The Private Life of Florence Nightingale

by Richard Gordon

  On the first night of the New Year of 1855, I left the Sisters’ Tower with Miss Nightingale on her night round. This had become my chance in her day for a talk. I was then writing weekly to the Penny Pioneer, and wanted to know more of the intimate correspondence she appeared to enjoy with the Queen. Miss Nightingale had implored Her Majesty that the ninepence a day, stopped from a sick soldier’s pay for the delights of Scutari, should be reduced to the fourpence-ha’penny he paid if having the good fortune to be wounded instead. She petitioned also that the Scutari cemetery should be ceded by Turkey to Britain, Her Majesty’s own subjects inside it steadily overtaking those of the Sultan.

  She lit her Turkish lamp as we set off. ‘Do you know, I am now clothing the British army, Mr Darling? Our convalescents must leave in their hospital dress or go naked, having arrived barely clothed and half shod. I have anyway substituted Turkish dressing-gowns for hospital dresses, though three bales marked “Hospital Gowns” stand in the passage because nobody has the authority to open them.’

  We went through the door into the avenue of sick. It was quieter than usual. All to be heard was the friction of our soles on the tiled floor, already worn into a groove between the rows of beds. ‘I can believe the shave that there are not 2,000 sound men in the whole army, because I have received 3,400 sick since mid-December. And purveying is still nil – socks, drawers, coffee-pots, earthenware urine cups, everything, are monotonously docketed “None in store”. Do you know the person I pray to have here?’

  ‘The Prince Consort?’ I suggested flatteringly.

  ‘A good innkeeper. The principle of running a hotel and a hospital is exactly the same, it is a matter of cooking, bed-making and making people comfortable. We need soft bread instead of the eternal hard biscuit, because the men’s gums are sore and their teeth gone from scurvy. Yet they have scurvy only through bad housekeeping. The navy has known for a thousand years that scurvy at sea could be cured by a ration of lime juice. There are 20,000 gallons of lime juice in the Commissary’s stores, and there they remain, for the same reason that the Commissary’s 3,000 pounds of tea stay unissued, while the troops in the Crimea get green, unroasted coffee beans to drink. Oh, for an inspired innkeeper!’

  We reached a fever ward. The doorway was choked with two grisly processions of stretchers in the candlelight, one carrying in the sick and the other carrying out the dead. We had a new epidemic. Miss Nightingale called it ‘gaol fever’, to most it was ‘Crimean fever’, Newbolt suspected it was connected with the rats and lice. Many of the patients developed a red rash, indicating the typhoid fever which was to carry away Prince Albert seven winters later, and later still to kill as many of our soldiers in South Africa as the Boers’ bullets. It was a fever carried on the poisonous breath of the hospital itself. After the war, the mortality rate of any regiment matched the number of men who had been invalided to Scutari.

  ‘Our registration of deaths is still lamentably defective,’ was Miss Nightingale’s response to the encounter. ‘The only record kept is that a man died on such and such a day. We should know the ages, modes of treatment, appearances of the body after death. I calculate that I have already attended 2,000 death-beds.’

  ‘Tom Handshear imagines you more an Angel of Death than an Angel of Mercy.’

  ‘That is unfair of Dr Handshear. It is simply that I have an instinct for the worst cases.’

  We moved along the ward, the breathing, snoring, groaning like the rustle of leaves and creak of branches from a wind in a forest. A man began to swear loudly, saw Miss Nightingale, cut his oath on his lips.

  ‘You see?’ she said softly, with satisfaction. ‘Amid these scenes of loathsome disease and death, there rises above it the innate dignity, gentleness and chivalry of the men. It prevents instinctively the use of any expression which could distress a gentlewoman. Look –’ She was entranced. ‘He is kissing my shadow.’

  ‘Because you are one of the few women he has seen for many a month, and he is enjoying some satisfaction.’

  ‘Save your cynicism for your salons, Mr Darling. A man hears, so far from home, in the nurse’s voice that of the mother or sister who nursed him in childhood.’

  ‘Believe me, Miss Nightingale, a woman’s gentle touch feels the same to a man sick as a man well. Lady and rough soldier are joined in a relationship as complex and delicate as a spider’s web.’

  ‘Webs cause no trouble until they are discovered and must be removed.’

  ‘You must talk more to the less ill patients,’ I advised her earnestly. ‘An enthusiastic letter in every soldier’s home will be most useful if the Government falls. And it is tottering already. Lord Aberdeen will drag Mr Herbert down with him, you will find yourself without a champion in London and with a rival at Therapia.’

  ‘But whenever a man opens his mouth with, “Please, ma’am, I want to speak to you,” my heart sinks within me, for I feel sure it will end with flannel shirts, and we haven’t got any.’ She stopped, lamp aloft. The patient cowered under his blanket, eyes glittering like a frightened animal. ‘Never be ashamed of your wounds, my friend,’ she said. He stayed silent. ‘Would you like a drink of water? Or of tea?’

  ‘If it’s all the same to you, ma’am, I likes a drop of brandy.’

  ‘H’m,’ said Miss Nightingale. ‘Perhaps, Mr Darling, your view of the world is right,’ she conceded.

  The Government was out before the month. On January 26, Mr Roebuck, a Radical, won a vote of censure about the war by 157 votes in a howling House of Commons. Lord Palmerston became Prime Minister. He had known Miss Nightingale since her girlhood. The offices of Secretary for and at War were concertinaed, and embodied in the Scottish Lord Panmure. In January, four of our surgeons died of the new fever. So did Poor Old Ward and his poor old wife. Handshear seeing no necessity for a bravery which risked his own life without saving his patients’, contented himself with shouting through the doors of fever-smitten wards, ‘You people all right in there?’ and hoping that he would not get deathly silence as an answer. Then one blowy afternoon in the middle of March, the inspired innkeeper astonishingly appeared.

  I found two strange persons at ease before our mess-room stove. One gentleman of colour, young and slight, in smart livery with bottle-green facings. The other was plump, about forty-five, heavy eyed, waxy faced, with a thick moustache and a beard like an exclamation mark. His blue trousers were red-striped resembling a guardsman’s, his waistcoat magenta piped with pink, his jacket to match in heavy watered silk, on his dark hair a green silk tam-o’-shanter.

  ‘Dr Newbolt, I am honoured,’ he exclaimed as I entered. ‘My card.’

  Dress and accent indicated some latter-day Baron Larrey. Our French allies never paid us a visit, the squalor and pestiferousness of our hospital being famous. Correcting him, I looked at the card, of uncustomary diagonal shape.

  Alexis Soyer

  London Paris

  I exclaimed, ‘You know Mr Wakley-Barlow at the Reform Club?’

  ‘Certainly, I have cooked for Mr Wakley-Barlow and many famous Parliamentarians,’ he said grandly. ‘Though Monsieur Wakley-Barlow est ami de coeur de la cave plus que la cuisine. I have had the honour to cook for Lord Panmure, who said, “Go to the Crimea and cheer up those brave fellows at the camp! Your joyful countenance will do them good, Soyer!”’ His voice began to gallop, his arms to fly. ‘“Teach them to make the best of their rations! I must make some arrangement for your expenses!” – an arrangement I accepted, or I should be giving offence to his Lordship and the Government. You read my letter to The Times, sir? February 2.’

  The fluttering slip was instantly pressed on me. I later discovered that Soyer wrote to the Editor of The Times with the frequency and ardour of a lover to his lass. The correspondent had read of gross mismanagement in the hospital kitchens, and proposed proceeding at once to Scutari, if the Government honoured him with its confidence.

  ‘That was written, sir, towards one in the morning, in the Wellington tavern at Dr
ury Lane, while waiting for my scalloped oysters and pint of port wine.’ He had a knack of making the most commonplace statements sound like a royal proclamation.

  ‘I fear you will find Scutari a tattered canvas for your artistry.’

  ‘Merci, Monsieur! Moi, je suis artiste. And like all successful artists, sir, I am a practical one. Mr Thackeray – with whom I have long had the honour of friendship – said of me in his Vanity Fair, “The immortal Alexis Soyer can make more delicious soup for a halfpenny than an ignorant cook can concoct with pounds of vegetables and meat.” During the Irish Famine, sir, my soup kitchens fed 26,000 every day!’ he exclaimed explosively. ‘And 10,000 London poor in Spitalfields have enjoyed the same benefit of my knowledge and experience. In that same year, I furnished the Reform Club with 30,000 dinners and forty banquets, besides receiving 15,000 distinguished visitors eager to inspect the renowned altar of a great Apician temple. My pen produced The Gastronomic Regenerator, of which you have doubtless heard – I am the author of half a dozen books, including The History of Food in All Ages, which was highly acclaimed last year – my cooking was a magnet to which all particles of the Liberal Party could cling. Though I fear that radicals seldom have good digestions. Mr Thackeray would cancel dinner engagements because of “an old friend”, sir, appearing at the Reform Club – my beans and bacon! Everyone was utterly distressed by my resignation, and neither club nor party, I sense, has been the same since.’

  ‘Have some brandy,’ I said, offering the Turkish bottle.

  He sniffed his glassful, cried, ‘ Zut! Mon Dieu! ’ poured it flashingly into the stove, and commanded his servant, ‘ Jullien! Le cognac. Le vieux.’

  A bottle was produced from a hamper at their feet. ‘Cooking,’ Soyer pronounced, ‘is organization. The excellent and delightful Mademoiselle Nightingale took my point instantly. At six o’clock tomorrow morning, Mr Darling, as it becomes light, you and I are inspecting the hospital kitchens.’

  I asked where he was quartered. ‘But here, mon ami,’ he replied in surprise. ‘Perhaps I could inspect your batterie de cuisine?’

  I had the best meal that night since leaving London. In the kitchen below, Soyer politely deflected Kipping, donned a huge white apron, turned back his cuffs like Newbolt preparing to amputate a leg, and with herbs, flavourings, wine and imagination turned our rations of hard biscuit and salt pork into a ragoût deserving of the Reform Club. He sat afterwards smoking a tchibouque, telling anecdotes of the English aristocracy, all of whom seemed his close and admiring friends.

  Newbolt, Handshear and Wiley were lost. The man was even further beyond the circle of their experience than myself. Alexis Soyer was a theatrical Frenchman, as Thackeray wickedly drew him in Monsieur Alcide Mirobolant, the book in Pendennis. It was the response of an individualist to a lifetime spent in England, serving English gentlemen.

  ‘Have you visited Meaux-en-Brie, sir?’ he asked Newbolt.

  This is my first excursion from England, Monsieur, and I suspect my last,’ Newbolt said, seeming offended at the suggestion.

  Soyer sighed deeply. ‘There I was born. So delightful! Wooded, cornfields, windmills on stilts, the Marne the width of the Thames at Henley.’ His eye gazed longingly across a continent. ‘I was destined for the Church,’ he revealed, ‘but I went on the stage instead.’ He shook with laughter for several seconds. ‘Then I was nearly murdered by the revolutionaries, so escaped with my twenty-two-year-old skin to London, where I had the honour to serve the Duke of Cambridge, who was always very agreeable towards me. Afterwards I married dear Miss Emma Jones. A brilliant artist, the English Murillo! How wonderful a wife I won! She filled me with a love which can never diminish.’

  Wiley lit one of his cigarettes. ‘You’ve left Mrs Soyer behind in England?’

  ‘She is in Kensal Green.’

  ‘Sounds a nice place.’

  Handshear gave a burst of laughter. ‘It’s a cemetery.’

  ‘I still cannot decide how fittingly to inscribe her grave.’ Soyer wiped a tear with his yellow bandanna.

  ‘How about Soyer Tranquille?’ I suggested unsympathetically.

  ‘I thought, “England gave her birth, genius immortality”. Otherwise, people might think she was French,’ he added revealingly.

  At six the next morning, Soyer and myself met Miss Bancroft at one of the hospital’s half dozen huge kitchens. Soyer ran his eye over it like Lord Ragland his battlefield – the cracked stone floor, the long deal tables and forms, the racks and ceiling-rings. A dozen soldiers under a sergeant were making the tea and coffee for breakfast. He strode up some steps to a long row of food-boilers encased in marble.

  ‘Copper!’ he cried in disgust. ‘The worst metal, as I wrote upon my important visit to the Consumptive Hospital at Brompton. The wealthy alone should have copper, because they can afford to keep it tinned. Malleable iron is extremely clean and much cheaper.’ I saw that Soyer had the same attitude towards cooking as Miss Nightingale towards nursing. He turned to Miss Bancroft, rubbing his plump hands. ‘Mademoiselle, bring me the ration, and I shall start work on the midday dinner.’

  ‘But that is impossible. Rations cannot be issued before ten o’clock.’

  ‘Mon Dieu! ’ He clasped his wide brow dramatically. ‘Even I could not manage in the time. And regard this charcoal – dusty, damp, useless. See that fire, in the roasting fireplace. Small trees, six foot lengths! The soup would boil too fast.’

  ‘They throw pails of water to keep it down. Though it does fill the kitchen with smoke and steam.’

  Soyer clasped his head with both hands. Unlike Miss Nightingale, his spirits rose and fell as his countryman Eugène Godard’s hot air balloon over the undulations of the countryside. ‘Such waste! Such inefficiency. Would that my kitchen in the Reform stood here in my country’s service! All was powerful steam – that intelligent and indefatigable servant – turning the spit, drawing the water, carrying up the coal. Everywhere bubbling stew pans, savour rôtis on my patent furnaces. Dutch ovens, marble mortars, gravies, sauces, stews, broth, fish on iced metal plates as spacious as a ballroom, Mademoiselle, and as white as a young bride. Where are the cooks?’

  I told him, ‘Cooking is a duty imposed on the soldiers, between their being well enough to stand up and being posted back to their regiments to be knocked off their feet again.’

  He shook his head, as though over the ending of the world. ‘They order this matter better in France, to quote my immortal Sterne.’ He gave the impression of the author somehow being a valued friend. ‘General Canrobert’s cooks are as highly trained as his infantry, and as highly regarded. Would that I had some of my pretty female assistants from the Reform Club! Lord Melbourne – who often honoured my kitchen with a visit – once remarked on their beauty. “My Lord,” I told him, “we do not want plain cooks here.”’ The end of the world was forgotten and he quivered with laughter for several seconds.

  At noon, the kitchen was in its customary uproar. The orderlies waiting to draw food for their wards were jostling, swearing, banging their soup-cans, some grabbing double rations, some left with none at all. Soyer was aghast. ‘The market at old Billingsgate is nothing to this. Look!’ he cried. ‘A wooden leg, boiled with the mutton!’

  ‘That’s a skewer, tied by the ward orderly to identify his piece when it’s done,’ Miss Bancroft explained patiently. ‘Usually they use buttons, or a rag of red uniform, or an old pair of scissors or some snuffers.’

  ‘The meat is issued raw to each orderly?’ Soyer was on tiptoe upon the pinnacle of incredulity.

  ‘That is so, Monsieur.’

  ‘All the meat is boiled?’

  ‘The army knows no other method of cooking.’

  ‘But one soldier may get all meat to eat, another only all bone to gnaw?’

  ‘That is the system, Monsieur.’

  ‘Oh! I am living on the same planet which saw my great banquet for Ibraham Pasha of Egypt – with my meringue three feet high – or my repast for Lord Pal
merston – who honoured me with so many fine compliments – when the band of the Coldstream Guards played, and my dear friend Mr Thackeray sang Rule Britannia –’ He grimaced over a ladleful of soup. ‘The fat must be skimmed, not thrown out, it is better for cooking than rank butter from Constantinople at fifteen piastres a pound. The gizzards, the heads and feet of the chicken and oxen, must not be taken out and buried, but turned into nutritious broth, which if poured over the serving of meat will keep it hot. Cooking is organization. Where are the vegetables?’

  ‘Soldiers do not eat vegetables,’ said Miss Bancroft.

  ‘But they are part of a proper diet,’ exclaimed Soyer in anguish. ‘As Hippocrates says very justly, “What pleases the palate nourishes.” I said exactly the same in my Shilling Cookery Book. The celebrated Leibnitz told us, “the experienced cook has made acquisitions in regard to the doctrine and theory of nutrition, surpassing all that chemical and physiological science have done.”’

  ‘If you, Hippocrates, and the celebrated Leibnitz are as one, Monsieur Soyer,’ said Miss Nightingale, who had entered the kitchen behind us, ‘I am sure we can be very reassured. Miss Bancroft, please have removed from the ward a carcass of a skinned sheep. It was apparently drawn by the orderlies too late this morning to be cooked for dinner.’

  Within a week, Soyer had reorganized the cooks and the cooking. By a change so simple as drawing the salt meat a day earlier to soak for a day longer, by sprinkling it with pepper and flavourings as liberally as his conversation with noble names, Soyer turned the inedible into the desirable. He made delicious beef-tea, mutton-broth, arrowroot-water, calf’s-foot jelly and a cheap Crimean lemonade. He invented a Scutari stove and a huge Scutari teapot – ‘Though admittedly it has no nourishing qualities, there is nothing yet discovered which is a substitute to the English patient for his cup of tea,’ said Miss Nightingale. The men cheered him as he passed down the wards, three times three. There was to be a grand official opening of the kitchens. Lady Stratford de Redcliffe had promised to attend, to sample the soldiers’ soup.