400 days

1st October 2005

‘Mother Seacole set up her store-dispensary-hospital, and became historic by right of good deeds, which is almost the rarest claim... even in an enlightened century [she] stands out pre-eminent and cannot be passed over.’ (Mrs. Tom Kelly, From the Fleet in the Fifties, 1902).

Four hundred days. That’s how long Mary Jane Seacole was on ‘active’ duty during the Crimean War.

Four hundred days in a life that spanned 76 years. Yet, it was precisely those days in the Crimea that made her famous in the nineteenth century.

Even so, it still raises the question: what is it about the character and the actions of this woman that make people come together, then, and now, to honour her name? Her achievements must be judged, not by today’s standards, but by that of the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century professional women were few and far between, whatever their ethnic origin.

A telling contemporary example is the story of Mrs Webb, an American ‘lady of colour giving dramatic readings’ to a large audience gathered at the Duchess of Sutherland’s mansion. The Illustrated London News reported that ‘she possessed considerable and rather peculiar dramatic power’ “However, Mrs Webb is not a ‘nigger’. She is the daughter indeed of a woman of full African blood, but her father was a European. Her colour is a rich olive, and her features are remarkably delicate and expressive”. Mrs Webb also happened to be well connected, with Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, among her friends. The year of Mrs Webb’s visit was 1856, the same year that the Crimean War ended.

With this vignette as part of the canvas, let me highlight for you the six aspects of Mary’s life that I particularly admire.

I admire her focus and dedication (evident from young age)

Mary was born of mixed heritage in Jamaica, which at that time was a major British slave colony. She and her mother were free-born Jamaicans, or Creoles. (Her mother was also of mixed heritage and Mary’s father was a Scottish soldier.) Mary was surrounded by ‘the horrors of slavery’, and at an early age she understood the value of personal liberty. Mary and her mother were not enslaved, but like most other people of mixed heritage, they were not allowed to vote, hold public office, inherit much in the way of family fortunes or enter the professions.

Mary learned Creole ‘doctoring’, that is curing and caring, from her mother, who had an excellent reputation as a doctress. The term doctress or doctoress originally referred to an enslaved African woman who took care of sick and injured fellow enslaved on a plantation. Up to and beyond the abolition of slavery, these women combined herbal remedies for the treatment of tropical diseases, general ailments and wounds, with the skills of midwifery. Creole doctoring derived from this tradition. There was no equivalent to the doctoress in the United Kingdom. British White women were excluded from medical education at that time. Mary grew up around British military doctors, many of whom stayed at the family-owned B&B when stationed in Jamaica. Through them, she took every opportunity to perfect her craft.

The tales of the travelers fueled her desire to see the world. But how could she accomplish this?

I admire her insatiable appetite for travel and the ease with which she moved through the world

Before her marriage, she started small and local; trading goods in the French-speaking island of Haiti, Spanish speaking Cuba, and in the Bahamas. She also visited England twice, first as a girl and later as an adult. She was married in 1836, but was widowed and lost her mother before 1845, by which time, she was a businesswoman and a leading doctress in her own right.

Despite all this, she was to do the ‘unthinkable’ for a respectable woman. She would travel across continents in search of ‘adventure’. Sometimes, she found herself in dangerous places, for example, living under conditions of lawlessness in Central and South America. In her mid-forties, she arrived with two staff in New Granada (present day Colombia and Panama), where one of  her brothers had set up an hotel and general store to serve the hordes of travellers passing through the region en route to and from the Californian gold fields. She was not impressed with some of the American travellers whom she encountered:

“My experience of travel”, she wrote in 1857, “had not failed to teach me that Americans (even from the Northern states) are always uncomfortable in the company of coloured people, and very often show this feeling in stronger ways than by sour looks and rude words. I think if I have a little prejudice against our cousins across the Atlantic… it is not unreasonable. I have a few shades of deeper brown upon my skin which shows me related – and I am proud of the relationship – to those poor mortals whom you once held enslaved, and whose bodies America still owns. And having this bond, and knowing what slavery is; having seen with my eyes and heard with my ears proof positive enough of its horrors … is it surprising that I should be somewhat impatient of the airs of superiority which many Americans have endeavoured to assume over me.”

Not only did Mary build her own establishment in a frontier town, but she also provided medical services for the population. At some point, she found the time to prospect for gold in the country’s interior. During her travels she observed how escaped African-American enslave people had become very successful in New Granada, the men holding down senior roles in the church, the criminal justice system and in politics. She also had first-hand experience of the beginnings of the USA’s expansionist ambitions in its ‘own back yard’.

Her philosophy of life and work is clearly summed up in her descriptions of that period: 

“… the females who crossed my path were about as unpleasant specimens of the fair sex as one could well wish to avoid…. As the majority came from the Southern States of America, and showed an instinctive repugnance against any one whose countenance claimed for her kindred with their slaves, my position was far from a pleasant one. Not that it ever gave me any annoyance; they were glad of my stores and comforts, I made money out of their wants; nor do I think our bond of connection was ever closer; only this, if any of them came to me sick and suffering… I forgot everything, except that she was my sister, and that it was my duty to help her.”

I admire her impressive credentials

As her medical skills developed, so did her own reputation in the region. However, by today’s standards, Mary’s medical skills could be considered rudimentary. Yet, she was a uniquely experienced, specialising in the prognosis and treatment of tropical diseases, complementary medicine, and minor surgery. She excelled in midwifery, dispensed her own medicines, and, she even admits to carrying out at least one postmortem, to better understand a disease. Mary was part apothecary, part physician and part surgeon.

William Russell, the eminent Times journalist at the Crimean front, witnessed her ‘courage, devotion, goodness of heart [and] public services’. He told the world, that ‘a more tender or skillful hand about a wound or a broken limb could not be found amongst our best surgeons’. On another occasion, Russell presented her to his readers as ‘a kind and successful physician’.

I admire her vision

It was precisely these skills that motivated her to travel from New Granada to London, with little more than a few references and ‘a confidence in my own powers’ to support her. Meanwhile, in Jamaica itself, the 2nd West India Regiment comprising 1,078 Black men, volunteered for posting to the Crimea expedition. Their request was turned down.

In London, contemporary records show that at least three Creole women applied for posts as nurses. The first, Miss Belgrave, a 33-year-old governess from Jamaica living in Fitzroy Square, was rejected because, a `West Indian constitution is not the one best able to bear the fatigue of nursing.... Though Miss B. looks robust - some English patients would object to a nurse being so nearly a person of colour’. The second West Indian, Elizabeth Purcell, aged 52, was the wife of a soldier resident at the Royal Hospital Chelsea. She brought to her interview in April 1855, a reference from her husband’s commanding officer, who described her as being of ‘exemplary character’. On the back of her application, someone has written: ‘almost black, and on that ground rather objected to by Lady C’. The summary on another certificate reads simply: Purcell. Very Dark. Aged 52. Too old and almost black’. The third, Mary, was 49 years old, overweight and, perhaps, she had packed her favourite yellow dress and blue bonnet with the red ribbons to wear at the interviews!

Feeling dejected after several failed attempts to get a nursing post, she reluctantly concluded that she had been turned away by the decision-makers because her `blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs’. She did not get angry. She did not play the victim. She came up with a plan.

Of the three - Miss Belgrave, Mrs Purcell and Mrs Seacole – we know of only one who made it to the Crimea.

There are at least three reasons why Mary journeyed from one continent to another and refused to give up. One: There was uproar in Britain because the vast majority of soldiers, tens of thousands in fact, were dying from diseases, and she had a proven track record of successfully treating those diseases. Two: She knew many of the British officers and regiments that were involved in the Crimean conflict. They had been stationed in Jamaica at one time or another. She called them her ‘sons’. They called her ‘Mother’. Three: She was fiercely patriotic. She considered it her duty to offer her services to her country, and was driven to explore every possible option of getting to the war zone.

Her plan fitted her experience and skills to perfection; combining her medical and commercial expertise. Given her culinary skills and catering experience, she would go to the Crimea at her own expense and set herself up as a sutler, that is, a person who sells food and drink to the army. Through this method, she was convinced that she could fund and provide the medical services that were so desperately needed. To be honest, she was over qualified and too assertive to have lasted long in a military hospital. She embodied the doctress tradition of independent and integrated curing and caring that was common in Caribbean societies.

Mary identified a partner for the venture, and executed her plan by shipping herself, and her provisions and medical supplies to Turkey, experiencing a brief audience with Florence Nightingale en route to her final destination. Eventually, Mary built the aptly named, British Hotel – a general store-dispensary-hospital- restaurant - two miles inland from Balaklava, where the contemporary assessment, again summarised by William Russell, was that ‘here she doctors and cures all manner of men with extraordinary success.’

It is worth pointing out that Britain entered the Crimean War on 28th March 1854, and the peace treaty was signed on 30th March 1856. Mary arrived in the war zone in March 1855, exactly one year after Britain entered the conflict. Although she stayed in the area until the final evacuation in the summer of 1856, she was actually on ‘active duty’ for a little over a year.

What did she do in those 400 days to attract such adoration, support and excitement when she returned bankrupt from her Crimean exploits?

I admire her stamina and resourcefulness

Well, she worked exceptionally long hours preparing and cooking food, sourcing new stock, protecting her assets from marauders and managing her establishment. She also established her own supply chain for goods from Constantinople. Despite this, she was present at all the main battles, tending the wounded of all nationalities. She was the first British woman to enter Sebastopol when it fell, and she recounts that she ’was one of the first to ride down to the Tchernaya, and very delighted seemed the Russians to see an English woman. I wonder if they thought they all had my complexion’, she joked.

Thievery, gun fire, stench, disease, exceptionally grueling work – none of this deterred her.

The Times War Correspondent, observed her frequently, and claimed: ‘there were times when she refused to wait for the cease fire or retreat call but carefully picked her way through the mutilated bodies of men hit by round shot and shell. She would seek out the wounded and dying, enemy or ally, without any consideration for her depleted stores and empty purse.’ Even when setting out to the battlefield, she writes: ‘I had not neglected my personal appearance, and wore my favourite yellow dress, and blue bonnet with red ribbons’.

Mary returned to England with her health shattered and her finances ruined because the war ended abruptly and her capital was invested in goods that were no longer required. ‘However, a grateful nation fêted Mary Seacole for her valiant services in the war.’ Once the news of her bankruptcy was made public, her loyal fans rallied, and tried to raise money for her through a variety of means, including a grand musical festival. Unfortunately, due to mismanagement, she received very little of the proceeds.

Finally, I admire her ‘cool’

In 1857, her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands was published, and it was a best-seller, and helped set her up in old age. Its success did not affect her fearless determination to be of service. One goal was to go to India, and she also wrote of her hope that ‘perhaps [her] work would take[her] to China or perhaps some other distant shore to which Englishmen go to serve their country.’ Alas, she couldn’t pull off any such international projects, but it was impossible for a woman of her stamina and resourcefulness to remain idle for long; retirement was not for her.

Instead, she had to console herself with charitable deeds closer to home. In one example, the medical journal, The Lancet reported in 1867 that ‘during the recent epidemic of cholera she renewed those kindly exertions for the helpless for which she was formerly famous’.

Among her many accomplishments was the art of massage. One of her clients was the Princess of Wales who suffered from lameness, and Mary was a frequent visitor to Marlborough House.

Mary Seacole died in 1881, aged 76 and was buried in St Mary’s Roman Catholic cemetery, Kensal Green, London. She left a substantial amount in her will to family members and friends in England and Jamaica.

Hers was a life devoted to public service not celebrity.

And there you have it; that unique blend of upbringing and character; self-confidence, leadership and organisational skills, business acumen, medical experience and a love of Britain and a lust for travel, which catapulted Mary onto the world stage in the middle of the nineteenth century, transforming her into a national jewel whose name graced the lips of the Queen and the Prime Minister.

Today, 200 years after her birth, Mary is part of OUR history, regardless of ethnic origin or religion. Her indomitable spirit lives on.