‘Without the devoted personal service, the disinterested counsel, and the co-operation of experienced nurses who went out from America to the Far East, Continental Europe, and Latin America, public health nursing could not have achieved the relatively high status it now occupies in these areas.’ Such was the confident conclusion of Rockefeller officials in 1938, after twenty-four years of Rockefeller interventions in nursing. In this chapter I shall consider the role of the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) in promoting nursing education in England during the interwar period. This episode in RF history was marked by the competitive interplay between a number of international organisations keen to influence the pattern of nursing education. Organisational rivalry and constraints on resources undermined attempts to establish an international infrastructure for nursing education. Moreover the low prestige attached to nursing by the RF circumscribed any investment the Foundation was prepared to make and ultimately the results that could be achieved.

Nevertheless the ‘imperial gaze’ of the RF ranged far and wide across the realm of nursing, scanning England and certain parts of Central and Eastern Europe for opportunities to invest. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland fell outside the RF's immediate scope of nursing vision. In spite of its emblematic status as the centre of the British Empire, England proved disappointingly barren territory for Rockefeller's expansionist ambitions.