Overseas recruitment

After the end of the second world war, nurse training in Salisbury offered a great opportunity for a career and a new lifestyle. Many overseas students arrived from countries that had been devastated by the war. One German student nurse recalls, “We worked alongside Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Swiss, French, Polish, Latvian, Estonian, German and Austrian nurses and there was an Indian and Nigerian nurse.”

The Salisbury School of Nursing, in the 1950s-1970s, attracted candidates by reputation, as well as Salisbury being a cathedral city within easy reach of London and the coast too. They school also offered midwifery, theatre, plastic surgery and ear, nose and throat courses too. Matron at the time recalls, “It was not a problem to maintain a flow of student and pupil nurses. Numbers were augmented during the fifties when a number of overseas candidates came from countries including Hong Kong, Uganda, Finland and Iran; this sort of recruitment continued during the sixties and seventies. Army nurses who came from Tidworth Military hospital for geriatric experience.”