Family celebrate three generations in NHS

When single mother Dorothy Henry arrived in the UK from Grenada in the 1950s she started a dynasty - three generations of women who dedicated their lives to caring for patients for more than 70 years.

Dorothy came to Huddersfield, with her young daughter, Jacquelin, in about 1959, to begin work at a care home.

Twenty years later Jacquelin joined the NHS as a trainee nurse and spent her entire career working at Huddersfield Royal Infirmary.

Following in their footsteps, in 2003 her daughter, Emma, became a midwife at Bradford Royal Infirmary.

Now a Pastoral Support and Preceptor Midwife at the Women's and Newborn Unit Emma Fleary, 48, says working in the same field had brought the three women together in way "I never sort of expected".

"When I became a midwife, suddenly they kind of started sharing stories about birth," she says.

"I remember Grandma saying once, 'your mum wasn't delivered by a midwife, you know, it was like a woman in the village'.

"I felt it kind of brought us a bit closer together."

Despite belonging to a large Caribbean community in Huddersfield, Dorothy, who was born in 1920 and died in 2012, experienced racism and prejudice during her career, says Emma.

"She always told stories with a smile on her face, which sounds bonkers when you kind of think about the stories," she says.

"There was her and a lady from Poland who had been in a concentration camp and they were really close friends. She was Black Dot and the other one was Polish Lucy.

"That's kind of how they kind of referred to each other and how everybody else referred to them."

Dorothy experienced patients not wanting to be treated by her because of her ethnicity as well as discrimination from her own colleagues, says Emma.

She also faced different challenges in her new life in Huddersfield as a single working mother.

"She would dress mum up in a big coat, she'd put newspaper in her hood and stand her in the doorway of the school at 7:00 and go to work," says Emma.

"Then mum would stay there until school started. You think about that now and you think that's insane. But she didn't have any of the childcare options at the time and she had to get to work to earn a living."

Jacquelin trained at Barnsley School of Nursing and began her career at Huddersfield Royal Infirmary working in male orthopaedics.

Emma remembers calling her on late shifts to say goodnight and laughing at her strange medical stories. But after a sudden stroke in 2006, Jacquelin retired aged 47.

"Mum has got slightly rose-tinted glasses and when she says she misses nursing, I sometimes think if she was nursing now, compared to how she was nursing 20 years ago, would she actually miss it?

"There is a lot more paperwork than hands-on care and the computers and all that jazz. I do sometimes wonder if she would have found that a challenge, but who knows?," says Emma.

After leaving school in Huddersfield, Emma studied History at university but graduated with no idea of what she would go on to do.

When she first told her mum and grandma she was thinking of becoming a midwife they thought it was "hilarious", she says.

"I'm really squeamish. I can't do bones. I can't do wounds. I can't do anything like that. So when I said I was going to do my midwifery, everyone thought it was hilarious and laughed at me," she says.

"But it sort of fascinated me, the whole sort of conception and birth thing and a human growing another human and then it comes out of the human and it just blew my mind a bit and it still does. And I think when it stops blowing my mind, then I'll change my job."

And the healthcare gene continues to run in the family, with Emma encouraging her 12-year-old son, Amos, into a career in physiotherapy.

"He would love to be a footballer. But I like to give them realistic expectations," she says.

"I've talked to him a lot about maybe going into physiotherapy or occupational health, things like that, just to kind of keep that involvement - so kind of planting those seeds a little bit."

Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.