As a last resort, she went to the manager of the Crimean Fund to see if they would simply send her out to the camp. Once there, she was sure that something would turn up. The Crimean Fund said no.
No one had been interested in her credentials or her manifest experience in treating cholera. She stood in the wintry twilight and succumbed to despair. “Doubts and suspicions arose in my heart for the first and last time, thank heaven. Was it possible that American prejudices against my colour had some root here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a skin somewhat duskier than theirs?
“Tears streamed down my foolish cheeks as I stood in the fast thinning streets; tears of grief that anyone should doubt my motives—that heaven should deny me the opportunity that I sought.” There was nothing for it. Mary Seacole decided—with enormous pluck—to go under her own steam.
If she couldn’t join Nightingale’s nurses, she would go as a sutler—an army camp follower, or victualler, who sells provisions to the troops in the field. She sailed to Constantinople via Malta, and on her way she came across a doctor who gave her a letter of introduction to Nightingale.
Clutching this document, she then chartered a caïque for the Selimiye barracks, where the hospital was housed. The water was choppy, and it was tricky to get in and out of the boats. “Time and trouble have left me with a well filled-out, portly form—the envy of many an angular Yankee female—and more than once I was in no slight danger of being too intimately acquainted with the temperature of the Bosphorus.”
Soon the boat was approaching the dull-looking barracks, where Nightingale had been working for many months, and the stately Caribbean lady began the steep climb to the gate.
When Florence Nightingale had arrived at Scutari, she found a vision of hell. There were four miles of beds, in which men mutilated by Russian cannon lay so close to one another that a nurse could not pass between them. The place was crawling with rats and other vermin. The floorboards were rotten. The soldiers had no elementary comforts such as basins, towels and soap. Worst of all, the hospital basement contained vast cisterns of sewage, so that the place of so-called healing was pervaded by an awful smell.
Using her knowledge of statistics and mathematics—which her father had taught her in defiance of her mother—Nightingale worked out that if the soldiers kept dying at this rate, there would soon be no army left. Brushing aside the protests of the sexist army medical officers—who referred to her slightingly as “the Bird,” and called her appointment “droll”—she insisted on giving the men newspapers, properly cooked food and toothbrushes.
“What does a soldier want with a toothbrush?” said one of her opponents. Nightingale crushed him. If someone said something couldn’t be done, she would say, “But it must be done,” and though she never raised her voice, she found that it was done.
She tried to beat the smell by throwing open the windows. She fixed the plumbing. She cut the red tape that stopped the supplies getting through. Before she arrived, the hospital had managed to wash a grand total of seven shirts. Nightingale set up a laundry.
It would be nice to say that the death rates started to fall in the way that Lytton Strachey suggests—from 42 percent to 2 percent. The reality is that Florence hugely improved conditions in the hospital, and doubtless saved many lives. But she still did not understand—any more than Edwin Chadwick—the full relation between hygiene and disease.
London doctor John Snow had come up with the right answer in 1854, shortly before she set out, and postulated that the cholera agent was borne in water; but the breakthrough was not widely understood. The awful truth seems to be that the death rate actually increased in the six months after Florence arrived, and Scutari was the most effective slaughterhouse in the region—with 4,077 people dying there in her first winter.
This was the house of death at which pilgrim Seacole now arrived, determined to make her mark with the Angel of Scutari.
The door creaked open; a nurse admitted her with a whisper. The injured soldiers may have been equipped with newspapers and toothbrushes, and they may have given up swearing in the presence of Nightingale, but they were still in pretty bad shape. Mary Seacole now began to walk round the beds, and by her own account she started to weep at the state of the men.
Some of them were veterans of the West Indies who recognised her from her Kingston hotel. An Irish sergeant shouted out, “Mother Seacole, Mother Seacole!” and held out his feeble arms before flopping back on the pillow, a fearful wound on his shaven head. Mary did not want to be presumptuous, but since no one seemed interested in her, she started to do a spot of nursing—replacing a slipped bandage here, easing another bandage there.
Where was Nightingale? She finally found a nurse who was willing to read the letter. Mrs. Seacole, she asked, turning over the document in her hand, what is your purpose in coming here? Well, said Mary, she wanted to be of use (and she thought, as she spoke, that she would have worked for the wounded soldiers in return for nothing but bread and water).
Then it came: another soft slap in the face. “Mrs. Nightingale has the entire management of our hospital staff, but I do not think that any vacancy—”
Mary interrupted her before the rejection could be completed and said that she was off to the front in a few days. At which her questioner looked more puzzled than ever and went away, leaving her in the hospital kitchen. After half an hour she was ushered into the presence of Florence Nightingale herself—“that Englishwoman whose name shall never die, but sound like music on the lips of British men until the hour of doom.”
Mary described a slight figure, resting her pale face lightly on the palm of one hand. She had a keen, inquiring expression, and the only sign of impatience was the tapping of her right foot. “‘What do you want, Mrs. Seacole? Anything we can do for you—if it lies in my power, I shall be very happy.”
What was Mary to say? She plainly wasn’t wanted in the hospital. She blurted something about not wanting to travel back to Constantinople by night, the perils of the caïque.
Was there room for her anywhere in the hospital? At last she was found a billet in the washerwomen’s quarters, where fleas feasted on her plump person. “Upon my word,” she joked in her memoirs, “I believe the fleas are the only industrious creatures in all Turkey.”
She left Nightingale’s empire with a flea in her ear and just about everywhere else. Soon she was hundreds of miles away, on the dockside of Balaclava itself—a busy bumblebee in a bright yellow dress, ministering to the mutilated men as they were loaded onto the ships.
Stump-limbed victims gave joyous shouts (so she boasts) at the mere sight of Old Mother Seacole, and vowed patriotically to get back into the fighting. “Never fear for me, Aunty Seacole,” said one man with Monty Pythonesque enthusiasm, “I’ll make the best of the leg the Russians have left me. I’ll get at them soon again, never fear.”
Within weeks she had found a site at Spring Hill, about two miles from Balaclava, and in spite of floods, theft and the incompetence of her Turkish carpenters, she had constructed her latest “British Hotel”—a Rube Goldberg affair of scrap iron, old packing cases and driftwood, with a large Union Jack floating from the roof.
Inside it was all comfortable and warm, and by the Christmas of 1855 Old Mother Seacole’s place was the most popular address in the Crimea. There were raucous plum-pudding feasts, washed down with claret and cider cup. Her rice pudding was so popular that maimed soldiers would lurch and hobble from their bivouacs to get it; officers would try to prise her tarts, still warm, from the oven. When she wasn’t earning the undying love of the troops with her cooking and her potations, Mother Seacole was showing physical bravery far beyond that expected of her sex.
To be sure, Florence Nightingale was brave herself. She eventually came to the front to see the hospitals, and spent whole days in the saddle. She would stand for hour
s in the heavy snow. She would scramble through ravines and reach her hut at dead of night, almost delirious from fatigue. But for sheer recklessness Nightingale is comfortably beaten by Seacole.
Such was her lust for excitement and her indifference to danger that Mary Seacole was frequently in range of the Russian guns—huge ships’ cannon fixed to the ground and trained on the British positions. Shots would come ploughing into the turf in front of her little mule, and the soldiers would shout, “Lie down, mother, lie down!”
At one point a shell whizzed overhead and she flung herself with such force to the earth that she bent her thumb permanently out of shape. She saw the Battle of Tchernaya as it happened, and attended on the spot to the injuries of the French, the Sardinians and the Russians themselves. One Russian had been badly shot in the jaw, and as Seacole instinctively shoved in her finger to remove the bullet, his jaws clamped shut in the agony of death.
A slow smile spread over his face, and with Seacole’s digit stuck fast in his mouth, the Russian died. She would bear the scar for the rest of her life. She was the first civilian to enter Sevastopol after the siege. She was one of life’s adrenaline chasers, she was wily (she once tried to sell some French troops a mangy horse by covering its bald patches with flour) and she was seemingly very successful at medicine.
Whatever her doctress mother had taught her about mustard emetics, it worked. We have abundant testimonials from officers and men who claimed that she had solved their enteric crises. “She doctors and cures all manner of men with extraordinary success,” said William H. Russell, the Times correspondent who was so important in bringing Mary to a wider public.
By the end of the war it is clear that her fame was immense—almost as great as Nightingale’s. Shortly before the great dinner at the Royal Surrey Gardens, the Times announced that “copies of the admirable likeness of the Mother of the British Army” were on sale at the Royal Polytechnic Institute in Regent Street, priced at 5 shillings, 10 shillings and £2. She was famous not because she was an amiable eccentric, but because of what she had contributed to the war.
British nursing was born amid the horrors of the Crimea, and it looks as though Seacole and Nightingale—at least at first—were jointly associated with its beginnings. The concept of nursing includes systematically dealing with the symptoms of epidemic disease, and it is now understood to be an essential part of city life.
The triumph of Victorian capitalism had brought a boom in the population, and a consequent explosion of disease. Nursing was part of the fightback. In 1855 Florence and Mary were trying to cope with the evils of infection in the army, and in the same year Londoners were starting to deal with some of the most appalling sources of contamination in their city.
Smithfield Market had long been a shambles of dung, gore and the bellows of dying animals. In the name of hygiene the operation was moved to Islington. In the same year, parliament tried to deal with the selfish squabbling of the various sewage authorities by setting up the Metropolitan Board of Works, the first modern attempt to create a central municipal body in London—the ancestor of today’s Greater London Authority.
By 1858 the smell from the river was so mind-bending that MPs could take it no more, and Joseph Bazalgette was commissioned to produce the immense system of sewers on which the city relies to this day.
The penny had finally dropped with London’s rulers. If you let poor people live in conditions of squalor and penury, then their diseases could be transmitted to the rich. The slums began to be cleared. In 1867 Dr. Thomas Barnardo launched his superb movement to help children in the East End. In 1870 Royal Doulton produced the porcelain toilet, on which filth could be more easily spotted.
The concepts of hygiene and ventilation informed the legal ratio of windows to walls in the spreading terraced houses that are still so loved and prized by London’s middle classes. In 1875 the Public Health Act ordained that parks should be laid out in such a way as to boost physical fitness.
There were a thousand innovations in the name of human health, but none was as far-reaching as the simple idea promoted by Nightingale and Seacole: that when people were sick, their chances of living were greatly improved by a professional nurse. It was only about forty years after the death of Florence Nightingale that Britain produced the National Health Service, whose central principle is that everyone—like the soldiers of the Crimea—should receive medical attention according to their need and not their ability to pay.
It is perhaps not surprising that by that stage—the mid–twentieth century—Mary Seacole had been forgotten. In the post-Crimean years she was hailed as a grand and spunky old dame. She toured barracks and received ovations from the troops who remembered her. She was adopted by various minor members of the royal family and served one of them as a personal masseuse.
After a while, however, her legend faded with the fickleness of the news. She eventually died of “apoplexy,” at the age of at least seventy-six, in Paddington.
It was Florence Nightingale whose lamp burned brighter and brighter, and who publicly continued on her march to sainthood. She retired to her bed in Mayfair, where she lived to a huge old age and terrorised the various men who worshipped her (notably Sidney Herbert and the poet A. H. Clough). She produced encyclopaedic volumes on nursing; she introduced professional nurses to workhouses—hence her claim to be the grandmother of the NHS—and she produced sanitary designs for hospitals.
Mary Seacole had nothing like Nightingale’s theoretical visions or ambitions. She was not rich. She was not well connected. She had no education in statistics. All that helps to explain the relative decline in her reputation; and yet it does not quite justify one striking omission in the postwar celebrations that were held in her honour.
Her Seacole fund was supported by the Prince of Wales (£25) and by his brother the Duke of Edinburgh (£15). But she was never accorded the recognition that was enjoyed by so many others. She was never invited to meet the Queen.
That touching medal ceremony we saw at the Islington primary school—it never happened in real life. There can be no suggestion that race was any bar, not with Victoria. As Helen Rappaport has convincingly shown in her book, the Queen was remarkably colour-blind. She met and congratulated people of all races from across the empire. In Victoria’s own prodigious letters and journals we find references to Josiah Henson, Mrs. Ricks, Sarah Forbes Bonetta, Duleep Singh and Prince Alamayou—all of whom she met.
When you consider the fame and popular sentiment excited by Mary Seacole, and her support among other members of the royal household, it is amazing that she was given no kind of audience at all. Someone, says Rappaport, must have poisoned the mind of the Queen against Mary Seacole—and that someone (so says Rappaport) was surely Florence Nightingale.
The Lady of the Lamp was summoned to Balmoral almost as soon as she returned from the Crimea, and there was a series of dinners at which the two women discussed the war and the difficulties of nursing. At some stage in those conversations the Queen must have asked about Mary Seacole, and at some stage it looks as if Florence slipped in a bad word.
We have a letter from Nightingale to her brother-in-law, the Liberal MP Sir Harry Verney. It is marked “burn” at the top, suggesting that other such comments would have been incinerated. Seacole was “very kind to the men,” said Florence, and “did some good.” But the trouble was alcohol.
Mary had “made many drunk,” and though she would not go so far as to say that Seacole’s “British Hotel” was a “bad house,” it was “something not very unlike it.” She added the killer: “Anyone who employs Mrs Seacole will introduce much kindness—also much drunkenness and improper conduct wherever she is.”
The suspicion is there, even if we will never prove it now. Poor sweet Mary Seacole was deprived of that crowning tribute—an audience with Her Maj, some tender words, a tin enamel trinket pinned on that curvaceous bosom—because s
he had been surreptitiously dished by Florence Nightingale.
So what if she got the men drunk with her “first-rate” claret cup? So what if she had a comely illegitimate daughter to help her in the “British Hotel”? So what if some of the French officers became so drunk as to attempt a bit of slap and tickle?
She was a dynamic and enterprising lady, who did many sick men a power of good. And yet I think we can nonetheless forgive Florence Nightingale, if indeed she is guilty as charged. With all the heaven-sent self-belief of the very greatest Victorians, she wanted to change the world. She wanted fundamentally to adjust the way that people looked at nursing and at women, and that meant above all that they and the profession had to be taken seriously.
It wasn’t so much that she was a Queen Bee, or that she wanted to be unchallenged as Mother of the British Army (though there may have been an element of that). It wasn’t that she was personally censorious about alcohol and sex (though that may have affected her attitude).
The reason she worried about the whiff of booze and fun from Mary Seacole was that it might detract from what she was trying to do. If you want evidence that she did rather admire her rumbustious black counterpart, it has been shown that Nightingale herself contributed quite generously to Seacole’s fund—but anonymously. Appearances mattered in those days.
Today the supporters of Seacole are proposing to erect a statue in her honour on the grounds of St. Thomas’ Hospital, where Nightingale started her training school for nurses.
* * *
And it was the Seacole view of alcohol that was supported by most Londoners. The capital did not boast quite as many pubs per head as the seriously sozzled Birmingham or Manchester, but you only had to walk down Whitechapel Road to encounter forty-five hostelries. There was one on every street corner; and pubs were not just places of alcoholic refreshment.
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