Inevitably, such devastation in ordinary people’s lives led to great bitterness against the British and in particular those who came to China with the express intention of ‘improving’ the people there. The Bishop of Victoria, Hong Kong, was quoted as saying:
“I have again and again been stopped, while preaching, with the question, ‘Are you an Englishman? Is not that the country that Opium comes from? Go back and stop it, and then we will talk about Christianity.”’
In spite of the conflict between the opium trade and the message of the missionaries, which led to hostility and sometimes violence against them, missionaries poured into China. In fact, a British war report quoted in the London Illustrated News in 1842 explicitly linked the two issues:
‘Out of evil sometimes cometh good, and the opium trade, which is little understood in this country, may have been the means intended by Providence for introducing the gospel and altering the condition of that benighted country, for that such an event is sooner or later to take place, no Christian can doubt.’
There were already more than 30 Protestant missions in China when J. Hudson Taylor founded the China Inland Mission in 1864, bringing hundreds more missionaries into the country. At the time of Florence’s visit to China, the Mission boasted more than 600 missionaries at work in the country. One was Miss Annie Taylor, who travelled through China to reach Tibet, having felt the call of God to the mission in that country. Her story was reproduced in China’s Millions, the Mission’s own publication, from reporting in the North China Daily News. Miss Taylor had been travelling for almost a year and was passing through Chung-king when the article was published under the title ‘A Lady’s Adventure in Tibet’.
‘Miss Taylor’, the article stated admiringly, ‘in addition to the suffering inevitable in a country so bare of food and shelter as is Tibet, and in a climate where the strongest often succumb, had her existence further imperilled by the treachery of her Chinese servant, and was only saved on more than one occasion from being murdered by the interposition of the more chivalrous Tibetans. And then, nothing but the most undaunted resolution, coupled with a coolness and nerve as astonishing as it is admirable, saved her from perishing a victim to such cold and hunger as it seemed incredible a frail woman should have survived.’
The article went on to relate how Miss Taylor had first attempted to enter Tibet from the Indian side in 1887, but faced illness and near starvation – although she had money, no-one would sell food to an English woman. Two attempts were made to poison her, and for ten months, she did not see another European. Retreating to China, she lived near the border for a year, building relationships with Tibetans and eventually making the border crossing in a convoy with four servants and ten horses.
‘One of her first serious adventures,’ the account continues with considerable under-statement, ‘was being attacked by a band of brigands with white fur coats, leading each a spare horse. Two were killed, eight wounded, and five out of her horses killed, besides much property lost. But a Lama called out to the robbers, “They are women! All women!” so she was not pursued. Amongst Mongols and Tibetans it is esteemed a dreadful thing to strike a woman, so that all women go about unarmed, although every man carries weapons…
On the 28th of September, the party crossed the Yellow River, there very narrow and dangerous, on yak skins blown out, with hurdles laid upon them, and drawn by horses. These rafts are awash all the time, and the water was ice-cold. They then found themselves in the very large Golok district, peopled entirely by robbers. But the Goloks never rob within their own territory. Travellers in making contracts in Tibet always have to agree to pay for a yak, or horse, if it die, or get stolen on a journey, but not if it be stolen by the Goloks. Their chieftain is a woman, and laws are strictly observed in her domain, and no bribes taken.
The Goloks relate how five Russians came to travel through the country, and they themselves went out to attack them 500 strong, but could kill none, though 12 of themselves were killed. Then came one traveller alone with a tin box. They all wanted that tin box, and still continue to reproach one another that they did not take it, but their belief was that on opening it an army of soldiers would come out. They thought the same with regard to Miss Taylor’s two cases of chest of drawers, besides many other fabulous tales about her.’
Annie Taylor did eventually reach her goal, Llassa, and it was there that her Chinese servant turned on her and she was saved by the intervention of the Tibetans. They provided an escort to take her out of the region – but her trials continued.
‘For three days they lost their road; they had no tent. That and every comfort had to be sold, her servant having taken everything he could from her before he left her. When, on the 24th of December, they found the road again, they just hid in the hills for the whole of Christmas Day for rest. During all this part of the journey her sufferings from the rarity of the air were very great: palpitations, gasping, inability to digest their barley food. Of even that they had so little. Noga [the treacherous servant] spread a report that Miss Taylor was travelling with a belt of gold and jewels around her waist. And she had to travel by night, finding the cold beyond what anyone could imagine who had not felt it. Tea froze as soon as poured out, and for three nights they were only too thankful to find refuge in a cave with just room for them to lie down, half suffocated by smoke, so as to obtain a little heat.
On 31st of December, they crossed the Drichu into the Lhassa district, but had to stop near Najuca, within three days’ journey of Lhassa, owing to Noga having gone before, making a great merit of revealing that it was a foreigner coming.
A military chief arrived from Lhassa, very gorgeous in his clothing, and at first rough, then friendly, and indignant with the Chinaman’s treachery. There was a sort of trial. And none who can should miss hearing from this heroic woman’s own lips how she stood out for her dignity as an Englishwoman, till in the end she not only won respect from all, but convinced them of the truth of her story, thereby saving the lives of her two Tibetan servants, who the Chinaman had tried to make out were treacherously leading her into Tibet.
The Chiefs told her as far as they were concerned she could carry on to Lhassa, but they would lose their lives if she did, and they gave her an official and nine soldiers to protect her against the Chinaman, beside supplying her most pressing necessities. Everywhere she found the Tibetans express liking for the English. They had been especially struck by the prisoners in the Sikkim war being kept alive, well fed, and actually supplied with money to go home with. So that there seems a little fear, lest should there be another war the whole people would seek to be taken prisoners!
On the return journey, the horses, which in winter have to be fed with goats’ flesh, tea, butter and cheese, suffered so from hunger they were always tumbling down, until Miss Taylor joined herself on to a yak caravan, and 200 yaks made a way for them through 20 feet of snow.’
She left Lhassa on 22nd January and arrived at Ta-chien-lu on 12th April, still determined to return to Tibet to spread the gospel. The Tibetans, the paper reported, called her ‘Annia’, the name for their women religious leaders: and, to look more like one, she had all her hair cut off.
Florence was in China at exactly the same time as Annie Taylor: perhaps she read about the woman’s travels in the China Inland Mission paper, China’s Millions. If so, Miss Taylor was probably one of the few people who could have made Florence feel that her trip to China as a governess was tame and unadventurous.
Another might have been Alicia Little, part of whose time in China also coincided with Florence’s visit. As Mrs Archibald Little, she was the wife of a merchant who spent 50 years in China, developing several businesses in Shanghai with his brother. Prior to her marriage, however, she had been a novelist, writing romances as A E N Bewicke. In China, Alicia Little wrote twelve more books of fiction, with China as the setting. Her novels centred on some of the key issues of colonial society in China. She wrote about relationships in colonial communi
ties, where junior officers in the foreign service were forbidden to marry for six years, and ‘concubinage’ was common. In fact, it was not banned by the British until 1910, and even then did not stop immediately. Alicia Little wrote about the schools that were set up for Eurasian children – often by missionaries and concerned European women – and which separated the children from their Chinese mothers. But the issue on which Little had the most impact, by moving outside of the realm of fiction into activism, was the Chinese custom of footbinding.
The purpose of footbinding, which had been practised in China since at least the first century BC – and, according to myth and legend, much longer – was to achieve a foot no more than three inches long. Such a tiny foot was considered a sign of daintiness, civility and attractiveness. It also became associated with eroticism and fetish. A three inch foot was known as a ‘golden lotus’, a four inch one was a ‘silver lotus’ and anything larger an ‘iron lotus’. To restrict growth to this abnormal size, footbinding began when girls were between the ages of three and eleven, and was undertaken initially by their mothers or other female relatives. First, the four smaller toes were broken and folded under the foot. Later the arch of the foot was broken so that the foot could be folded in two, with a deep cleft between the heel and the sole, which might be deepened by cutting. Tight bandaging held the foot in this position and restricted any further growth. Infections, gangrene and even septicaemia sometimes resulted, and some girls died. The whole process was extremely painful, and continued throughout the woman’s life. The bound feet restricted walking, so had the effect of confining women close to home. It was not however restricted to higher class women, who had household servants to wait on them; it was also performed in working families, in the hope that it would make the girls more attractive to potential husbands. When this failed, they would resume work in spite of their bound feet.
Alicia Little was vehemently opposed to footbinding, which was called ‘one of the greatest curses in China’. In April 1895, she founded T’ien Tsu Hui, the Natural Feet Society, and persuaded women in Shanghai to join. Together they sent 10,000 copies of an anti-footbinding leaflet around China, and collected examples of where the practice had been abandoned to encourage other places to follow suit. (The support of the ruling dynasties for footbinding has waxed and waned over the centuries as the leaders changed – the Europeans were not the first to suggest that the practice should be ended.) Later, Chinese women took over leadership of the Society and the movement joined in the wider cause of more liberation for women in China. In 1902, Tz’u Hsi, the Empress Dowager, issued a proclamation banning footbinding. But it was the 1911 revolution, which ended the Ch’ing dynasty, which also finally – formally – ended the practice of footbinding. Like many such customs, it was several decades later before the practice really died out. But Alicia Little’s campaigning work, described in her book ‘Intimate China’, certainly helped sound the death knell for this mutilation of Chinese girls, and was probably her proudest achievement.
Florence Shore’s stay in China is more of a mystery than the lives of the traveller and the novelist who left their written records. There is no record of how Florence came to be working as a governess in China, or the exact dates of her stay. She was not recorded in the UK 1891 census, which took place on the night of 5th/6th April, so it seems likely that her stay in China included this year. Her application to train as a nurse in Edinburgh must have been made in 1892, by which time, her hospital record shows, she had worked for two years in China, so allowing time for her to make the application and be accepted, she must have been back in England by Autumn 1892. The journey to and from China was a long one – it took Hudson Taylor five months to travel from England to China by ship in the 1860s, though the coming of steam ships and the opening of the Panama canal speeded up the journey soon afterwards – so it is possible that Florence was out of England for the best part of three years.
Florence was said to have been religious throughout her life, and her great uncle on her father’s side, George Brewin, was a curate in the parish of Wortley, near the Shore home, for the whole of his ministry. Perhaps he was able to help Florence find a position as governess to a missionary family during their posting to China. Or she could have worked for a merchant’s or diplomat’s family, based in one of the treaty ports. One of her references for the nurse training school in Edinburgh, to which she applied immediately after her China trip, was from a Mrs Mackintosh, of 22 Balderton Street, London. Was this the family whose children Florence had taught in China? The Mackintosh family was not resident at Balderton Street at the time of the 1891 census, so they may have been in China at that time, with Florence working for them as a governess. Whatever the nature of her employment, she would have returned to England with some extraordinary new experiences from life in the Middle Kingdom. Victorian society in Edinburgh, where Florence went next to start her nurse training, was, quite literally, a world apart.
Chapter 10
Nurse Florence Shore
For most of the 19th century, hospital nursing had been the province of drunks and paupers. But by the time Florence Nightingale Shore began her nurse training at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, on 1st January 1893, the influence of her godmother Florence Nightingale had radically changed nursing. Nightingale had made it possible for respectable lay women to become nurses, and opened up one of the very few alternatives for middle class 19th century women to a life of marriage and children, or spinsterhood in the homes of male relatives.
A Nightingale Fund for the training of nurses had been established by admirers of her work while Florence Nightingale was still in the Crimea, organising the nursing in the army hospitals. By the time she returned to England, a sum of £55,000 was available, and the Nightingale Training School was set up at St Thomas’s Hospital in London in 1860. The core of the curriculum was set by Nightingale herself in her book ‘Notes on Nursing’, and ‘Nightingale nurses’ were recognised as educated, knowledgeable and skilled people, in stark contrast to most others calling themselves nurses. (Registration of trained nurses, and the legal protection of the title ‘nurse’, was still sixty years away.) Nightingale nurses were soon in great demand in both hospitals and workhouses. The matrons of several of the famous London hospitals had passed through the Nightingale school, as had those in charge at the Liverpool Royal Infirmary, the army’s Royal Victoria Hospital at Netley, and the Cumberland Infirmary. Miss Spencer, in charge of the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh when Florence Shore applied there, was also a Nightingale nurse.
Florence’s decision to become a nurse was, unsurprisingly, influenced by her godmother. She wrote to Florence Nightingale about her desire ‘to become a hospital nurse … probably inspired by your kind interest in being my godmother.’ In another letter she added that her ‘ultimate hopes are to become an Army nurse as you were.’
The Royal Infirmary Edinburgh was a venerable institution, already more than 150 years old when Florence arrived. It had been set up in 1729, following an appeal for funds by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, with just four beds in its first building, the ‘Little House’ at the head of Robertson’s Close. It was granted a Royal Charter in 1736, and moved seven years later into new premises in the present Infirmary Street. The ‘Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh’ had more than 200 beds. Further building, including two additional surgical hospitals, created increasingly cramped conditions and finally led to the RIE moving into a specially-commissioned new hospital in Lauriston Place in 1879. This was the hospital to which Florence applied for her nursing training.
Her application came with recommendations from Mrs Mackintosh in London, and from Mrs Brewin, wife of the Reverend George Brewin. Florence was within days of her 28th birthday when she started her nurse training, and had a lot more experience of the world than most women of her age and time. However, the rules of the hospital that governed probationers’ work and their lives were all about compliance and conformity, and they applied to everyone
from the youngest and most raw, to the oldest and most experienced. The Regulations stated that:
‘The Managers of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary have made arrangements for giving a year’s training to women desirous of working as Hospital or Private Nurses.
Women desirous of receiving this course of training should apply to the Lady Superintendent of Nurses, Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, subject to whose selection they will be received into the Hospital as Probationers. Probationers are admitted between twenty-five and thirty-five years of age, single or widows; a certificate of age and other information will be required, according to the form printed at the back…
The term of the Probationer’s training is a complete year; it may, however, be extended for another quarter, and Probationers will be received on the distinct understanding that they will remain for the required term…
They will be lodged in the Hospital, in the ‘Nurses’ Home’; each will have a separate bedroom, and they will be supplied with board, including tea and sugar, also washing, and with indoor uniform, which they will always be required to wear when in the Hospital. They will serve as Assistant-Nurses in the Wards of the Hospital.
The Nightingale Shore Murder Page 8