The History of England, Volume 5 by Peter Ackroyd

Author:Peter Ackroyd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

Nightingale was not the only woman to devote herself to the sufferings of the soldiers. One other such was Mrs Mary Seacole, a ‘quadroon’ from the British West Indies who confronted prejudice against her sex and her race simply by knocking it down. Like many formidable women (Lady Hester Stanhope is another shining example from a period just before), she had a confirmed and powerful wanderlust. ‘I have never wanted [lacked] inclination to rove’, she wrote, ‘nor will powerful enough to carry out my wishes.’ This was the antithesis of the Victorian idea of a woman, immured in the house as a domestic prisoner. How much is ‘the angel in the house’ a masculine illusion foisted upon frustrated wives who may have had adventurous spirits as powerful as that of Mary Seacole?

She acquired many of her skills at the British Army Hospital in Jamaica, where yellow fever in particular led to many deaths. Of her decision to minister to the soldiers of the Crimea, she remarked that ‘heavens knows it was visionary enough’. But she recalled that in ‘the ardour of my nature, which carried me where inclination prompted, I declared that I would go to the Crimea’. She was not at first welcome, since Florence Nightingale had doubts about a non-white nurse, and she was also rebuffed by the War Office and the Medical Department. Eventually she decided to make her own path and to bypass the authorities by opening a hotel for invalids. Cards were printed and distributed in the war region, announcing a ‘BRITISH HOTEL’ where she intended ‘to establish a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers’.

The fame of her skills as a healer and nurse soon spread. She called her patients ‘sons’ and she was universally known as ‘Mother Seacole’. As soon as she arrived on the Crimean peninsula she learned that ‘the hospitals were full to suffocation, that scarcity and exposure were the fate of all in the camp’. She built up a cadre of female nurses of whom she said that ‘only women could have done more than they did who attended to this melancholy duty; and they, not because their hearts could be softer, but because their hands are moulded for this work’. It may not be going too far to suggest that without the unacknowledged assistance of the women the men would not have survived. Mary Seacole returned to England and died in May 1881.

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