Elizabeth Fry’s friendship with Charles de Bunsen was cemented by the marriage of Ernest, his eldest son, to her Quaker niece, Elizabeth Gurney. The friendship began through the shared interest of two dedicated reformers in creating a new public hospital for London, at a time when Britain’s city slums were rampant breeding grounds for virulent disease.
This, in an age of enterprise and achievement, was Britain’s dirty little secret. A horrified German visitor to Bradford in 1846 described the back streets of a thriving Yorkshire manufacturing town as a vision from hell. Young Friedrich Engels, despatched from Wuppertal in 1842 to gain some knowledge of his family’s textile business in Manchester, was shown the sufferings of the city’s industrial poor by Mary Burns, a radical-minded Irish factory girl who became his common-law wife. Back in Germany before he returned to England to subsidise and collaborate with his admired friend and colleague, Karl Marx, Engels published his most famous book, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), as a warning to his homeland’s merchant class of the terrible consequences of industrialisation. England, as Engels pointed out in a work that (unsurprisingly) was not published in Britain until 1887, offered Germany a frightening model of what happened when social welfare was valued below economic success.
What Engels did not point out in his great book was that the people who had come to England from his own country were among the most oppressed in their new homeland, and that the conditions he had witnessed in Manchester were not restricted to that city.
In 1840, around the time that Charles de Bunsen first arrived in England, German sugar-bakers were working twelve-hour days in the infamous East End boiling houses, in conditions so bad that no Englishmen (even in the terrible decade known as ‘the Hungry Forties’) would undertake such labour. Consumption, caused by inhaling the sugar-scum, was rife and deadly; London’s hospital beds, when compared to what was offered by other European capitals, were in short supply.
Charles de Bunsen, addressing a hospital committee about the need for immediate action in 1843, was well-fortified with the pertinent statistics, and they were shaming. Berlin, with a population of 365,000, offered 3000 hospital beds. Paris, with a population of one million, offered 20,000. London, with the comparatively enormous population of two million (of whom at least 30,000 were German immigrants who spoke no English and who relied upon a handful of overworked Lutheran pastors to communicate their needs), could supply a mere 5000 beds.1
Nursing in England had reached an all-time low by the 1840s, and for good reason. Readers of Martin Chuzzlewit, serialised in 1843–4, were not so stirred as they should have been by Dickens’s characterisation of Sairey Gamp, a venal alcoholic who cares less about her work as a midwife, nurse and layer-out of the dead than ensuring her own basic comforts. Emphasising Mrs Gamp’s unsuitability for her profession, Dickens neglected to mention that the hard life of a city nurse offered scant incentive for any finer standard of behaviour. Pay to a hospital nurse was negligible; training and supervision were almost non-existent. Accommodation often amounted to a straw mattress and a thin blanket, flopped at the bottom of a stairwell. Treated with such indifference, nurses could not be expected to behave like ministering angels.
Years earlier, Charles de Bunsen had successfully overseen the establishment of a small Protestant hospital in Rome. Newly arrived in London and shocked by the absence of medical provision for his poorer compatriots, de Bunsen set out to repeat his success. To do so, he drew upon his friendship with Elizabeth Fry and upon his knowledge of a German nursing institute, Kaiserswerth, that had been inspired by her example.
Theodor Fliedner, Kaiserswerth’s founder, had originally entered England in 1824 as a pastor on a mission to raise funds for the German poor. A meeting with Mrs Fry had led to an invitation, a decade later, to watch this sweet but formidable woman at work as she read to a group of female convicts, in a Bible class held within the walls of Newgate Prison. Fliedner was awestruck, and inspired.
Fry’s main objective was to improve the conditions of prison life for women, and to revive, by the fostering of piety among such inmates, a sense of hope. Fliedner formulated a project that was closer to the spirit of Thomas Carlyle. (An unpopular 1850’s pamphlet by Carlyle, Model Prisons, suggested that less should be spent on the creation of smart new penitentiaries, and more on building better homes for the working poor.)
Returning to the little town of Kaiserswerth, near the Rhine, Pastor Fliedner’s first pioneering venture was to create a post-prison hostel for women, a place of transition at which recently released female convicts could be trained and prepared for social service within the larger German community. The still bolder idea of a female teaching college followed on, together with the nursing institute that had so interested Charles de Bunsen. Initiated by Fliedner’s second wife, who had formerly headed a surgical ward at a Hamburg hospital, the institute aimed to provide unmarried girls with three years of training in nursing and religion at Kaiserswerth, followed by practical experience, to be gained abroad. It was this final aspect of the Fliedners’ programme that caught de Bunsen’s attention as he began to plot the route to setting up a German-speaking hospital in London. Kaiserswerth offered a way in which to recruit a reliable supply of German-speaking nurses. All that was required now was to gather a first-hand report of Fliedner’s institute.
In October 1839, Mrs Fry told Bunsen of her plan to undertake a major tour of German prisons, with the intention of bringing her forceful personality to bear on their urgent need for reform. Mrs Fry intended to travel out with her brother Samuel Gurney, a wealthy Quaker of enterprising views who would later host the first demonstration of an electrical telegraph at his home in London, and Samuel’s daughter, Elizabeth. De Bunsen, having congratulated Mrs Fry upon a laudable project, urged his friend (whom he diplomatically described as ‘a tall, large figure . . . not plain, but rather grand than handsome’) to visit Kaiserswerth, and to report back with her usual trenchant clarity.
Mrs Fry, while impressed by de Bunsen’s project, was not easily persuaded. Prisons, not hospitals, were her mission in life and she had committed herself to what was already a punishing schedule for a semi-invalid, and one who was nearing sixty. It seems that a certain amount of delicate bartering took place. De Bunsen indicated his willingness to arrange for Mrs Fry to meet those royal personages under whose control the German prisons lay; letters of introduction were placed in her capable hands. In exchange, with a calm inflexibility that matched the great reformer’s own determined spirit, de Bunsen insisted upon her visiting an institute, as he calmly reminded his visitor, that owed its very existence to herown splendid example. Gratified by the allusion to her influence and delighted by the entrée that de Bunsen had provided to Germany’s royal circles, Mrs Fry surrendered.
Mrs Fry’s 1840 trip to Germany commenced auspiciously, with a summons from Queen Victoria, who (possibly at the prompting of de Bunsen himself) delivered a short personal message of goodwill for the expedition to Germany. Mrs Fry (whose most un-Quakerish attachment to royalty did not always gain the approval of her family) was impressed.
Elizabeth Gurney, to her considerable disappointment, had received no summons to join her aunt on the visit to Windsor Castle. A lively and sharp-eyed young Norfolk Quaker who referred to herself with self-effacing meekness as ‘the hem of Aunt’s garment’, Elizabeth went off instead to purchase a new diary from Ackermann’s shop in the Strand. Its plain pages (no gilt edgings for Quakers) would record her candid impressions of Germany – and of Aunt Fry in action.
Miss Gurney’s unpublished diary offers an unexpected glimpse of Mrs Fry offstage. Feeding ‘Aunt’ up with the requisite amount of porter and ale to keep her lively in spirits and forceful in voice throughout the trip was, so Elizabeth demurely commented, quite a business in itself. Well-nourished and constantly feted, Mrs Fry was less discomforted than her niece either by the strangeness of German meals – how peculiar, Elizabeth remarked, to begin a meal with plum pudding and end it with a joint of beef – or by the hearty kisses with which both ladies were invariably set upon by their Quaker counterparts. ‘And not content with one good smack,’ Elizabeth noted with dismay, ‘they plan for at least four, that is two for each side . . . Aunt Fry bears it heroically.’
‘I think,’ the young diarist slyly added, ‘she rather likes it.’2
A noble mission (Mrs Fry was anxious to discover whether much-heralded reforms had been put into practice in Hanover and Berlin) did not preclude the hope of some sightseeing trips for the English visitors. Meanwhile, Elizabeth reported on various prison visits and praised the skill with which Mrs Fry persuaded ladies of fashion to adopt an eager interest in her cause. Miss Gurney shared her aunt’s dismay at finding that Hanover (so closely connected by its history to England) harboured one of the worst prisons in Germany, with 400 men in chains, and all under the auspices of an unpleasant new king (Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, one of George III’s least popular sons) who declared himself ‘too ill’ even to listen to the urgent recommendations of his English visitors. Hanover town, like its king, was very haughty and grand, Elizabeth reported with disgust. She was glad they had not dined with such a worldly man as the Ambassador, Lord Bligh.
A young woman embarked on her first trip abroad could not stay indignant for longer than an afternoon. Happy to be taken in hand by one Rudolph, their personable German tour guide, she was hard put to know what thrilled her more: the chance to sit in Luther’s own chair, and there to gaze upon ‘the very beer jug that he had drunk out of’ (this formidable relic lay under the shy supervision of a shabby old straw-hatted schoolmaster who stammered out that he had been reading Mrs Fry’s works for twenty years), or a visit to ‘the sight that all loyal English hearts cannot fail to see with interest – Albert’s palace’. Here, a guide had showed off (with conspicuous triumph, Elizabeth noted) the Prince’s ‘really splendid apartments – we had no idea he lived in such state’. Miss Gurney, evidently, had been taking information from one of the many English periodicals that drew attention, in the year of the Queen’s marriage, to the Coburgs’ lack of funds and to the predicted likelihood that young Albert’s impoverished relations would seek a share of Albion’s hard-earned wealth.
Weimar (visited on a side-trip with her father) sounds to have marked the low point for Elizabeth Gurney, a spirited young woman whose attempts at enthusiasm (‘delightful public parks and gardens . . . trees looking so lovely . . .’) fail to mask her impatience with the time-worn reminiscences about Goethe delivered by the ever-hospitable Duke and Duchess, whose grandeur offered scant compensation for the fact that the aged Duchess seemed unable to hear a word that Elizabeth and her father ventured to say. But solace was on hand. Berlin lay ahead, enriched by Charles de Bunsen’s promised introductions to royal personages.
Elizabeth liked Berlin. Careful record was kept of her visits to various elegant grand ladies, in boudoirs filled with exotic caged birds and a wealth of Dresden china. Note was also made of every titled person that she met, ranging from King Friedrich Wilhelm IV down to an entire galaxy of Prussian princesses. Familiarity, however, soon bred a certain degree of knowing scorn: attending a final party for ‘300 of the first gentry in Berlin’, including ‘a vast concourse of Counts, Barons, etc.’ Miss Gurney told her sister Richenda that she had been introduced to ‘two princes and principes’, but had not been fooled. These were small fry. They were definitely ‘not Royal ones’.
Awe returned, as the English party were escorted around a Berlin prison, with ‘Royalty’ in attendance, ‘and lastly our honoured aunt! Oh it was a sight! . . . My Aunt looked like a Princess herself in a beautiful full silk cloak that Papa has given her . . . and a pair of light gloves and her cap. She looks’, Miss Gurney was proud to declare, ‘fit for any court of Europe.’ Descending at the jail’s gates from a magnificent carriage that Miss Gurney had been invited to share with one of the apprehensive royal party (none of whom had ever stepped inside a prison before), Elizabeth was better pleased still to see that, while Mrs Fry attracted ‘huge crowds’, the family of the Prussian King had attracted very limited interest.
Of Kaiserswerth, disappointingly, Elizabeth Gurney reported next to nothing. She noted that the young deaconesses wore blue uniforms and white caps, that they visited the deserving poor, that they had sole care of their patients, and that some were being prepared to work abroad: no more was said. Mrs Fry’s admiration for Kaiserswerth, however, was unstinting. Directly upon her return to England, a new scheme for the training of nurses was set in motion. Kaiserswerth was the acknowledged German model.
Elizabeth Gurney’s lesser interest in Kaiserswerth may have related to the fact that she had other thoughts than nursing reform on her young mind. It was during her tour in Germany with Mrs Fry that Elizabeth was first introduced to two of the young de Bunsens; in August 1845, she married Ernest, the eldest son of Charles and Fanny. ‘Seldom can it have happened in life to have a connexion in all its circumstances so entirely satisfactory,’ a delighted Fanny exclaimed of her new daughter-in-law, two days after the ceremony; her satisfaction was completed in 1854, when the de Bunsens’ second, Berlin-based son, Georg, carried off the daughter of another prosperous clan of high-minded and well-connected Norfolk Quakers. Nothing, it seemed, could now sever the bond that knit the de Bunsen family into the closely woven fabric of philanthropic enterprise in England and Germany.
Charles de Bunsen was greatly encouraged by Mrs Fry’s response to Kaiserswerth. In 1842, when a restless young Florence Nightingale asked him what she should do with her life, he unhesitatingly advised her to visit the Fliedners in Germany. In 1846, de Bunsen took a further step. He presented Miss Nightingale with a Kaiserswerth year-book, a volume that provided the would-be nurse with a full account of the training methods and achievements of an exemplary German institute.
Florence, who was struggling to persuade the uneasy Nightingale family that nursing could provide an acceptable career to a young lady of her social background, was impressed by de Bunsen’s accounts. ‘There my heart is and there, I trust, will one day be my body,’ she confided to a private book.3 In 1850, still without family approval, Miss Nightingale slipped out of England for a two-week summer visit to the Fliedners’ institute.
Almost fifty years later, reluctantly sending the British Museum an old pamphlet – her first publication – that she had written in praise of Kaiserswerth, the famous and feted Florence Nightingale scribbled a note of chilling disclaimer. True, the atmosphere of the place had been spiritually pure. An endearing attention had been paid to the celebration of sick children’s birthdays. As to the institute itself, however, no word, in 1897, was sufficiently harsh. The nursing standards had been poor, the so-called deaconesses were peasants (Nightingale was never an egalitarian), the hospital itself was squalid, and its hygiene standard had been a disgrace.
Reading that sour pencilled note today, it seems strange that Nightingale had returned to Kaiserswerth for a second and much longer visit in 1851, when Fliedner had commended the excellence of the results she achieved in her nursing exams.
Nightingale’s later view was coloured by intervening events. By 1897, Germany’s demands (massive reparations were sought from France after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1) had turned Florence against what she had come to perceive as a greedy upstart empire. Back in the 1850s, while pleading with her mother to come over to Germany and visit the Fliedners herself, Nightingale had written that the only happiness she lacked at Kaiserswerth was the approval of her own parents.
The training that Florence Nightingale received at Kaiserswerth provided the foundation for her later work. The young deaconesses with whom she learned the basic principles of nursing care were among the first groups who were sent out from Kaiserswerth, from 1845 onwards, to work in London at the new German Hospital. Here, they provided, from the hospital’s earliest days, the high standard of care that de Bunsen and two ardent Lutheran pastors had set out to secure for the poorest members of the German population in London.
It had been hard work. In 1841, Charles de Bunsen had promised his Lutheran visitors that he would do his best to secure support and funding for a hospital that would serve the German poor. In 1843, de Bunsen summoned his first planning committee to a City pub that was regularly used, back then, for business conferences. The first Duke of Cambridge (George III’s affable seventh son) was invited to become president, in part because of his strong affection for Germany and in part because he promised to make full use of his royal connections to recruit patronage and funds. Plans were made for a visit to the chosen site on Dalston Lane, where the designated buildings were set in a large garden among tranquil and almost country-like surroundings. Its closeness to the German community huddled in the East End was noted and approved. Agreement was reached for a modest start, with room for just twelve beds. De Bunsen’s recommendation for the immediate recruitment from Germany of six Kaiserswerth deaconesses was passed, as was the suggestion of an annual penny subscription for all sugar-bakers, in exchange for free treatment, beds and convalescent stays. Locals, of whatever nationality and creed, were to receive free day treatment.
Helped by the generosity of the Schröder family and by contributions from de Bunsen’s friends in Prussia, the Ambassador was able to push matters forward at his usual energetic pace. On 15 October 1845, the date that marked the King of Prussia’s birthday, the German Hospital formally opened its doors. Appropriately, for an institution strongly linked to the Protestant faith, its inauguration began with a choir of German children singing de Bunsen’s favourite German hymn: ‘Nun danket alle Gott’.
The German Hospital’s history of success makes for impressive reading. By 1852, when Florence Nightingale was given a tour of the wards, the nursing team was headed by Dr Hermann Weber, an expert on the then deadly disease of tuberculosis and an outstanding physician whose future patients would include Queen Victoria and five of her prime ministers. Joseph Lister, early on in his career as a pioneer of modern surgery, was acting as an advisor. The number of patients who had been treated within the first year of the hospital’s opening, so Nightingale was proudly informed, numbered 10,000.
Nightingale was visibly impressed by what she was shown and told. Hermann Weber, in turn, took note of his visitor’s brisk suggestions for improvements in ventilation and sanitation. Miss Nightingale’s recommendations – a reminder of how conscious she was of the importance of good sanitation before she ever went to the Crimea – were swiftly adopted as standard practice in a hospital that, within a decade, prided itself upon offering the most modern standard of health service that was available anywhere in Britain in Victorian times.