Cell array of dates in string format to date array

I've pulled some data from a spreadsheet and created a new cell array from the first column, which is dates in the format 'dd/MM/yyyy' (data attached) and then I've tried to convert those to dates:

[~, ~, raw] = xlsread('file.xlsx', 'sheet');
date = {rawFull{2:end,1}}';
date2 = datetime(date, 'InputFormat', 'dd/MM/yyyy');

But I get the following error:

Error using datetime (line 629)
Input data must be a numeric or a date/time string or a cell array or char matrix containing date/time character vectors.

I've had a look using a smaller dummy array that works correctly:

dummyOld = {'01/10/2017'; '01/10/2017'};
dummyNew = datetime(dummyOld, 'InputFormat', 'dd/MM/yyyy');

I assume the difference between working and not working is something to do with the quotation marks shown below, but I'm not sure how to overcome that? Any help (with an explanation of what I'm missing) is much appreciated!