When Mary Seacole was ‘rediscovered’ in he late 20th century, she was proclaimed as a heroine who had been written out of British history because she was black and working-class, and therefore inferior to the white middle-class Florence Nightingale (Mary features in this light in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses). The truth is more complex. Born Mary Grant in 1805 of Scottish-Creole parentage in Jamaica (her mother ran a boarding-house for British officers), in 1836 she married the merchant Edwin Horatio Hamilton Seacole, who may have been a godson of Nelson, or possibly son of Nelson and Emma (there is no proof of either assertion).
Mary had expertise in treating fevers, and when war broke out with Russia in 1853, she travelled to England and offered her services to the War Office. Her offer was rejected (because of her colour, she believed) so she travelled to the Crimea without official backing to set up a base near the front line. On her way she visited Florence Nightingale at Scutari. Contrary to some sources, Mary did not ask for a job, as she makes clear in her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857).
Mary describes Florence thus: ‘A slight figure, in the nurses’ dress; with a pale, gentle, and withal firm face, resting lightly in the palm of one white hand, while the other supports the elbow. . .Standing thus in repose, and yet keenly observant – the greatest sign of impatience at any time a slight, perhaps unwitting motion of the firmly planted right foot – was Florence Nightingale – that Englishwoman whose name shall never die, but sound like music on the lips of British men until the hour of doom’. Florence said ‘in her gentle but eminently practical and business-like way, "What do you want, Mrs. Seacole – anything that we can do for you? If it lies in my power, I shall be very happy." ‘ All Mary wanted was a bed, and one was found for her in the washerwoman’s quarters where she swapped ‘biographies’ with sick nurses and took off for the front in the morning.
Critics of Florence’s seemingly superior attitude to Mary forget Florence wanted to establish nursing as a profession, whereas Mary had a business to run as well as nurse, and was therefore muddying the waters in Florence’s eyes. Mary’s business cards described her Crimean base – the British Hotel – as a ‘mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers’. Unlike Florence, Mary charged for her services, admitted tourists and served alcohol (she used the profits to finance hospital and battlefield treatment, however, of Russian as well as British soldiers). Florence’s comments on Mary were mostly restrained and she praised her kindness. Privately, however, she suggested that the British Hotel was a ‘Bad House’, a euphemism for ‘brothel’ and she kept her nurses away.
What Happened Next
In his preface to Mary’s book, The Times correspondent W H Russell says ‘I have witnessed her devotion and her courage. . . 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’. England did not immediately forget. Mary went bankrupt in 1856, but The Times and Punch publicised the losses she sustained in her war work, and a Seacole Fund approved by Queen Victoria was established to ensure she was reimbursed for her losses. Victoria’s nephew Count Gleichen, whom she had treated in the Crimea, became a friend, and made a marble bust of her. Mary died of ‘apoplexy’ in 1881, and England gradually forgot her.