Grace Pilgrim spends a greater part of her day wading through stacks of paper strewn across her dining table, researching the history of the Moravian Church in Barbados.
Generations of her family embraced the Moravian faith and she grew up in a Moravian environment with a father who was a Moravian minister. The former nurse has now laid down her cudgel of activism for women’s rights, and is devoting her twilight years to a long-held passion to document local Moravian history.
At 88, she is satisfied that she has done her part to make life easier for nurses; that her pioneer work in the area of disaster preparedness has laid the foundation for a better educated populace to handle natural disasters. In the National Organisation of Women and the Business and Professional Women’s Club she has demonstrated that women can come together and work together for the common good contrary to the belief that women working together “do not get along.”
In her working life Grace undertook the role of teacher in every sphere.
She still thinks her parents were betting on her becoming a lawyer after she left Queen’s College as she sensed they were not keen on the idea when she announced she wanted to be a nurse. “I am one of these people who are always asking questions and daddy said I would make a good lawyer.”
She went to Farnborough Hospital in Surrey to study nursing, the job she really wanted to do, and in 1952 switched to midwifery, moving to Moorfields Eye Hospital “which I loved and enjoyed very much.”
She was one of the first black ward sisters at that hospital.
While there she took a course in administration in nursing techniques at the Royal College of Nursing which prepared her for the different assignments that she would later undertake back home.
With ailing parents in Barbados, she returned to Barbados and joined the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in 1965, assigned to the eye ward. It was an area of nursing she really liked and she said “I believe that is what got me to take up ophthalmic nursing as a specialty.”
The organiser that she is, she soon got involved in the Barbados Nurses’ Association because she observed “nurses were not treated as they should have been. They had to do a lot of menial tasks, not like England with special ward maids.”
Grace recalled seeing nurses at the QEH “scared of doctors”, being called upon to perform tasks like cleaning ink pots. “I introduced in my department team nursing and I used to teach. When I did the ward rounds with the doctor I always took an extra nurse with me and in the afternoon I would have all the nurses that were on duty around my desk and tell them what the doctor had said about all the patients and what should be done.”
In the course of her work, she identified troublesome issues associated with the welfare and well being of nurses and she put them before the Nurses’ Association. She raised matters like the health of the nurse at work; the need for a nurses’ sick bay as well as the absence of lockers for storing the personal belongings of nurses.
In addition she said, “we found that the nurses who were doing midwifery were not well paid.”
She must have stood out as a nurse advocate. It was she whom then Prime Minister, National Hero the Rt Excellent Errol Barrow handpicked to head a delegation to the United Nations where she gave an address on Barbados’ health services. The three-month experience remains a highlight of her life.
After six years Grace had a career change, switching to the Government Training Unit, employing the teaching skills which she had enhanced with a course in public administration and training techniques in Britain. Stints in other Government agencies followed and some may have forgotten her pioneering efforts in getting the Central Emergency Relief Organisations (CERO) off the ground. That was the forerunner to what is now known as the Department of Emergency Services. It was a job so well done, as she was recognised with the award of the Barbados Service Medal.
She was chairman of the steering committee that set up the National Organisation of Women, influenced by a model of different women’s organisations coming together under a single umbrella she had seen working effectively in the United States. She broached the idea to the late (Sir) Clyde Gollop, head of the Community Development Division when she came back to Barbados, and putting heads together, they managed to get a similar organisation going here.
“What interested me most was to see how all these women’s organisations came together and what they were doing.” Grace said. When she approached Bridgetown businesses to promote the idea of employing a nurse in the workplace, she was not timid, but was confident of the support of the women who went along with the idea.
Grace was elected the first president of National Organisation of Women. She is also a founder member, charter president and life member of the Business and Professional Women’s Club.
Now that her life is no longer controlled by a schedule of meetings, she has lots of time on her hands to engage in another pastime – experimenting with food, particularly the continental dishes she favours.
Long retired she said “I would tell women that they have to have a drive. Life is going to have many challenges so they have to work together. They have to do their research and come forward with suggestions to advance their cause.”