Remember the scottish angel of crime a
Lady with the Lamp Florence Nightingale may have got all the glory, but Mary Seacole had all the fun, writes Susan Morrison
She was the other angel of the Crimea. Until recently, her story was overshadowed by that superstar of midvictorian nursing, Florence Nightingale. In many ways, her life is even more extraordinary than Nightingale’s. After all, Florence had a lot going for her. Her wealthy, well-connected family provided the security and contacts to start her stellar career, once they’d got over their objections to her life choices. Mary Seacole was black, in a white world that enslaved people who looked like her, even if they were half-scottish.
On the very first page of her riproaring autobiography, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole, she puts her Scottish cards on the table. She has "good Scotch blood coursing in her veins”.
This secret ingredient, she writes, many considered to be the source of her incredible “energy and activity”. She is indefatigable. Mary Seacole crosses the world from the Caribbean to Panama to the Crimea, hauling a cornucopia of remedies, teas, meats, jellies and pockethandkerchiefs like a mobile Amazon depot.
She’s touchingly vague about the year of her birth. “I may well be excused giving the precise date of this important event”, she writes, coyly. It was 1805. Sorry, Mary, can’t keep a secret in today's information society.
Her love for adventure may have come from her Scottish father. James Grant was an infantry officer, from what Mary describes as an "old Scotch family”. His soldier’s tales might have sparked off her wanderlust. Her mother gave her the skills to travel with. Rebecca Grant must have been a remarkable woman in her own right. A free black woman in a dangerous world, she was the respected landlady of a thriving boarding house in Kingston called Blundell Hall. Rebecca was also what Mary referred to as a “doctoress”. She taught her daughter traditional remedies and practical healing skills.
The travel bug bit Mary early. A family trip takes her to London when she’s just a girl. Not all her memories of this visit are happy. Street boys poke fun at her cousin for her darker complexion, and Mary gives the impression that she’d resort to fisticuffs when the occasion arose.
She paid for her second trip by bringing
West Indian pickles and preserves to sell in London, a city awash with men returned from the colonies seeking a little taste of the Caribbean. On her way back she proved to be a great woman in a crisis. Her ship, the Velusia, caught fire. The crew battled to get the blaze under control. Mary Seacole planned for disaster and had the ship’s cook lash her to a large hen-coop. She promised him two pounds to chuck her overboard if things got dicey. Fortunately rescue arrived in time to save the Velusia, Mary and, presumably, the hens.
She married Edwin Seacole on 10 November 1836. Sadly, he died only a year later. She lost her beloved mother soon after. Mary was distraught, and turned to the one cure she knew for grief. Travel.
Her brother Edward had set up the Independent Hotel in Panama. Mary went to join him. She admits to being somewhat disappointed when she discovered that the “hotel” was in fact a long "low hut… filled up with mud... and already filled with visitors”. He didn’t even have a room for her. He’d rented the last straw mattresses to two Englishwomen. Undaunted, Mary rolled her sleeves up, tied a cloth around a table and slept under it in her very own fourposter bed
When Cholera hit Panama Mary became the “doctoress” her mother had trained her to be. It wasn’t the first time she’d faced it, and she was fearless. She nursed anyone, regardless of who they were or whether they could pay. She used traditional remedies, including water boiled with cinnamon. Not as fancy as modern drugs, but hydrating cholera patients is crucial. She pulled many through. She lost others. The death of a baby hit her so hard she became determined to find out just how cholera killed. She performed a secret moonlit post-mortem on the tiny corpse in an effort to learn more to save more.
Crimea was the war Mary needed. As a soldier's daughter, she felt called to the colours. Florence was recruiting nurses. It made perfect sense for Mrs Seacole to join her. But it didn’t quite go to plan.
Miss Nightingale was not inclined to include Mrs Seacole. Odd, really. This was a tough, practical, hard-working woman with experience to offer. Did Florence see Mary as just a bit too much for her to handle? Either way, Mary was rejected, which again hardly even slowed her down. She got herself out to the Crimea, fitted out an entire “British Hotel” and started feeding the troops and nursing the sick.
She rode to the front at besieged Sebastopol, even coming under direct fire, which seems to have annoyed her more than scared her. She fought off a would-be horse thief by waving a pistol at him, which she breezily admitted she didn't even know how to load. She pitched up at overcrowded field hospitals and worked alongside exhausted doctors to bind up wounds and hold the hands of the dying.
Mary was loved by the officers and troops. When she ran into financial troubles after Crimea, a huge threeday fundraiser was held in her honour. Enough was raised to let Mrs Seacole live out the rest of her days in comfort, dying in 1881.
Mary was funny, tough and resourceful. She was proud to be Scottish, we should be proud of her. You can’t help but read her book and think that The Lady of the Lamp got all the glory, but Mrs Seacole had all the fun.
Her ship, the Velusia, caught fire. Mary Seacole planned for disaster and had the ship’s cook lash her to a large hen-coop