How nurse Mary Seacole overcame obstacles to find undying praise

As we saw last week, the woman born Mary Jane Grant to a Scottish military officer father and a Creole boarding house owner in Kingston, Jamaica, learned how to combine traditional skills and modern medicine as a “doctress” on her native island.

She travelled around the Caribbean before returning to Kingston where she married Edwin Horatio Hamilton Seacole in 1836. They had no children before he died in 1844, Mary’s beloved mother dying shortly afterwards. She also suffered the loss of her home, razed to the ground in a fire that engulfed Kingston. Nothing daunted, Mary rebuilt her house and started to take in soldiers and their wives as paying guests.

Her renown as a healer and nurse came to the fore in 1850 when she nursed victims of a cholera epidemic in Jamaica and then went to the town of Cruces in Panama where her brother Edward lived. She went to establish a hotel but ended up being the “yellow doctress” as cholera cut a swathe through the people of Panama – Mary also contracted it but survived.

She travelled extensively in Panama where she encountered many racist Americans, but soon went home to Kingston. While there, the British military authorities engaged her to set up a corps of Jamaican nurses at the large camp near Kingston that was beset with Yellow Fever. Drawing on the lessons she had a learned in dealing with cholera, she emphasised the need for cleanliness at all times. The experience was to prove very useful as she decided to do what she could to serve the soldiers fighting in the Crimean War.

Mary sailed to London and applied to various officials, seeking employment as a nurse, but she was turned down flat, even by other nurses. She wrote in her memoirs: “Doubts and suspicions arose in my heart for the first and last time, thank Heaven. Was it possible that American prejudices against colour had some root here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs?”

Misogyny and racism were rife in British society at that time, so it makes it all the more remarkable that Mary Seacole overcame these obstacles and within a few short years she would be lauded for her work in the Crimea where Britain and its allies defeated the Russian Empire’s forces.

With a friend from Panama, Thomas Day, Mary set up the company of Seacole and Day. She would establish a “British Hotel” and he would set up a shop. It is important to note that Seacole did not start a hospital. To use an old word, Seacole and Day were sutlers, merchants who supply armies with goods they required, and the nursing aspect came later.

The hotel was between the British headquarters at Balaclava and the city of Sevastopol, or Sebastapol as it was known back then. On the way to start business there, Seacole stopped at Scutari where Florence Nightingale had her hospital. They appear to have got on well, but Nightingale was very firm that Mary could not join her staff – she had not been trained as a “Nightingale” nurse.

Mary Seacole’s establishment was called Spring Hill and thrived as a place where British soldiers and sightseers – people came from the UK and elsewhere in Europe to view the battles – could find rest as well as hot tea and cool lemonade. But it was her ministering to wounded soldiers that soon earned her the nickname Mother Seacole.

This is the most controversial aspect of Mary Seacole’s reputation. She was not a nurse as such, but she certainly nursed a great many soldiers and did so often within yards of the frontline.

Her fame grew thanks to the stories of her fearlessly going to the battlefield and tending to the sick and wounded. They would also come to her at Spring Hill rather than go to hospital – the constant refrain from the soldiers was that you entered hospital on a stretcher and came out in a box.

The Times journalist William Russell spread her fame to Britain. He wrote: “I have seen her go down, under fire, with her little store of creature comforts for our wounded men; and a more tender or skilful hand about a wound or broken limb could not be found among our best surgeons. I saw her at the assault on the Redan, at the Tchernaya, at the fall of Sebastopol, laden, not with plunder, good old soul, but with wine, bandages, and food for the wounded or the prisoners.”

By early 1856, it was clear that the forces amassed against the Russians were too powerful and defeat for them had become inevitable after the fall of Sevastopol ended the 11-month siege of the city.

The Russians sued for peace and the armies went home, which left Mary Seacole in a quandary – she had purchased huge stocks and now had nobody to sell them to.

She packed up and left for London where she and Thomas Day were declared bankrupt, but a public fund was set up for her and in 1857, she published her memoirs The Wonderful Adventures Of Mrs Seacole In Many Lands. Between the fund and the book she was able to go home to Jamaica, but returned to live out her life quietly in London where she died on May 14, 1881, at the age of 75.

William Russell summed her up in his preface to her memoirs: “I trust that England will not forget one who nursed her sick, who sought out her wounded to aid and succour them, and who performed the last offices for some of her illustrious dead.”

He had no doubts about her achievements. Why should anyone else?