In Search of Mary Seacole by Helen Rappaport

In Search of Mary Seacole by Helen Rappaport

Author:Helen Rappaport
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2022-02-17T00:00:00+00:00


I. This statement comes as something of a surprise, if not a shock. A mixed-heritage boy with Mary in Crimea? One can only assume he was a local Tatar boy hired for the purpose. Unfortunately, we cannot travel further down this road, for this is the one and only mention of him. ‘Prince Victor-Hugo’ here is Mary’s friend, the Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, aka Count Gleichen.

II. Despite a concerted search, and the fact that numerous French officers patronised her establishment at Spring Hill, the only French source that refers to Mary seems to be that of the Comte de Castellane: Madgy: Souvenirs de L’Armée Anglaise en Crimée (Paris 1878, 294-5), in which the author describes how British officers referred to Mary as ‘la mère Jamaïque’ [the Jamaican mother] and claimed that ‘every country in the world knew her’ and that she had been ‘in the Indies, the Cape of Good Hope, China, Australia and elsewhere’. According to Castellane, ‘Mistress Seacole was The Jamaican, in the same way that the grand Scipio was referred to as The African [Scipio Africanus] – by right of conquest’.

III. Mary helped any wounded men who solicited her medical care, even enemy Russians. It is greatly regretted that no evidence has yet come to light in either French or Turkish or Russian language sources in support of this. However, as with so much in Mary’s story, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

IV. This contemporary usage seems odd but both Lord Gough and Mary herself – as well as other Victorians – tended to use the word ‘English’ where we today would of course say ‘British’.

V. When sculptor Martin Jennings, who created the Mary Seacole statue that stands outside St Thomas Hospital, visited the site of Spring Hill, using location details provided by Dr David Jones of the CWRS, he and members of the Sevastopol Museum found a collection of old broken bottles buried there. These almost certainly were the unsold bottles of wine and spirits that Mary had been forced to smash when she finally abandoned Spring Hill in July 1856.



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