‘I REALISED I COULD MAKE A DIFFERENCE THROUGH NURSING’
Dame Elizabeth Anionwu shares her remarkable story of overcoming a childhood of shame and discrimination to become one of the UK’S greatest nurses
Meet Dame Elizabeth Anionwu
The most precious photograph I possess is of me sitting on my mother’s knee on a garden bench; I’m about one, I have an Afro head of hair and I’m holding a rattle. My mother, Mary, is smiling and looking straight at the camera. It was almost unheard of at this time for a white mother to have a brown-skinned child, but she’s so proud. When people see this picture, they often tell me how uplifting they find it. My mother came from an Irish working-class family and there was huge pride in 1945 when she won a place at Newnham College, Cambridge, to read Classics. But on a trip back to the family home in Stafford, her mum noticed she couldn’t fit into her skirt. Mary broke down and admitted she was six months pregnant. The shame of it, in a devoutly Catholic family, was overwhelming, but a priest was called and a plan agreed for her to stay in a catholic mother-and-baby home in Birmingham. Later, the child would move to the family home under the pretence of being fostered, or a late arrival for Mary’s own mother.
But Mary was keeping a second secret. My father was an African law student. Being brown-skinned meant I remained at the mother-and-baby home and, for the first six months, my mum stayed, too. I couldn’t imagine how she must have felt when she had to eventually leave me in a children’s home and return to her family. It was three days before Christmas and she could make no mention of my existence as her siblings weren’t aware that she’d been pregnant. Even worse, after that, she could only visit me for two hours, twice a month.
It must have been so tough for my mum, especially as she’d decided not to return to Cambridge in the hope that, if she had a job, she could save money and get me back. As things worked out, though, I’d remain in Catholic children’s homes until I was nine. There were no other Black children in the home and the older I got, the more aware I was of being different. I remember shutting myself in the wash room and scrubbing my face with harsh carbolic soap. I’d hoped to make my skin lighter; instead, I ended up in the sick bay. I suffered from bad eczema, and the soap caused a flare-up. Looking back, it shows how isolated and miserable I was.
One person impressed me: the ‘white nun’, so-called because she wore a white habit rather than a black one. She was a nurse and she’d treat the red, itchy skin on my arms with coal tar paste and apply bandages. I was struck by how good she was at distracting me from the pain – saying words like ‘bottom’, which you wouldn’t expect from a nun, always made me laugh.
Eventually, I was able to leave the home. My mum had married and I became part of a ready-made family; my stepfather had a son and he and my mother had more children together.
DRAWN TO NURSING
Like my mother, I was bright at school; ‘university material’, as my teachers put it, but the ‘white nun’ had made me determined to go into nursing. In those days, that wasn’t a degree subject, so I started training at Paddington General in London. I was good at nursing, but I knew it would be difficult to get on. There didn’t seem to be any Black ward sisters. Much later, a former colleague told me she remembered thinking, ‘What a shame Elizabeth won’t be able to go far.’
I scrubbed my face with harsh carbolic soap hoping to make my skin lighter
After nursing, I did midwifery, training in Edinburgh. There was little time to talk to the new mothers, but I remember one who was struggling to breastfeed and I sat with her, encouraging her to relax. She managed to breastfeed, but she developed postnatal depression and was transferred to another unit. When she eventually recovered, her husband contacted me and I visited her and the baby, thrilled at how much better she now was. When I returned to my hospital, the ward sister, who’d been told about my visit, was furious. ‘Who gave you permission to do this?’ she kept asking. ‘Just who do you think you are?’
The truth was that I wasn’t sure who I thought I was because I’d never felt whole, like some piece of the jigsaw was missing. I left midwifery, went back to London and qualified as a health visitor, which I loved. I was interested in the totality of my patients and not just in their illnesses.
Being a health visitor was also my introduction to the disease sickle cell anaemia, a potentially fatal inherited blood disorder that’s prevalent in the Black community. As long ago as 1949 a scientist called Linus Pauling was writing about it, but there I was in the 1970s and the families whose children had it weren’t getting adequate support.
I’d also discovered someone else who there was little information about: the Victorian nursing pioneer Mary Seacole. She hadn’t been mentioned during my nursing training, but she was on a par with Florence Nightingale; I identified with Mary as she, too, was mixed race. In both cases, the story of Mary Seacole and the way families with sickle cell
anaemia were treated, there had been so many omissions because of race.
FINDING MY FATHER
I knew what mattered; helping families with sickle cell and raising the profile of Seacole. And there was another big element to bring into play: my own Black heritage. All I knew about my father was his name, Lawrence Anionwu, and that he was Nigerian. I’d had my mother’s name, Furlong, all my life. I asked a barrister friend, who had mentioned he was teaching Nigerian students, if he could help me find my father. I thought he might be in Africa, but a few days later, my friend said he’d found him – right there in London.
Soon after that, I rang the doorbell of the house where my father lived with his wife, Regina. A short, bespectacled and dark-skinned man opened it. He hugged me, stood back, smiled and said, ‘Welcome!’ I remember his warm embrace and the tears that came to my eyes. He’d known I existed and had tried to find me but failed because my mother’s family had moved away.
I’d feared I’d be rejected, but here was an amazing acceptance and I filled in that side of my story that I’d known nothing about. My father was affluent, a successful lawyer, and had been a highly-placed official in the Nigerian government, and Nigeria’s first ambassador to Italy. Getting to know him made a huge difference to how I saw myself.
My mother was surprised I found him so quickly and was delighted that we got on so well. I knew my father for eight years before he died in 1980 at the age of 59. With his support, I visited Nigeria and met the family I’d never known, but he also gave me career advice, which no one else had ever offered. He made me realise I could take nursing somewhere; I could make a difference.
A few months after my father’s death, I went to a wedding and met a Nigerian student called Nick. Our relationship moved quickly; losing my father had triggered a desire in me to have my own family. At the age of 34, I found myself pregnant. It was only after I had my daughter, Azuka, that Nick admitted he was married. Even though he was going to get divorced, I could never trust him again. We remained friends, but I raised our daughter alone. Today, Azuka is an actress and a playwright, and she has a daughter of her own, Rhianne, who’s 13.
TAKING UP THE BATON
My mother and I were always close. At the end of her life in 2003, I was able to nurse her in her final illness.
Today, I’m in my mid-70s, and I’m Elizabeth Anionwu. Four years after meeting my father, I changed my name to his, by deed poll: I was his daughter and it felt right to take his name.
I ended up studying sickle cell anaemia in the US, and set up a centre in Brent and advised on others across the UK, offering counselling to families affected by it. As a professor of nursing at the University of West London, I created The Mary Seacole Centre for Nursing Practice, to encourage more diversity, and I was vice chair of the appeal to raise money for a statue of Mary Seacole, which was unveiled by Baroness Floella Benjamin outside London’s St Thomas’ Hospital in 2016, the UK’S first-ever statue of a named Black woman.
I became a Dame in 2017, and for the 70th anniversary of the founding of the NHS,
I was named one of the most influential nurses in its history, an incredible honour, of which I am immensely grateful.
Rhianne keeps me up to speed with music and culture, so I was already a Dua Lipa fan and had downloaded her song We’re Good, when a friend rang earlier this year to congratulate me, saying I’d had a shout out at the BRIT Awards. Each winner was asked to share their award with someone they admired, and Dua Lipa had dedicated her British Female Solo Artist award to me: I was thrilled.
Thinking about my life, I owe much to my mother. My autobiography is called Dreams From My Mother and it reflects that I achieved what my mother could no longer achieve. She had to drop her plans of an academic career for me. But what she gave to me meant I could take up the baton. She lived to see me get my doctorate; if there was one thing I’d say to her now it would be ‘thank you’. * Dreams From My Mother (Seven Dials) by Dame Elizabeth Anionwu is published in paperback on 16 September