The BRI’s first Black nurse May Tanner: What was nursing like in the 50s?
There are many hidden histories at the glenside hospital museum, a gallery based in what opened in 1861 as a bristol asylum. One of these collections highlights the tremendous work of May Tanner, the first black nurse in the city of bristol.
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00:00 I mean looking after people was my main concern and I did that. Well I hope I did that.
00:11 So I am here outside the Glenside Hospital Museum and we're going to be chatting to May Tanner
00:16 who was the first woman of colour to nurse at the Bristol Royal Infirmary Hospital.
00:21 I had the whole hospital to look after. You know, if there was an accident at Bristol Airport
00:31 I had to create everything for people to go to that major accident if it was.
00:39 You know I enjoyed it and the experience was great.
00:45 We had this book in our collection and in this book are 320 students.
00:52 Each page is a student and from 1956 to 1966 every single student is documented in here
01:03 for the first sort of six week to eight week training course.
01:07 They came from all over the place but 22% from our Commonwealth, 17% from the Caribbean
01:17 and this is between 1956 and 1966 so that's a lot of people from the Commonwealth.
01:24 So we thought oh wow there's a story there.
01:26 I came to, is it Fishponds or? I went to Bristol Maynard Hospital in 1956
01:37 and I started my training there to become a state-related mental nurse.
01:45 This I did and I felt, I felt as though I was helping people.
01:55 We forget how important our health is and I think what I've learnt doing it is how important
02:04 it is to remember that mental health is so different to physical health.
02:08 Being a nurse was quite interesting because it was looking after people
02:14 and I'm a caring type of person. You know, I would like to think I was quite observant
02:21 and I've been able to be kind to people really because when you're ill you need someone who can,
02:32 especially in psychiatry, you need someone who can talk to you
02:38 because psychiatry is a very sort of different type of nurse in general.
02:45 Certainly every time you look at something you find another story and the museum is just full of stories
02:53 that have been kind of led by a strange object in our collection.