Daughter tells inspirational story of one of Britain’s first qualified black nurses
Posted on October 4, 2012 by adwoakorkoh
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Picture this, a baby born in London’s Docklands, mother English, father Jamaican. Nothing unusual in that except Winifred Scott came into the world almost a hundred years ago spending her early years living in the shadow of the Tate and Lyle factory in Silvertown before being placed into care.
But spirited and self-possessed, she became one of Britain’s first qualified black nurses, married a political activist and counted Paul Robeson as among her regular guests at her Hampstead home.
“My mother was one of those unsung heroines, an extraordinary woman, whose life offers an insight into a little known era of Black Britain,” says her daughter Penny Klees, who is researching the family history.
“She experienced a lot of prejudice and hardship, but rather than let it get her down it made her more determined to get on.”
Born in 1917 when the sight of a black person on the streets of London would have excited a range of reactions, from curiosity to hostility, Winifred seems to have inherited her gutsy determination from her mother, Isabella, who defied convention by marrying Charles Scott. He was part of a small community of black seaman who had settled in the area, mainly in Canning Town, attracted by work at the Royal Docks. But Charles returned to the West Indies, leaving his wife to bring up their baby alone at a time when racial tensions had escalated into attacks on black men who were seen as rivals for jobs and women. “Gran found herself ostracised and couldn’t cope financially,” explains Penny.
“She felt she had no choice but to put my mother into a children’s home, which, sadly, was the fate of the majority of mixed race children then. The only difference was, my Gran kept in touch with my Mum.”
Like most working class girls of the day, Winifred was expected to either go into service or to work in a factory. She became a servant but had other ideas. “My mother set her heart on becoming a nurse and that’s what she became, training for her qualification at [St Nicholas’ Hospital] in Plumstead, southeast London, just before the Second World War,” recalls Penny with more than a touch of pride.
“As far as we know, there were only two black state registered nurses in the country at the time [1937], my mother and Princess Tsahai, Haile Selassie’s daughter, who trained at Great Ormond St Hospital.”
Winifred’s skills were soon much needed as the war hit home, and one of her deployments was to the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich to tend to casualties during German bombing raids on munition stores.
By this time she had married Peter MacFarren Blackman, a Barbadian who had studied for the priesthood. He traveled to Gambia as a missionary in the 1930s only to return a communist.
“He was completely disillusioned by the whole experience. For a start, African worshippers had to sit at the back of the church. My mother met him at a political gathering – it was a real meeting of minds but they clashed a lot.”
The couple had three children, two boys, Chris and Peter, and Penny, the youngest, who was five when the family moved to rented accommodation in Heath Hurst Rd, Hampstead.
Her father, who was also a published poet, worked for the Communist Party and the flat became a haunt for political activists, among them Paul Robeson. “Robeson was a lovely man and I remember often sitting on his knee,” recalls Penny, who attended New End primary and Haverstock secondary schools.
Winifred was by now a member of the senior nursing staff at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead and would go on to specialise in midwifery before joining the nearby St Columba’s hospice. “It was unusual for married women to work but she really loved her job and saw it as a vocation.”
But her parents had a volatile relationship and Penny would look forward to the weekends when she and her mother would escape to Silvertown to stay with her grandmother and her new husband, another West Indian seaman. Sometimes she would make the journey alone, going on shopping trips with Isabella at one of the East End’s most popular markets, Rathbone Market.
“I used to love going down there. It was wonderfully calming and I had a really special relationship with Gran. As for Silvertown, it may have been rough but it was a lot friendlier than Hampstead.”
Despite the disruption to her childhood, Winifred had grown close to her mother and would later look after her in old age. Did she ever talk about the children’s home? “No. Mum never mentioned it and neither did Gran. It was a closed subject. All I know is that they’d always kept in touch with each other.”
Although Winifred was well travelled, she never expressed a desire to seek out her father in Jamaica. “She was a most open minded person but in this instance she just wasn’t interested,” shrugs Penny, a retired potter and jewellery maker now living in Lambeth, south London.
Penny’s parents divorced when she was 13 but it was Winifred who moved out of the family home. She ended her career as a community nurse and retired to Epping in Essex. She died aged 92.
“She is someone whose story deserves to be heard,” declares Penny. “Considering her background and her generation, my mother achieved such a lot and I always look up to her as an inspiration.”
Published West End Extra 4 October, 2012
During a recent visit to the Cross Roads Women’s Centre in north London, I noticed a blown up picture of Winifred Scott in the foyer, the same one that is featured above. After expressing my surprise, Selma James, whom I had gone to interview about the 50th anniversary of the Wages for Housework campaign she’d founded, told me she and her colleagues had known Winifred, and even visited her at her home in Epping. Moreover, Winifred was included in a book they had published in 1985, Strangers&Sisters: Women, Race and Immigration that arose out of a conference held three years earlier at the Camden Centre in King’s Cross.
Within minutes the book was brought down to me, with instructions to pass it on to her daughter. Penny, who now lives in Canada, would have been both proud and astonished to hear that her mother had been associated with what would become the Cross Roads Women’s Centre. In fact, Selma is recorded as having introduced her at the conference as “a mother, a grandmother, a fighter and a lesbian”.
The book is largely a collection of verbatim speeches and in her’s Winifred describes her beginnings, how when she was a baby, her mother handed her over to be brought up by her aunt. As a young English woman, the stigma of having a black baby let alone being a single mum proved too much, particularly after an incident 1919 when, while walking along the street with Winifred, she was “forced against the wall … and she was stoned”. Her aunt, who was married to her father’s brother and had four children of her own, raised her in a loving but overcrowded household. Her mother would visit her but remained unwilling to take her in. “I don’t blame her,” Winnifred told the 350 or so people who had come to the conference. “You must remember that this was 1919.”
In the end, Winifred was sent to an orphanage at the age of nine and stayed there until she was “13 years and 11 months”, when she was put into service. “I was in service for quite a long time,” she recalls. “I learned how the rich lived, how to lay the tables, how to behave when I entertained, which was just as well because when I was Peter Blackman’s wife we entertained people like Stafford Cripps [post-war Labour chancellor] and [Arthur] Creech Jones [post-war colonies minister], all the parliamentary people.”
It was while working as a maid for Sir Reginald Kennedy-Cox, a social reformer and founder of the Dockland Settlements (including one in Canning Town), that she got the opportunity to train as a nurse. “He liked me,” she explained. “I told him what I wanted; he said if I liked to go to night school and try and get a London matric[ulation qualification], he would try and get me into a hospital, which he did. Matron Wilkinson at the Plumstead hospital said she was willing to take me if I could make the grade, which I made it my business to do.”
The press made a great deal about a black servant girl with no formal education becoming a nurse, and when her mother died she found a collection of all the newspaper cuttings about it among her papers. “I was a vanguard, a leader,” Winifred declared to applause. “I was the first coloured woman, London-born negro girl to be accepted into the nursing service of England. I was the first non-grammar school child to be accepted into the nursing profession of England.” However, she had had to study twice as hard as everyone else to get there, she said, reading her books after lights were out under the bedclothes with a torch until three in the morning in the nurses’ home.
After the start of the Second World War, nurses from the Caribbean joined the service as part of the war effort. She became friendly with one of them, a member of of the League of Coloured Peoples, a civil rights organisation that had been set up in 1931 by the Jamaican-born Peckham doctor Harold Moody. Winifred recounts how she was invited to one of its meetings. “I went along full of trepidation. I’d never met a coloured man, let alone gone to meet them at a meeting.” It was a fateful occasion for it was here that she found herself “entering into a black community” and meeting her future husband Peter Blackman.
Although as his wife she encountered many leading political figures, her role was confined to playing hostess: “I wasn’t allowed to join in. I wasn’t allowed to say anything. I mean, I was only a woman … I may as well have been in purdah.” It was clearly a difficult marriage but she learned a lot and continued to work as a nurse while bringing up their three children. When Penny got married, she and her husband agreed to an amicable divorce.
It was while working at the Royal Free Hospital in the late ’50s when she was 42 that she met a young woman who invited her along to the Gateways Club, a pioneer lesbian nightclub on the King’s Rd in Chelsea, telling her to her face that she was gay. “I can tell, you don’t like men, you don’t like your husband,” she said, to which Winifred responded, “Yes, I don’t like being pushed about, I don’t like being pulled about and I don’t like being raped.” At Gateways she was the only black woman but she made many long lasting friends.
Years later and stricken with multiple sclerosis, she made overtures to a black lesbian support group, presumably a part of the Wages for Housework campaign network. But after entertaining members in her home, they never got back to her. “I can only assume that when they saw I was an elderly woman in a wheelchair, they didn’t want to know,” she stated, rounding up her speech with the stern reprimand, “How can we expect other people to mind what we do when our own are not interested in their elderly people, who were the fighters and made it possible for them to come out in this country?”
Strangers&Sisters: Women, Race and Immigration is published by Falling Wall Press
http://www.westendextra.com/reviews/features/2012/oct
