#HistFicThursdays - Horrible Histories 2 - Mary Seacole

 Images conjured up by the phrase "Crimean War" tend to include the ill-fated Charge of the Light Brigade and Florence Nightingale as the Lady of the Lamp single-handedly fighting back cholera and treating the wounded. These are certainly what we were told about in school and were reflected in the children's history books. I ended up being amazed that the allied forces ever managed to beat the Russians... These sort of odds were bound to make a great book!

Medical history tends to make an appearance in all of my books, so it's no surprise that I opted to make my heroine a nurse. I began researching Florence Nightingale's work and was surprised to find it was not the story I'd been told in school. I'd been led to believe she was a battlefield nurse, but her hospital was so far behind the lines many wounded men would have died long before they reached it.

No, this was no good for my heroine. She had to be a roll-up-her-sleeves-and-get-the-job-done woman. She would be in the thick of it.

Sketch of Mary Seacole's British Hotel in Crimea

by Lady Alicia Blackwood

(accessed via Wikipedia)

So then I scrapped my preconceived ideas and began delving into the research (and, as you know, I take research-delving very seriously!). It was here that I first properly met Mary Seacole. I had heard the name before and knew she was something to do with the Crimean War, but beyond that she was new to me. What I found was an incredible woman: strong, determined, and entirely committed to other people. She was a battlefield nurse in every sense of the phrase, establishing her hospital so close to the front line, she sometimes found herself under fire. Not only this, but she would also go out onto the field herself and help the wounded men after the battle.

How had I not met this woman, who put herself in harm's way to save and protect the men in her care, in my schooling? The answer is a simple one: colonial embarrassment. Here was a real heroine who was willing to lay her own health and wealth on the line to fulfil her drive to help and tend people. But, perhaps most extraordinary of all, she willingly did all this for people she knew could not accept her. In her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, she wrote about the War Office's decision not to send her in the second contingent of nurses:

Now, I am not for a single instant going to blame the authorities who would not listen to the offer of a motherly yellow woman to go to the Crimea and nurse her ‘sons’ there, suffering from cholera, diarrhœa, and a host of lesser ills. In my country, where people know our use, it would have been different; but here it was natural enough – although I had references, and other voices spoke for me – that they should laugh, good-naturedly enough, at my offer.

Astonishingly, it took more than 150 years for the descendants of the men whose lives she saved, to learn about her in the English school curriculum. I could not believe I had gone so many years believing Florence Nightingale had been the nurse of the Crimean War, but the embarrassment caused by our former empire and its attitudes make people a little uncomfortable to consider these things.

I was pleased to discover I wasn't the only one to feel this way. When I was introduced to the Horrible Histories song below, I realised that work is now being done to have the incredible Mary Seacole, not only known, but also recognised for her work. I speak as one of those people who for so long did not know her when I say: It's about time!