The Her Edit

Black History Month · Then & Now

The UK’s first sickle cell nurse specialist, who spent twelve years making sure Mary Seacole would never be forgotten. A reflection on care, legacy and honouring those who came before.

Some women spend their lives caring for others. A rare few also spend their lives making sure the women who came before them are remembered.

Dame Elizabeth Anionwu has done both.

A childhood of beginnings

Elizabeth was born in Birmingham in 1947. Her mother was Irish; her father was Nigerian. They had met as students at Cambridge University.

Much of her early childhood was spent in a convent children’s home in Birmingham, and her path from there was not an easy one. But in the midst of it, there was a moment that would shape her whole life. When she was four years old, a nun gently cared for her eczema. That small act of kindness stayed with her — so much so that she decided she wanted to become a nurse.

I find that detail so moving. How one person’s tenderness, offered to a child, can quietly become the seed of a whole life’s work.

A nurse, and a first

Elizabeth left school at sixteen and trained as a nurse and health visitor. As she worked, she began to notice something: families living with sickle cell disease and thalassaemia — conditions that particularly affect people of African, Caribbean, Mediterranean and Asian heritage — were often overlooked, misunderstood and left without the support they needed.

In 1979, she became the UK’s first sickle cell and thalassaemia nurse specialist. Together with a haematologist, Dr Milica Brozovic, she helped establish a pioneering screening and counselling centre in the London Borough of Brent. It became a model for the services that followed across the country.

She went on to become a professor of nursing, and in 1998 she founded the Mary Seacole Centre for Nursing Practice at the University of West London.

Twelve years for a statue

This is the part of Elizabeth’s story that I find most beautiful.

For years, Mary Seacole’s contribution had been underappreciated. Elizabeth believed Mary deserved to be honoured properly — and publicly. She became a driving force behind the campaign for a statue, and she did not give up.

It took twelve years. Twelve years of fundraising, advocating, persuading and waiting. In June 2016, the statue of Mary Seacole was finally unveiled outside St Thomas’ Hospital in London, facing the Houses of Parliament.

Legacy isn’t only what we build. It’s also who we choose to carry with us.

There is something so tender in that act — one Black woman in nursing making sure another would never be forgotten. It’s a kind of care that reaches across centuries.

Honoured in her own right

Elizabeth has received many honours for her work. She was made a Dame in 2017, and in 2022 she was appointed to the Order of Merit — one of the highest honours in the country, limited to just twenty-four living members at a time. In 2021, she published her memoir, Dreams from My Mother. And in May 2023, she carried the Sovereign’s Orb at the coronation of King Charles III.

I imagine a nurse from a Birmingham children’s home walking through Westminster Abbey on that day, and I find it hard not to feel something.

What she teaches me

I’ve come to think of Elizabeth’s life as a lesson in two kinds of care: the kind we give to the people in front of us, and the kind we give to the stories of those who came before us.

So often, we’re encouraged to focus only on our own achievements. Elizabeth’s life gently asks something different: who opened the doors you walked through? And how might you honour them?

Perhaps it’s a mother, a grandmother, a teacher, a mentor. Perhaps it’s a woman from history you’ve only just discovered. Carrying their stories forward is its own form of love.

Softly, Fiona x.