Nottingham connected
had to earn in those days for ourselves
as well as to help the family. On top of
this, my grammar school was facing
closure in my final year and teachers were
leaving. I decided to on radiotherapy
after spending a day in the radiotherapy
department of the local general hospital.
I would recommend anybody who is
wanting to do something to actually
volunteer, to go and spend some time
to see what they will be doing before
they decide. There are 20+ places
for radiography students who had
studied together but only 4 places for
radiotherapy students, the remainder
were for diagnostic radiography. Another
reason for my decision to choose
radiotherapy was having read the story
of athlete Lillian Board’s chemotherapy treatment. There
are still very few black therapeutic radiographers - 99% of
what we do is treat cancer.
In 2005 I spoke at the annual radiotherapy conference
and noticed how few BME radiographers there were
there - about 6 out of 200 (including me!), three of whom
had been sent over from Africa to train here and were
returning! Most recently I spoke at the 2017 Radiotherapy
Conference in Newcastle as an invited speaker and
noticed little change, at which point I did raise awareness
that this profession needs to attract more diversity,
particularly as we have a diverse population, and many
languages. I encourage allied health professionals to
value diversity and would like to see more young BME
people take up the profession.
With reference to my Honorary Doctorate, it felt fitting
that it should be awarded during July, which is Ethnic
Minority Cancer Awareness Month. I’m actually also on
the management committee of Cancer Equality, the
charity that set up EMCAM.
I hope they take that on board
Well they did this time and a few people commented
on it afterwards. So i realised I could’ve been either the
only black radiographer--apart from those that had come
from other countries. My principal—I thank god for miss
harper--she actually went over to the Caribbean, recruited
some girls who wanted to train as radiographers, brought
them back to this country and found places for them in
Lincoln and Nottingham and different places to train
them. Then they went back over and the Jamaican
government—I don’t know if they were assisted form
here--set up the first radiotherapy department, I believe
News & Sport
5
in the Caribbean, in Kingston. I actually
saw what had come out of that when I
went over in ‘76, that they had another
department in Montego bay that they
were developing. The girl that was
actually heading up that department
that hadn’t opened yet, was from
Lincoln. She was a black radiographer
and she did actually offer me a job
‘cause I’d been qualified about a year
then and I was going to take it and I
was writing back to offer my services
when Lindsay my husband court me
and asked me out.
Everything changed, he swept you
off you feet!
Well no! We were friends for some
time before and he proposed just before I was offered
a job in Montego Bay (which I didn’t go for in the end).
I had this plan that you know I would get the skills and
actually… You had to, in those days, be qualified for three
years before you got any progression. But there were no
jobs in Nottingham because nobody moved. Because
people didn’t have benefits for maternity rights that
they have now. I basically had a choice of either going
to leeds—I was offered jobs at Leeds, Hammersmith
hospital in London and Westminster hospital. And I
chose Westminster because it was easier for me to get
back home and in the last year of my training was when
we had the devastating news that our mother had breast
cancer. My mother was articulate, she was the district
women’s leader for our church, which covered from the
east midlands right up to Yorkshire and Liverpool. So she