as sexual as a man, yet public trials from Christine Keeler to Margaret Argyle showed a stone age repression of women by men still wielding power.
• English women were exhausted, terrorised by the blitz and harshness of those long six years. Terrorized also for their sons, fathers, brothers and loved ones overseas. The apparition of fresh-faced young girls in uniform, cracking jokes, singing and dancing at the weekends, holding the hands of their menfolk in hospital beds, did not make London women feel any more attractive.
• The point of the war was to preserve English traditions, keep the native tongue, defend the borders.
• Relief with the end of the war was eroded by relentless warnings of a nuclear explosion. Accidental, deliberate, the Cuban Missile Crisis, all reinforced by broadcast images of Gagarin above our heads.
• The Beatles were loved despite being Irish. JFK was mourned despite being Irish. This much success and glamour was not present in Londoners’ homes.

Could this hostility to immigrants ever happen again?

Only Hounslow as a London Borough voted to Leave. No London constituency returned a Reform MP. Today on the coast, we see large signs in Polish proclaiming ‘Kindness to Poles’ and in Ukrainian, welcoming Ukrainians for jobs and to the churches. Are most of London’s 8.8 million residents today the children or grandchildren of immigrants? I believe so. Surely such prejudice could not happen again. 

The Migration Museum in Lewisham offers the last week of a year’s touring exhibition, Heart of the nation: Migration and the making of the NHS.

It closes on 27 July 2024. Free admission.

https://www.migrationmuseum.org/event/heart-of-the-nation-migration-and-the-making-of-the-nhs-lewisham

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 Tracey Chippendale-Gammell

Picture: One of 3 NHS adverts inside the back cover of the Irish Nurses’ Magazine, Vol 21 November 1954. © University College Dublin, National University of Ireland, Dublin.

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