Aneurin Bevan visits a ward on the NHS opening day in 1948

• IS the Whittington the most appropriate place to site a 7×7-foot statue which appears to deny and erase the history of Irish nursing in Islington?

Although it’s praiseworthy that Islington’s Labour council and the Whittington Hospital wish to commemorate Windrush and Commonwealth NHS nurses and midwives, immigrant Irish nurses and midwives from the new Free State/Republic of Ireland, already working, pre-1948, in the British health service, formed and grew the backbone of the new NHS.

At times, the nursing staff of the Whittington was over 85 per cent Irish. With between 45,000 and 55,000 Irish immigrants, mainly women, arriving each year, the NHS came to depend very heavily on the services of Irish nurses. By 1951, 11 per cent of nurses and midwives in Britain were Irish.

An amalgam of three hospitals, the newly created Whittington joined the NHS in 1948. These hospitals would have already been staffed with Irish nurses from this traditional Irish area of Archway, which had the sixth highest percentage Irish population of any UK constituency outside Northern Ireland.

Thus because of the catchment area, a large percentage of the women giving birth would have been from the Irish community and, traditionally, Irish families are large.

There are no statues to the Irish nurses who saved the NHS from collapse. The body of this statue is different from the representation of the newly delivered baby and could be construed as suggesting that the Irish could not birth their own children!

This attitude of incompetence was fostered in colonial times to enable the indigenous Irish to be stripped of their lands.

In the early 20th century, Irish nurses helped staff British hospitals, Irish labour the factories, mines, land, and construction and with the outbreak of the First World War, and the promise of relaxation of colonial rule in return, over 200,000 Irish people joined the British army.

During the Second World War, Irish nurses braved torpedoes, bombs, and bullets to sail to Britain to staff its pre-NHS medical services. The Irish also risked their lives as ambulance and fire brigade staff, nightly enduring Hitler’s Blitz.

Nurses like Mary Ellen Morris from Galway were part of the D-Day landings. Two young Irish nurses won the newly created (King) George Medal – civilian equivalent of the Victoria Cross – rescuing people from a blitzed building.

Over 1,000 Irish pilots and crew lost their lives in the Battle of Britain with Irish women like 21-year-old Dubliner Annette Hill, undertaking the dangerous job of flying spitfires to military airfields and between maintenance units.

Overall, the supposedly neutral Irish contributed over 400,000 personnel to British forces and won 11 Victoria Crosses and 780 awards for gallantry.

Yet, publicly funded bodies like the BBC, put energy into airbrushing us out of history. Call the Midwife lacked Irish nursing characters, until recently when it acquired, despite the size of our community, one only.

Occasionally, Irish subsidiary characters were featured, but in a derogatory way, whereas other communities’ characters are portrayed with respect.

The BBC’s NHS documentaries have not, despite the facts, credited the overwhelming number of Irish nurses within the NHS, with saving it.

This Orwellian rewriting of history must stop.

The peacetime, 1948 arrival of the Empire Windrush was welcome, and this generation included my partner’s relatives. But in the time this liner was being tied off at Tilbury, many Irish boats, a night’s journey away, had docked with their cargo of Irish nurses, midwives and trainees, responding to Britain’s many recruitment drives in Ireland.

The Irish, whose labour constructed the Whittington, the roads that lead up to it, the nearby tube station and neighbourhood, are apparently, in the words of the weavers, “Good enough to make the cloth, but not good enough to wear it”.

RÓISÍN NÍ ĊURRÁIN
ChildrenofEmer.com