‘Whether I shall come up out of this … I don’t know. It is a desperate game I am playing here, and it is doubtful … I who was and am and never shall be anything but a muddler. The stench, the washing, the enemas, the bed pans, the blood, is my world. Not London society, politics, that gateway into which I so strangely wandered – into which I don’t care a hairpin if I never wander again … this Haut Politique that makes me have to catch large powerful family-men by the tail of their nightshirts at midnight, stand over them when they are sinking, tie up their jaws when they are dead. Five and six jaws a night have I had of late to tie up.’1
MARY KINGSLEY WAS a well-known adventurer and explorer whose writing challenged prevailing European notions of racial superiority, thereby provoking considerable hostility in her time. Books on her life have generally focused on her travels in West Africa and her views on the native peoples of the region, with the result that the period she spent in South Africa during the Anglo-Boer War has been largely neglected. A contributing reason for this neglect may be the relatively brief period she spent nursing Boer prisoners of war in Simon’s Town in 1900. But it was nonetheless an eventful, traumatic and ultimately tragic period, and despite her limited opportunity to write, Mary managed to leave a memorable account of life in the hospital where she was posted. Many might find it surprising that a well-known Englishwoman was prepared to nurse enemy patients whose hearts were filled with bitterness towards Britain, and whose language was totally foreign to her. But even more surprising was the firm dedication with which she did her job.
Mary Henrietta Kingsley was born in Islington, London, on 13 October 1862; she was the only daughter and eldest child of traveller and writer, Dr George Kingsley, whose brother, Charles was a well-known novelist. George’s wife – his former housekeeper Mary Bailey – gave birth to Mary four days after their wedding, an event that undoubtedly raised eyebrows in Victorian social circles. Less than a year after Mary’s birth, the family moved to Highgate, where her brother Charles was born in 1866. By 1881, they were living in Southwood House in Bexley, Kent. George Kingsley’s services were engaged by a group of aristocrats who included the Earl of Pembroke, and he was regularly away from home on voyages to collect information for his medical studies. He travelled to North America between 1870 and 1875, and it was perhaps her father’s views on injustices suffered by the Native Americans that helped to shape Mary’s opinions on British imperialism in West Africa.
Mary had little formal schooling apart from German lessons as a young girl, but she did have access to her father’s extensive library. She later recalled:
The whole of my childhood and youth was spent at home, in the house and garden. The living outside world I saw little of, and cared less for, for I felt myself out of place at the few parties I ever had the chance of going to, and I deservedly was unpopular with my own generation, for I knew nothing of play and such things. But this was not superiority of mind in me, at all; the truth was I had a great amusing world of my own other people did not know, or care about – that was in the books in my father’s library … They were mostly old books on the West Indies, and old medical books, and old travel books and what not; fiction was represented in it by the works of Smollett, and little else.2
In 1891, the family moved to Cambridge, where Charles was reading law at the university, and Mary was studying medicine. When their mother became ill, Mary was expected to care for her, and was unable to leave her side for more than a few hours at a time – limiting any travel opportunities that arose. Following one of his trips, her father became bedridden with rheumatic fever, and died in February 1892; her mother followed soon after, in April that year. Freed from her responsibilities, and with an inheritance that was split evenly with her brother, Mary was now able to travel to faraway places that piqued her interest.
Her first visit was to Africa, where she needed to collect material to complete a book that her father had started writing. The book dealt with the culture of the people of Africa, and after a preliminary visit to the Canary Islands, she made preparations to travel to the west coast of Africa. At the time, non-African women who embarked on journeys to Africa were generally the wives of missionaries and government officials. People were therefore astonished that a woman, especially one who was a mere thirty years old, wished to travel to an unknown continent alone, without the protection of a man. But Mary ignored the criticism, and landed in Sierra Leone on 17 August 1893. From there she pressed on into Luanda in Angola, where she lived with local tribes, though often venturing into unknown and dangerous areas alone.
Mary’s second trip to Africa was in 1895, when the British Museum agreed to assist her in a study of freshwater fish, though from her writings it seems that she was more interested in the practice of cannibalism among local tribes. After arriving on the continent in April 1895, she became acquainted with Scottish missionary Mary Slessor, who was living in the Okoyong territory on the Calabar River among West African natives. If Mary Kingsley found Mary Slessor interesting, the feeling was mutual, as is clear from a letter written by the missionary:
Miss Kingsley cannot be portrayed. She had an individuality as pronounced as it was unique, with charm of manner and conversation, while the interplay of wit and mild satire, of pure spontaneous mirth and of profoundly deep seriousness, made her a series of surprises, each one tenderer and more surprising than the foregoing.3
Later, while in Gabon, Mary took a steamboat up the Ogooué River, deep into uncharted Fang territory in what was then the French Congo, and from there continued on foot and by canoe across the swamplands north of the Ogooué River. She had spent a lot of time in the British Museum under the tutorship of Dr Albert Günther, head of the Zoological Department and author of An Introduction to the Study of Fishes. As she paddled up the river, she collected unrecorded fish specimens, three of which were later named after her.4 Along the way she met up with the Fang people and daringly climbed Mount Cameroon (13 255 feet).
On her return to England in November 1895, she found that newspapers were portraying her as a ‘New Woman’, an image that she herself did not embrace. Over the next three years she toured England, giving lectures on Africa to a wide array of audiences, and displeasing the Church of England by criticising missionaries for attempting to westernise the people of Africa. She wrote two books about her experiences, Travels in West Africa (1897), an immediate bestseller, and West African Studies (1899), which earned her prestige within the scholarly community. After this, she spent most of her time eagerly planning her next big trip to Africa.
‘There is nothing so fascinating as spending a night out in an African forest but, I do not advise anyone to follow the practice. Nor indeed do I recommend African forest life to anyone,’ she advised, warning that ‘unless you are interested in it and fall under its charm’, the forest is ‘like being shut up in a library whose books you cannot read, all the while tormented, terrified, and bored. Still it is good for a man to have experience of it, whether he likes it or not, for it teaches you how very dependent you have been during your previous life on the familiarity of those conditions you have been brought up among, and on your fellow-citizens.’5
Mary seems to have had little time for romantic liaisons, and once wrote, ‘I have never been in love, nor has anyone ever been in love with me.’6 But for all her independence and lively spirit of adventure, she did develop affection for Major Matthew Nathan, acting governor of Sierra Leone, whom she met at a London dinner party. By all accounts, he remained a lifelong bachelor amidst rumours of affairs with a number of women.7 Nathan failed to see Mary off on the eve of her departure to South Africa in 1900, and though she wrote a last letter to him during the voyage, he never replied to it, thus apparently signalling the end of their relationship.
The Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902 provided Mary with an opportunity to travel more widely in Africa. After five years in England, she was eager to return to the continent that she had grown to love. And so, on 2 February 1900, she wrote a letter to Dr Günther, with whom she still worked, informing him that she planned to leave for South Africa in the first week of March.8 She explained that she needed to go to South Africa in order to collect freshwater fish specimens from the Orange River, the border between the British-controlled Cape Colony and the Boer republic of the Orange Free State. It was uncertain how she planned to achieve this in the midst of a war, but she determined to make her next move once she disembarked in South Africa. She had for some time supported, and spoken on behalf of, the Colonial Nursing Association, urging the establishment of a regular nursing corps, and so it was not too surprising when she volunteered her services in South Africa. Apart from nursing, Mary considered the possibility of covering the war as a correspondent – rather like Lady Sarah Wilson – with the aim of returning to her beloved West Africa after the war.9
And so, on 11 March 1900, Mary left Liverpool on the mail ship Moor, which carried more than 650 British soldiers bound for South Africa. The Moor called at Southampton before sailing on to Cape Town. All the decks, cabins and saloons were crammed with people, but toilet facilities were inadequate, and ventilation left much to be desired. After only a few days at sea, the men began to fall ill with dysentery and other sicknesses.
While on board, Mary busied herself with writing. She wrote an article, ‘An Early African Voyage’, an account of Captain Phillips’s voyage on the Hannibal to Africa and the West Indies in 1693–94. She wrote many letters, too, including one very interesting letter to the editor of New Africa journal, where she argued that the future of Africans does not lie in progressive westernisation; she warned that Africans should protect their institutions and laws from colonial interference, and that they should use the power of African nationalism to counter colonial oppression.10
The Moor docked in Cape Town on 28 March. By now Mary was wearing a belted tunic made of khaki drill, and a broad-brimmed felt hat, an outfit that was a stark contrast to her dark-coloured Victorian dresses. She lost no time in calling on Principal Officer of Health General W.D. Wilson, at his office at the Castle, to enquire about making herself useful at a hospital. By this stage, Wilson had probably had enough of well-meaning Englishwomen who were more of a hindrance than a help. So he seemingly tried to put Mary off, telling her that a serious situation had developed at Simon’s Town, and suggesting that she take care of Boer patients there. He would certainly not have anticipated her reaction. Mary recounts the meeting thus:
To make a long story short, I went to the PMO, General Wilson, and said I was out to help in any way he pleased. He said, ‘Will you go to Simonstown to the Boer prisoners?’ – evidently expecting I wouldn’t. I said, ‘If that’s what you want done, yes.’ It was. Those prisoners were dying in a way the British authorities, properly so called, did not approve of.11
At the time, many sick and wounded Boer prisoners of war had been sent to Cape Town, following the large-scale surrender of General Piet Cronjé’s forces at Paardeberg a month before. Healthy Boer prisoners were held in camps at Green Point and Simon’s Town, while the sick and wounded were accommodated on poorly equipped hospital ships in Simon’s Bay. A makeshift hospital had also been opened in the old Palace Barracks – a rather misleading name for buildings that dated back to 1886 – to accommodate sick Boers, but it was desperately short of staff. Many Boer patients were ill with typhoid, while others suffered from measles and other ailments.
Simon’s Town lies on the far south-eastern side of the Cape Peninsula, and when Mary arrived there she took a room at the British Hotel, where Prime Minister Cecil John Rhodes had also once stayed.12 Situated in the heart of Simon’s Town, this restful hotel overlooks the harbour and False Bay, but Mary soon moved to a room in the Palace Barracks at the northern end of town where she spent most of her time.
Two weeks before her arrival in Simon’s Town, Dr Gerard Carré had been transferred from Wynberg in Cape Town to the Palace Barracks, to help convert it into decent quarters.13 When he first arrived, he found the place in a dreadful state, dirty, with peeling paint; it was also overcrowded, and there was a shortage of medical staff and the necessary facilities. Mary described the barracks as a place where ‘they sent the wretched patients, and gave it to an already over-worked doctor [Carré] to see after, omitting to supply either nurses or proper orderlies’. Though things did eventually improve, Mary was clearly appalled at what she first encountered:
The consequences have been, of course, a terrible death-rate and a regular howl from the Afrikander section here. The medical officers have moved heaven and earth to improve matters, and now I think I may say it has been done and things will go better; but I never struck such a rocky bit of the valley of the Shadow of Death in all my days as the Palace Hospital, Simonstown.14
Dr Carré set about converting the old barracks into a hospital consisting of a main building and four wood-and-iron huts; the main building was divided into smaller wards, each with eight to ten narrow iron beds with rough sacking-cloth sheets and mud-coloured blankets. Officially, the hospital had sixty-seven beds, but at the height of the typhoid epidemic there were at least 140 patients; the dreadful conditions were exacerbated by a shortage of nurses and nursing facilities. In a letter to a friend, Dr Carré wrote: ‘[A]fter I had been here about a week Miss Kingsley joined me in the capacity of a Nursing Sister and between us in an incredibly short time we converted chaos into order, or as she herself has written it, converted “a mortuary into a sanitarium” [sic].’15
Death was an ever-present reality in the wards, and Mary dealt with its proximity in a no-nonsense way. ‘When a man is dying definitely, you don’t like the two next to turn to see the performance, so you trot off and find two little screens. Well, the other two know what those screens mean perfectly well, only they think they are for them, so they start off on dying too. We have had four or five a night dying under these conditions.’ Throughout this, however, she maintained a wry sense of humour: ‘Then there are the never-to-be-forgotten bugs and lice. They swarm. The Palace supplies the bugs free of charge, the patients the lice; they get on well together and make common cause on humanity, of course including you.’16
Dr Carré was assisted by Dr Thomas Hall, the former district surgeon at Jacobsdal, who was fluent in Dutch and facilitated communication with the Boers, many of whom did not speak English.17 At first there were twelve nurses, only two of whom were trained, the rest being local voluntary helpers. Mary wrote that when she first arrived, the doctor and two nurses (sisters Rowlandson and Jackson) were tackling the outbreak of typhoid on their own and ‘were nearly done for’ – and that she herself was soon ‘nearly done for’. The situation improved a little when they acquired another two doctors, three nurses and more orderlies. Yet it was still overwhelming. ‘[A]ll to-day I have had over a hundred patients under my own charge – killing work from the nature of the case – delirious, fretting strong men, every third man wanting to nurse himself,’ she lamented.18
A music teacher and local volunteer, Lucy Bester, had a high regard for Mary. Though Lucy herself contracted typhoid fever, she fortunately survived. According to her, they were nine nurses in all: Mary Kingsley, sisters Rae, Knight, Morris and Rogers, with Mrs Von Willigh and Misses Botha and Wrench assisting. Three of them worked the night shift until half past four in the morning, while the rest were on day duty.19
Mary enjoyed some relief from the grim world of the hospital during her visits to Rudyard Kipling and his American wife, Carrie. The Kiplings stayed at ‘The Woolsack’, their home in Wynberg during their long visits to Cape Town, though Mary would also meet up with them at the Mount Nelson Hotel in Gardens. The famous writer and poet had known Mary ever since being a boarder at the United Services College in Westward Ho! in Devon. They had first met in London, at the Kensington home of Mary and Georgiana Craik (daughters of literary scholar George Lillie Craik). Kipling later recorded this first encounter: ‘It was at the quietest of tea-parties, in this [literary] circle, that I first met Mary Kingsley, the bravest woman of all my knowledge.’20 He also recalled, ‘She must have been afraid of something, but one never found out what it was.’21
In his 1932 memoir, Kipling reminisces about Mary and her nursing exploits in Cape Town:
In the early days of the Boer War she came to Cape Town of set purpose to relieve English nurses for work among our own peoples, by helping to tend sick and wounded Boer prisoners at Simon’s Town, the naval station. Sometimes she would put into our house near Wynberg for what she called ‘a Christian tea’. Sitting on the stoep, her hands quite still in her lap, and looking across the Cape flats to the coloured ranges beyond, she would tell of single-handed night vigils over fever-stricken men whose speech she hardly understood. And notably of hand-to-hand campaigns, in which, to do them justice, other prisoners came to her aid, against a wounded Cape Colony farmer who had joined a rebel commando and was crazed with fear of being identified and punished when he should recover. His obsession led him to attempt stealthy escapes into the open at any hour of the night, and then, until he was overpowered and sat upon, to fight to exhaustion.22
At times, Mary would take a break from her arduous work and sit on the stoep of the Palace Barracks, where she had a beautiful view of the sea. Looking out over the bay, she sometimes counted the ships; when illuminated at night, they were a splendid sight.23
In a relatively short time, Mary endeared herself to her fellow nurses and also to the Boers whom she nursed. According to Nurse Rae, a sister from the Army Nursing Reserve, Mary ‘was the one bright spot for us, always with some amusing tale when we were at our lowest ebb’.24 Throughout this challenging time, Mary only had kind words for the Boers, in spite of the difficulties in nursing them:
They are a most civil set of men. Those we have are mostly from the Beiwohner [sharecropper] class, men who the big Boer farmers allowed to live on their farms and cultivate an allotment in return for services when required; but they are a courtly set of people, they never take a thing from you without a ‘Thank you’; when they are not delirious, they obey every word you say.25
To her Boer patients, she was an ever-present angel. One man who seemed to have little hope of surviving, eventually pulled through – and his first words to Mary were, as she later recorded, ‘You are always here.’ She replied, ‘Count on it, stay in bed’, whereupon the man said, ‘You must be so tired.’ Mary concluded by agreeing with him.26
She described the Boers as being, above all, family men; but they were also men who loved their country and their independence – qualities she herself seems to have understood very well:
They want their own country their very own; it works out in all their delirium – ‘ons Land, ons Land! ’ [our Country, our Country!]. One of them held forth to me to-day, a sane one, how he knew every hill’s name, every bend of the river’s name, every twist in the road – his hills, his roads, rivers, not England’s, or Germany’s, but ‘ons Land ’. We English are born Imperialists, these men are born nationalists; but I will say no more on that now, it is a rocky problem for the future.27
All the while, there had been efforts by some Boers to escape from the prisoner-of-war camp, as Mary recorded. At dinner one night, they heard shots, and later, at half past two, two men were brought in: a Boer with bayonet wounds, and a black man who had been shot through the kidneys in the skirmish. ‘We got them into bed and expect they will die tonight when we are on duty again, and as we rather expect three more deaths tonight too, I shall be glad when it is tomorrow.’28
Mary was fully aware of the risk to herself, especially in nursing typhoid patients:
Whether I shall come up out of this, like I came up out of what is associated with thinking proper, I don’t know. It is a desperate game I am playing here, and it is doubtful. One nurse and an orderly who have only been on two days are down themselves. But if I do not, believe me, my dear lady, I am eternally grateful to you for all your tenderness, your infinite toleration and thoughtfulness for me. I who was and am and never shall be anything but a muddler. The stench, the washing, the enemas, the bed pans, the blood, is my world. Not London society, politics, that gateway into which I so strangely wandered – into which I don’t care a hairpin if I never wander again … this Haut Politique that makes me have to catch large powerful family-men by the tail of their nightshirts at midnight, stand over them when they are sinking, tie up their jaws when they are dead. Five and six jaws a night have I had of late to tie up.29
She did, however, take some – rather odd – precautions to prevent herself from falling ill; usually almost a teetotaller, she took to drinking Cape wines, as well as smoking cigarettes, as she believed these would give her some immunity from infection. But by the middle of May she was feverish and struggled to eat, though she dismissed these as nothing serious. Then other symptoms began to show: headaches, dizziness, aching joints, nose bleeds, stomach ache, diarrhoea and delirium. By now there was no doubt that Mary had typhoid.
Nurse Rae recalled that when she got up on the morning of 1 June, she noticed that the medical staff – all except Mary – were away at the hospital. Mary surprised her by opening her door a crack and asking her to come in. She complained of pain and had a temperature, and Nurse Rae put her to bed and insisted on calling a doctor. But Mary was only prepared to see Dr Carré, and he would not be available until the next day.30 Having examined her, Dr Carré decided to operate at once, confirming Mary’s suspicion that her intestine had been perforated. The operation was successful, and Mary regained consciousness the next day, but she was fully aware of the severity of her condition. By evening she knew that she was dying, and asked to see Dr Carré. She made him promise to see to it that she was buried at sea; at first he insisted that she was rallying, but then conceded the onset of heart failure.
‘She rallied for a short time but realised she was going,’ Nurse Rae recalled. ‘She asked to be left to die alone, saying she did not wish anyone to see her in her weakness. Animals, she said, went away to die alone, and she felt like them. It was hard for us to do this, but we left the door ajar, and when we saw she was beyond knowledge went to her.’31 Dr Carré and Nurse Rae stayed at Mary’s bedside throughout the night, but eventually her breathing began to falter and she died peacefully in the early hours of 3 June 1900. She was only thirty-seven years old.
In a letter to Mary’s brother Charles on 5 September 1900, Dr Carré wrote:
[W]hat little I was unfortunately able to do for your good sister, she was so good to me, helping me in every way in her power that there is nothing I would not have done to save her life, or to have increased her comfort & happiness in her earlier days at Simonstown … Truth to tell your sister and I only began to understand one another quite at the last (I am afraid I am a difficult individual to get on with), we put mutual trust in one another & her untimely death cut short what I believe would have been one of my great friendships.32
Dr Carré erroneously entered Mary’s age on her death certificate as thirty-five, an error that was repeated on a brass plaque on her coffin, which read: ‘Mary Kingsley. Aged 35. Died at Simon’s Town Whilst Nursing Boer Prisoners of War. June 3, 1900.’ He carried out Mary’s dying wish, and arranged with the authorities for a burial at sea; in addition to this, he organised a combined naval and military ceremony. The funeral procession left for the Simon’s Town pier from the Palace Barracks, led by a detachment of gunners and followed by the 4th Yorkshire Military Band, with Mary’s coffin – draped in the Union Jack – on a gun carriage. From the pier, the coffin was taken by launch to a torpedo boat, HMS Thrush, which then sailed beyond Cape Point and lowered Mary’s remains into the open sea. But it was as if Mary was reluctant to leave this world, for the coffin refused to sink and had to be hauled back on board; it was then weighed down with an anchor and thrown overboard again, disappearing now into the wide ocean. An acquaintance, Stephen Gwynn, astutely observed that ‘through all her distinct life [Mary] had neither mate nor hearth … and the resting-place of her choice was limited by no boundary ’.33
Dr Carré himself remarked in a letter that Mary’s ‘funeral at sea, in accordance with her most definitely expressed wishes, was … the most imposing obsequies this small place has ever witnessed’. Paying tribute to her, he continued:
Unfortunately as events have shown she greatly overtaxes her strength, and this wretched war claims yet another brilliant victim, a thoroughly good woman of giant intellect whom this world can ill spare. I shall always recall Miss Kingsley’s memory as one of the saddest and greatest friendships of my life. It will be of great satisfaction to her brother and her friends to know that though only two months in Simonstown she had won the love and respect of all.34
The Boer prisoners of war had an equally high regard for and appreciation of this self-sacrificing woman, and referred to her as ’n engel [an angel]. Their admiration for Mary was especially evident from their efforts and contributions to the Mary Kingsley Fund. ‘Tonight there is a Christy Minstrel Entertainment in building C in aid of the fund to the memory of Mary Kingsly [sic],’ Boer prisoner Hugo van Niekerk recorded in his diary on 8 August 1900 in the Green Point camp. He went on to say that, before the start of the concert, Landdrost Zijlstra of Rouxville carefully explained its purpose to the prisoners.35
Back in England, the Kipling family, who had left the Cape in late April, were saddened to hear the news of Mary’s death. Referring to her relentless work ethic, her long working hours, as well as the strain of treating patients in extremely trying conditions, Rudyard Kipling observed, ‘All this sort of thing helped to kill her, for she was weakened by malaria and worn down by lack of help, and could not resist when the typhoid developed. But even during the short time that she served there, all who had come in contact with her, from Admirals to orderlies, knew and adored her as “Mary”; there being but one of her mould.’36
Some years later, in 1903, Kipling wrote a moving personal tribute to Mary and her fellow nurses:
Who recalls the moontide and the funerals through the market (Blanket-hidden bodies, flagless, followed by the flies) And the footsore firing-party, and the dust and stench and staleness, And the faces of the Sisters and the glory in their eyes?37
Dr Carré sent photographs of Mary to his sculptor brother in England, to start working on a bust of her. He also mentioned a ‘memorial scheme’ with a view to honouring Mary, but rejected the building of a hospital, saying that he failed to see where such a large sum of money would come from.38
Nevertheless, apparently independently of this scheme, and following efforts of the townspeople for the provision of a general civilian hospital, the Simon’s Town Cottage Hospital was opened in a former hospital building on 1 April 1905. The substantial stone structure was situated on the mountainside, and consisted of four wards, each of which could accommodate three beds. One of these wards was named after Mary: the Nurse Kingsley Ward. However, in later years there was a need for a larger hospital to cater for a growing number of patients, and so when the new False Bay Hospital was built, the doors of the Simon’s Town Cottage Hospital closed – as did those of the Nurse Kingsley Ward.
In England, Mary’s death was widely mourned. In her honour, the merchants of Liverpool and Manchester established the Mary Kingsley Hospital in Liverpool for the treatment of tropical diseases. Her legacy was also commemorated with the founding of the Mary Kingsley Society of West Africa; later renamed the African Society, its focus being the study of African customs and institutions.
Among the many tributes that poured in after Mary’s death, this one from a prestigious literary magazine, The Athenaeum, was especially poignant:
It is difficult in speaking of the premature death of Miss Mary Kingsley not to use language which to those who did not know her, or only knew her as it were, from the outside, may seem to savour of exaggeration. To those, on the other hand, who knew her as she was, with all the variety of her richly endowed nature, her commanding intellect, her keen insight, her originality, her tenderness, her simplicity, her absolute freedom from cant or pretense, her delightful humour, her extraordinary grasp of the problems, physical, ethnological, or political, to which as occasion arose she turned her attention, any attempt to portray her character or to estimate by how much the world is the poorer for her loss must fall short of reality.39