Empire: World History - 84. A Tale of Two Nurses: Seacole & Nightingale

Episode Date: September 28, 2023

The Lady with the Lamp, the great nurse who forever changed public health for the better: Florence Nightingale lives large in the national consciousness. Mary Seacole, however, has been largely forgotten by history, even though she too played a significant role in the Crimean War. Both were lauded by the press. Both were famous in Britain upon their return. Remarkable forces of will, both were women ahead of their time. Listen as William and Anita are joined by Helen Rappaport to discuss the lives of these inspirational women. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arneng. And me, William Drimple. Do you know what? I actually, in awe of you, because you've got a flight to catch in not very many hours. So well done you. Well, if you knew that A, I wasn't packed, B, I wasn't checked.

There's a man, I know. You'd be less full of admiration. Yeah, I was half expecting you to sort of turn up with socks over your shoulder and piles of laundry. It's quite a panic. There was a croissant that was hidden and is out of view. But anyway, that's now well eaten. I'm so glad you have. And the only reason that you'd be motivated to be dragged out of the chaos that is your packing is because we've got an absolute corker of a subject.

today to talk about. And now just remind everyone, really, this comes off the back of our wonderful episodes with Orlando Fiji's on the Crimean War. And just tell us, just for those who may not have, and by the way, why haven't you, listen to those podcasts just yet? A thumbnail sketch of where we're at

and why the Crimean was such an important place. Then, as it is now, but then in particular, it was one of the first wars of its kind, wasn't it? It's three empires. clashing. There is the Ottoman Empire which we dealt with in our second series, which is under assault by the Russians who are moving through Ottoman territory, not only in the Caucasus and in the north of the Black Sea, but also in the Crimea. At the same time, the British are worried

that the Russians are becoming too powerful and are encroaching close to Afghanistan and their British Indian possessions and already they've got Russophobia on the loose in London, and finally have the Russians themselves who take obviously a rather different view of all this, and they think that their job is to look after the Orthodox Christians of the Middle East, who they believe not unfairly are under persecution by the Ottomans, that they are needing the protection of the new Rome as the Tsar sees himself. He's the new Caesar looking after the Christians of these. So these three powers plus France, which is now trying to show it's still a power after the defeat of Napoleon, all converge on the Crimea. And so there's this

clash of three different series. We're going to have all our different subjects coming together. Basically, all of our food groups here. And today, I'm particularly excited because we're talking about, well, a feminist issue, I think, about women who were right in the middle of all of this. One in particular, right on the front line of all of this, because we talked about just some of the scale of the carnage that took place during the Crimean War. Charge of the Light Brigade, we went through all of that. So you all know this from schooling here in this country if you've been brought up in Britain. It was young men, or what do they say, lions led by donkeys, very much sort of a situation

where young men in their prime were sent to the Mincer. And here in the middle of this, two women, one who in her time became emblematic of heroism and female sacrifice and all of the things that Florence Nightingale has now come to represent. But Mary Seacol latterly, a lot later has drifted into a public consciousness. A black woman, a black nurse, doctorist, and we'll get into that terminology in a moment. But largely, we really owe a debt of gratitude to our very special guest today. Helen Rappaport, hard tea. Look what I did there. Very impressive. We have been discussing Helen's work for.

for several weeks now, serially mispronouncing your name. Yes, I know. I'm so sorry. I mean, I've seen it in print, but we've not met before. But I mean, these are also your food groups as well, Helen, because I mean, you've written extensively about the Romanovs. I think you studied Russian, didn't you, way back? Yes, I studied Russian special studies at Leeds. And my first trade book was actually a book called No Place for Ladies about all the women who went out, you know, following the army to Crimea during that terrible war. And I pulled together an extraordinary cast of largely unsung women still. This sounds a familiar, familiar field of interest to one of our presenters.

Yeah, I did actually say, hello, sister, when she came up because I'm also, I'm very into women who've slipped through the cracks of history. Yeah, me too, very much. Helen, your amazing book, In Search for Mary Sequel, The Making of a Cultural icon, is going to be sort of the beating heart of this podcast. but can we, first of all, scotch a thing that I know often happens to you and often happens to women writing about women, which is people seem very dead set on pitting different women in the same era in a wrestling ring, in the red corner, we have Florence Nightingale in the blue corner, Mary Seacall. You hate that, don't you? You hate that.

Yes, because it's a construct that we have created. It's a modern retrospective construct of a sense. of rivalry between two extraordinarily different women who operated in different spheres. And it stems from this kind of the sense that somehow Mary is better than Florence and that back in the late 90s, in fact, the nursing union would talk about displacing Florence Nightingale as their figurehead in favour of Mary. And it's this sense people have that in order to celebrate one, you must denounce. the other and vice versa. And there's been this really quite a bitter camp on the Florence Nightingale's side

and an equally very vociferous fan following, if you like to call it, that of Mary. And in a sense, both have distorted what they both did in their very different ways and tried to set up a comparison that's entirely false. The parallel between them, the link between them is they were exceptional women in their day at a time of the world gone mad. I mean, this is kind of a protein world war situation that you've got in Crimea where these three great empires are coming together and clashing with each other. The thing I want to say right at the very top, the first important fact we must bear in mind in all this, Florence was over in Skutari. Yes, she wasn't even there. Three hundred miles across the Black Sea. Okay, she came on a couple of tours

of inspection to Crimea. Mary was the one in the war zone. And, you know, it's very easy to talk about Florence doing this, that and the other. But she did it act to remove. And Florence fundamentally was tied down by bureaucracy, fighting the war office. Shall we start by talking about the lady with the lamp? Many of us will have that image of Florence Nightingale, Lady of the Lamp. She's born into a fairly successful industrialist family north of Derbyshire.

They have money, don't they? I mean, she hasn't come from a poor background, and this sets up the sort of the difference between the two women. Well, fundamentally, Florence was off that generation from very well comfortably off families, who if she hadn't for tooth and nail to live her own life, her own way and do her own thing, would have been condemned to a life of virtual imprisonment,

essentially as an unpaid domiciliary, nurse sitting by the bedside of all her elderly ageing and sick relatives as one by one they popped off and she would never have had a life and she fought it. A little like sort of Lady Mary Wortley-Montague we came across before. Clever, clever woman. You know, so she studied modern languages, classics, mathematics. That's a very good parallel actually.

I didn't thought of that, yes, very like that. Yeah, I mean, we sort of buried one very funny comment from you. I mean, why is Florence called Florence, William? Because she's born in Florence. Well, her sister's called Parthenope, for God's sake. What a name. Well, I mean, was there a brother called Bogner? I mean, good. It's not terribly, you know, imaginative. So she was an educated woman. She declined suitors throughout life, as you say. You know, she sort of escaped this life that would have been planned out for her. She was offered a very, very good match with Moncton Milne. Oh, yes, the poet, Richard Moncton Mills. who sort of at a distance waited for her to make a decision for something like seven years. But she didn't want to be tied down by marriage and childbirth and possibly early death in labour. She wanted to do something constructive and useful and she wanted to study nursing.

And she somehow managed to escape to go to an institute in Germany called Kaiser-Swirth, where she did do some very rudimentary nurses training in the early 1850s for about three months. How unusual was that at this period that a woman from a good family would train to be a nurse? Almost unheard of because there was no profession. This is the thing people forget when they talk about Mary and Florence. Nursing did not become a respectable profession for ladies of a genteel background like Florence, i.e. a job they can do if they needed the money. It didn't become that until after the Crimean War. It was Florence who made nursing a respectable job. So if you'd gone into an early 19th

century hospital, who would be looking after you? Mrs. Gamp, Dickens, Mrs. Gamp was pretty much, you know, the slightly ginswigging hospital nurse. The hospital nurses, unfortunately, at the time had a terrible reputation. They didn't really do. any nursing. They were there to make the beds, do the washing, empty the pots under the beds, and just generally be dogs' bodies. There weren't any women nurses except in religious orders. Well, I was just going to say, now, religion is important in Florence's origin story. Her Christianity informs a lot of what she does. When she got to, Skutari, it was they invited genteel ladies to come over and read the Bible.

read the Bible to the recovering wounded. And I mean, she was very much pro a Christian environment for the recovering wounded. Mary, of course, was terribly funny about this because when she visited the wounded in the land transport hospital on Crimea, she said all they wanted was punch and the illustrated London News.

They didn't want to read the Bible. We should perhaps say here that the 1850s was absolutely the peak of the evangelical movement and the Clapham sect was hugely influential at this time. We've touched on it a little bit in our slavery series with all these serious anti-slavers coming out of that background. But it's also very much part of the story of the background to the Indian uprising because there's attempts at mass conversion or a lot of sort of Bible reading to sepoys and this sort of thing. The same sort of impulse to read the Bible to your wounded soldier also leads a lot of colonels

to start reading the Bible to their sepoys on parade. And the famous remark by telling Blair that we don't do religion in this country. In 1850s, they did religion very publicly the whole time. In fact, there was a problem with some of the nuns, the Catholic nuns, who went out to Florence's hospital. Some of the wounded complained, they tried to convert them at the bedside. Well, that's also something we hear even in modern times. Tell me this.

At what point, I mean, we've leapfrogged a very nice, nice girl from a nurse, nice house. else defying her parents and going into nursing. That is a big hop, skip and jump. You can be doing it in Harley Street. I believe she did do it in Harley Street for a while. She ran a hospital for Gentile, impoverished ladies in Harley Street. But that is a big jump to get to the Crimean War. What happened in her life? They made her think she could do something. Well, essentially, the Crimean War facilitated in Florence's career. She might have had a quite different life, just running a genteel hospital like that for the rest of her active days. But when the Crimean War broke up, there was a huge public outcry.

When journalists' reports came back, not yet from Russell, but from a man called Chenery, who'd been based out in Constantinople, I think, talking about the appalling neglect of the wounded, the lack of any proper medical care. And it was realised that they had to get some kind of nursing contingent organised to go out and help. And this was when Florence was approached, I think, by Sydney Herbert at the War Office, and asked if she would be willing to recruit a team of nurses. In fact, a lot of women were very eager and was saying, how can we help, what can we do? We want to go out and help nurse the wounded. So Florence, because she had been running this institute for

genteel sick women in Harley Street, was asked if she would take that job on. Helen, give us a sketch of Florence Nightingale aged 34 at this point in her life. What sort of woman is she? Very, very self-possessed, very determined, very unbelievably driven, very self-sacrificing in a way and refusing in any way to compromise on what she saw was her kind of permission in life. She wanted to see women given a purpose beyond being the angel in the house. She hated that epithet. She hated. seeing women locked away at home. And this for her, and in a strange way, also for Mary, war was their metier. War gave them that opportunity to expand their horizons.

Just for those who may not have an image in their head, there are very sort of now ubiquitous images of Florence Nightingale in the bonnet, the sort of the middle parting, dark hair, very intense, dark eyes, severe, yeah, severe looking, but also, I mean, I can say this because I'm a woman, an attractive woman in her prime. And she also has the stuff, which I know you bring out very well in your book, is that she knows what needs to be done. Yes. And so she does this thing that women don't do at the time, which is she said, if you want me to go out, I've got to be in charge. Talk us through that conversation, how that went down with top military brass.

That presumably must have been very, again, unusual in this early period. This is long before the suffragette started yet. This was way before, really. I mean, Barbara Bodishon and the Lange and Place group got going in the 50s, didn't they? 50s and 60s. She was ahead of her time in terms of forging a career, a career that women could do. A nursing was something that they had a natural instinct and capability for. But she wasn't interested in promoting herself. She liked being anonymous. That's why you don't see many photographs of her. She wasn't interested in fashion. Mary, of course, was the antithesis of that, because she was a great self-publicist. But sorry, I should have answered, William.

Florence, because she was so gifted, a very good mathematician, statistician, this that and the other, was born to be a good administrator. And that in a way meant she got locked into Scutari and wasn't really able to do any nursing because she was engaged in constant battles with the commissariat to get the supplies she needed and to run her hospital efficiently. Because before that, I mean, you know, we've sort of touched on it. But to be wounded was almost to be dead. There would be people with untreated wounds.

Gangareen was taking so many who could have been saved had there been some kind of sterile intervention. But important point, I think the French, though, are way ahead of the game at this point. They were much better. The French had a whole network of orders of Sisters of Mercy who were based all around Asia Minor out at Pera, Constantinople, and various other places around the Black Sea. So the French took an absolute run ahead of the Brits when the war broke because as soon as their troops landed in Crimea,

they called on all these French nursing orders to come and help nurse their wounded. And these women, Sisters of Mercy of St. Vincent de Paul, were extremely accomplished nurses. The Brits were way behind in the game. Who did Florence recruit? Because she said, you know, leave me in charge. I will recruit the people I want. Who did she search for and who did she bring? Well, it was a very, very mixed bag of women.

As I said, there was no profession of nurses. So they couldn't hire, you know, established nurses. they took a few of the hospital nurses, i.e. the sort of Mrs. Gamp dog's bodies. And Florence made a point of hiring older women who were not attractive and might not flirt with the wounded. But most of the women were a combination of Catholic nursing nuns, Selenites and Anglicans. And they were a mishmash. And of course, throw these women all into the nurse's quarters at Scutari. And you've got the makings of a glorious soap.

opera because a lot of them didn't get on with each other. Some of them tried to get at the brandy store and Florence had to lock it up. And it was, you know, there were a lot of flashes. And she's a, she's a tougher. I'm about to say tough, her bird. She's not a tough old bird. She's 34, but she's made of steel. She was old for her years because she had been stuck at home with elderly parents and

relatives, always nursing and being the dog's body. She was kind of older for her years. but she had to really lay down the rule with this very, very disparate group of nurses who clashed with each other as well as with her. Well, I mean, you know, put any group of people, it turns into the Big Brother house very quickly. That's it, big brother. Absolutely. Okay, so now, drum roll, Mary Seacall's origin story could not have been more different,

you know, where you've got sort of Florence Nightingale living somewhere down the road from Lord Palmerston who intercedes on her behalf. She's got friends in high places. People already respect her. Mary is born with none of that. Tell us her story. Well, unfortunately, Mary was very careful never to reveal very much of her early life because for the obvious consideration that she was born illegitimate of a mixed heritage relationship

between a free woman of colour in Jamaica and a white Scottish soldier, probably an officer, but we can't know for sure. So when she later told her story, she cast an absolute smoke screen over her origins and the extended informal relationships that her mother had had with several men and all the half-siblings that I was able to research and find. So she had to keep the lid on her actual background in Jamaica. Where we start really learning anything about her early life is this extraordinary moment when, And it was absolutely unusual in Jamaica then. She married a white West India merchant called Edwin Seacol. Now, till then, she was Mary Grant.

If she hadn't married Edwin Seacol and become Mrs. Seacol, I think my long, long search for a Mary Grant wouldn't have got very far. Because that name, she traded on the name. The husband is an absolute cipher in her life, and he died. Quite quickly, I think basically the marriage was one of convenience. He gave her respectability. He gave her a leg up the social ladder in Kingston. And she was his nurse. So in Kingston, Jamaica, I mean, she sets up on the back of, you know, her husband's reputation and probably funding, a boarding house. And this is the really, really important thing. Her mother ran one as well. Yeah. Okay. So she's in the biz. But also, what's really fascinating is that she practices, traditional herbal medicine. And those women in Jamaica who did that were known as actresses. Now, that's quite an alien term to us these days. What was a doctorist? What were they able to do? The doctorous tradition is, I think, fairly unique to West Indies and especially Jamaica.

It was born of what you would call the slave hospitals, which were known as hot houses. These were built like effective prisons, actually. They're pretty grim looking places, those that haven't completely fallen down. These were built to take in the sick African slaves being brought in to Jamaica, who were dropping like flies from the very humid, disease-ridden climate. They come from the dry heat of Africa. And what they did is they put them in these hot houses and used local women of color and black women on the plantations to nurse them.

And these women became known as doctoresses. And what they did, of course, is they used the local pharmacopoeia. I mean, there were herbs and spices and plants and, God knows what, growing outside the door that they all knew how to use. And they had this incredibly rich and quite sophisticated range of treatments for everything under the sun. One thing in particular that many enslaved people suffered from was this terrible disease called yours. Horrible, horrible disease. Tell us what happens when you have your word.

What is that? It's a horrible kind of fungal skin disease, very, very nasty. And Mary developed these doctorising skills, but many of the women like her, learned those skills from their mothers. So I suspect Mary's mother, Rebecca, had been a doctorist, perhaps in a plantation hospital. Mary learned the herbal and actually pharmaceutical skills almost from these skills. from her mother at her mother Rebecca's boarding house in her childhood. I think this is something I learned from your book, but certainly it startled me enough. I read your book quite a while ago. But in these hospitals, these slave hospitals where women were practicing their doctorising,

this is often for slaves who were hurt doing the inexorable work that was presented to them, that they often died from exhaustion. But is it true? I mean, just tell us, they didn't have beds or mattresses because they didn't want to encourage people to pretend to be sick. So that can't have been a lovely atmosphere. It is almost a war footing in those hospitals, that tradition, isn't it? Well, there were effective prisons.

No, you're quite right. I did discover that some of these slave hospitals, hot houses, didn't provide beds or proper bedding. They wanted to make it as uncomfortable and unpleasant an experience as possible to discourage malingering. Is that astonishing? I mean, again, it literally is all our food groups, isn't it, William? I mean, just, you know, we've done entire. And they did actually. They did actually lock them in.

And many of the slave hospitals didn't even have proper windows. Well, they just had metal bars. They were jails. But what is so wonderfully rich about that horrible, horrible stain on Jamaican history, on British colonial history is that this extraordinary farmer Kapir was developed by the Jamaican women. In fact, one British doctor went out in the early 1800s and wrote a whole treaty. on all these different concoctions that the women were able to create. Well, I mean, again, and I may be drawing too many lines here, and you tell me,

but one of the main conditions that this doctorising tradition treated was flux and fever, and fever temperature, as you'd expect, but flux is dysentery. And what happens on a war front, it's dysentery and fever, isn't it? I mean, so there is a whole movement, a whole history of treating exactly the kind of thing. that Mary will ultimately be facing in the Crimea. That is precisely why I get so angry that the British authorities did not recruit Mary and many, many other black and West Indian women who might have been around. We know at least of two other women who volunteered,

because these West Indian doctoruses had precisely the skills of nursing enteric disease, cholera, typhoid, yellow fever, dysentery, jaundice. Mary was highly skilled. And as were these other women, those were the women they needed to nurse the sick in Crimea. Helen, before we moved to the Crimea, take us first to Panama. How does Mary get from Jamaica to Panama? That's not a automatic jump. Well, Mary, of course, was a born entrepreneur.

And some people are rather uncomfortable with this fact. that alongside being a very skilled nurse, doctor's heal or whatever you want to call her, she was a businesswoman. She needed to make a living. She needed to make money. She was a natural born entrepreneur. And of course, Panama in 1850 exploded with the gold rush over in California because what was happening, all these eager American and other nationality gold prospectors were heading

down to cut across the Panamanian isthmus to do the. a shortcut up and round to California for the Goldsfields. So there was a lot of interest in making money in Panama. So Mary, being the entrepreneur, she was, went out there to join her brother Edwards and set up, I won't call it a hotel. I won't even call it a restaurant. I mean, many of the hotels in Panama at the time were basically tense. Right. And it was somewhere to get out the cold and have a hot dinner. And she went out there because she was such an intrepid woman. Well, and you know, it just reminds me with that gorgeous northern expression, where there's muck,

there's brass, you know. Absolutely. You can't say muck. You've got to say muck. Well, there's muck. There's brass. That's Mary Tutti. She was always game for any stab at making money and making business.

So tell me this, because then some people detractors of Mary say that, you know, there was a lot of muck in Crimea and there may have been a lot of brass. But she talked about her motivations. I mean, she was always very, you know, she was always very, you know, she was. She may have been foggy about her background and who, you know, legitimacy and all of that kind of thing. But she did have a great deal of pride in her Scottish roots. And she talked about the soldiers who she was reading about like everybody else, as if they were. And she called them her sons.

Her sons were calling her. Tell us more about that. Well, that all stems from her time in Kingston running a lodging house. Because in those days, there are a hell of a lot of British Army and Navy based in Jamaica. The West India station was very busy. And what happened was the officer class, if they fell sick with yellow fever or cholera or one of the awful things that was felling them, left, right and center, they could afford to go and stay in these lodging houses run by women like Mary. They were effectively treated as convalescent hospitals. And that's how Mary got to know all these men from various regiments.

And so she developed a very, very close relationship with some of these men. And going back to what you said earlier about the evangelicals, one of them, Headley Vickers, when Mary went to Crimea later, he had a damascene conversion and was out there giving out evangelical pamphlets, which she also handed out. So she was very, very fond of those soldiers. They always looked upon her as a mother figure, as a surrogate when they were a long way from home, because she could nurse them and she could cook hot dinners. She was, you know, other earth. Give us, again, a sketch of the Mary Sequel that turns up in the Crimea. Yeah. What age was she? And what does she, you know, what does she look?

What she looked like? She sounds very warm. Yeah. I'm thinking, you know, bosomy, sort of rounded figure. I mean, a very different figure to Florence. She was, I think, small, round, forceful, explosive personality. She was born, we think, around 1805, but though her absolute confirmation of her date of birth has not been found. Wikipedia, I keep trying to put you right, but never mind. She was... So 15 years older than Florence?

She was 50. When Mary got to Crimea, she was 50, fairly large, very jolly, very loud, very forthright, had had those years in Panama, had seen the world. She'd been everywhere. She was far more world aware than Florence was probably. And she got there and she wanted to help and serve and look after her sons.

Did she apply through official routes to go as Florence did? And what did the British Sater when she applied to go and treat their boys at the front? Well, Mary was in Panama when she heard the war broken out. So she got on a ship and went straight from Panama to England. I mean, the other end of the world. It isn't just like, you know, do you know, she sailed the Atlantic at least nine times? Wow. And that's right back from the days of sailing ships before the screw steamers.

So anyway, Mary went to England. I'm sorry, the dust bin. Oh, that's okay. The bin men are here, everyone. It's a good reminder, actually. They're flashing lights. You suddenly have a disco background with your rubbish truck. Ellen.

This is good. She's got the moves. Don't worry. It happens in this podcast. So she goes, so she crosses from Panama. She crosses, so makes the Atlantic crossing. Yeah, she goes to volunteer in London. She goes to the recruiting office in London and officer services. She goes to the quartermaster office. She goes to the war office. She trapes round all the official institutions or commissariat offices to do with the war and has the door pretty much slammed in her face. But she has letters of

recommendation. She had all the skills, as I just said. Was it just because she was black? Is that why they turned her down? I think obviously it was colour. In fact, there was a horrible little scribble on one of the applications for one of the other West Indian women where they actually noted that she was too black and that she might frighten the patience. Luckily, Mary was the kind a go-getting self-starting woman she was. She was a woman of business. So, okay, she wanted to go to Crimea to help the wounded and the sick. But she could also go and run a business.

So that's what she did. Okay, we're going to take a break here. And join us after the break when we find out what happens to both these women when they finally get to their destinations. Well, welcome back. In the last half of this episode, we brought our two heroines. Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacol to the Crimea, both remarkable, forceful women, but from utterly different backgrounds and with very different personalities.

And we have brought them now to the war. Helen Rappaport, with a strong tea, tell us what happened to Florence. With a strong tea and rubbish trucks and dogs and the most eventful guest, I have to say, we've had in a very long time. So, okay, so Florence is now in Scutari. Just tell us where Scutari is and what Florence faced in. Skatari. Who's coming in to Skutari? Skutari was actually a huge, rambling, filthy, neglected Turkish barracks. The British army had been given the use of this by their Ottoman allies for

the wounded, but of course it was filthy, vermin infested, it had no facilities. And Florence arrived, really, with a horrible, disgustingly disorganized blank page to fill an organised, put straight. And this is where her brilliant administrative skills kicked in. She was in there. She reminds me of our last episode. We had the wonderful Lady Sale, who's this sort of indomitable woman in Afghanistan. And Fronisiting it's made of sort of similar stuff. She's solid steel, isn't she? She immediately drew up great long lists of all the basins and brooms and equipment she needed to put the hospital right and make it a function. place for the wounded that were being brought 300 miles across the Black Sea from Crimea.

So she had an enormous task just getting the place relatively clean. Then they had to fill endless palliasses with straw. They had to create the beds and the wards and scrub. Those poor nurses who arrived in that first contingent, having spent 10 days at sea vomiting the whole way, they were immediately flung into arduous, arduous work cleaning, place up. And despite all of these efforts, which are all laudable, these women, and I often think we don't think about this enough, they have to still watch men in their prime, in their hundreds

coming through and just dying, dying in their arms. 50 or 60 a day before she arrives. Well, when they arrived, the wounded were there in a terrible state of neglect, wounds infested with maggots, men dying unnecessarily of septicemia of neglect. This is the dreadful thing about the Crimean War, and I'm sure Orlando said it, that there were so many thousands of soldiers who did not need to die. Orlando talked particularly of this guy, Nikolai Perugov, who is at the same time is improving the Russian hospital. So everyone else has got better hospitals.

Everyone's doing it better than us. I did some work on the Russian nurses were astonishing. And I wrote about them in my book, No Place for Ladies. They were a sort of semi-religious order, not really. and they went and worked with Paragov, who set up a triage system. And that was so important, they're of quickly separating the hopeless cases from those who could be saved. And the Russian nurses, Sisters of Mercy, worked with him in Sebastopol right through the siege, right under constant, constant bombardment.

They are absolute heroines. I wrote about them in my book, as I say, but there's not that much said about them. You know, there were many other nurses. There were army wives in Crimea, nursing in the field hospitals who never get accorded the recognition they deserve. Helen, I mean, you're painting a picture of Florence as an extraordinary woman, a real force of nature. But, you know, forces of nature are often blunt instruments.

And some of the nurses who were under her chafed under that kind of authority. I mean, tell us what they, what did they think of Florence? They could have stern, implacable and worst of all, anti-Catholic. There's some lovely stories, but the one in particular was there's one very balshie nurse who hated the standard uniform. They made one bog standard uniform in sort of large with long or short skirts. And she hated these frilly caps they had to wear. She said, I came out here to nurse the wounded not to wear this stupid hat. And, you know, she really balked.

And one or two of them, Florence never, you know, messed about. if people became obstreperous, they got sacked. But the one problem above all others that Florence was ruthless in dealing with was drink. She had always believed that booze was scourge of the army. Alcoholism was a massive problem in the British army. And this is a big evangelical thing too, is that? It ties it with her religious thing. Yeah, exactly.

It tied in with that. And if she caught any of the nurses drinking, or being drunk, they were immediately sent home. And this is where our two ladies differ quite fundamentally. That's why she had a problem with Mary. So Mary quite likes a drink, but also realises the value of giving a drink to somebody who is in a great deal of pain and is pretty damn miserable and on their uppers. Well, Mary not exactly is known for her own personal drinking,

but the one area in which Florence deeply, deeply disapproved of Mary Seacol was that she sold alcohol and that there were stories coming out of her British hotel well it wasn't a hotel it was just simply known as Mrs Seacolls it was a canteen come offices club there were stories coming out of a lot of drunkenness

and late night where was it where was her not hotel it was about three miles I think it up from balaclava at a place she named Spring Hill because it was near a freshwater spring She had wanted to actually set up in a light cavalry camp even closer to the front lines. But British authorities would not allow her. She's an extraordinary woman. How does she get there from Panama?

What is just? I mean, actually, you know, sort of on the one hand, yes, you need a field hospital in the field. She just seems like that's sensible. But on the other, what kind of woman says, I want to be where hundreds and thousands of men are dying every day? It's like going now to someone setting up a boutique hotel in backmood or her son. She and her business partner asked if they could set up near the light cavalry camp, which was much close to the front lines. They weren't allowed to do that.

So they found Spring Hill. And there they had this sort of homestead, if you like to call it, which is a real mishmash of a catering storehouse, officers club. I sort of think a bit sort of like a Wild West sort of scenario, you know, where you've got the canteener and you've got big vats and, you know, people. But the fact that she's doing it for money, do we think less of her because she was doing it for money, Helen? Well, this is a big, big stumbling block for many people who admire a sequel or would be totally unqualified in their admiration is, oh, she went out and did good and did this, that and the other and helped with the wounded and people who needed medical assistance. but she sold alcohol and she ran a store.

Well, she couldn't go out there and give it all away for free. She had to fund her enterprise. And of course, in order to make all her preparations, getting the ingredients she needed for various medicines, to give away free dinners and refreshments to those who are in need and take food up to the observation post, she had to make money. Did she get rich or was it really just a self-funding enterprise just to keep going?

That's what she did. You know, there's an interesting thing I discovered. It goes back to the war correspondence, including, I hate to say it, I hear a William Howard Russell, at the end of the war when Mary went bankrupt because it war ended suddenly, guess what? All those officers had been, and war correspondents had been putting their stuff on tick. So basically, you know, the officer class, many of them never paid their bills.

The journalists didn't pay their bills. And this all contributed to the huge debts Mary had at the end of the war. Right. Well, let's not get to the end of the war just yet. Yeah, Helen, just if when had asked Mary when she arrived in the Crimea, why she'd come, would she have said that she'd come to help her soldiers or would she say she'd come to start a business? How did she vocalise what she was doing? Well, publicly, she always made a point of saying she went to be with her sons to offer her help to the British Army.

because of course she was a great patriot. She wanted to serve Queen and Country and do her bit for the war effort. So I think her primary impulse was definitely to reconnect with many of the men in the British Army as she'd known in Jamaica. Well, there are easier ways to make a living, let's face it, than going to either front,

you know, she didn't have to go all that way to make money. This is an enterprising woman. Panama to London, to Constantinople. She's a woman with a plan. And she's becoming not Mary Sequel, she's becoming Mother Sequel. She's not even Mrs Sequel. So is that what the soldiers call her, Mother Sequel? It's very interesting.

They called her Mother Sequel, Auntie Sequel, Mrs Sequel. With great affection, they absolutely revered her as a mother figure. But of course, there was a slight problem with her being called Mother Sequel because Florence, over in Scutari, had nominated herself as mother of the mother. the army. So I think that's where you get some unconscious. Eddies of competition. Eddies of competition. Do they ever cross paths? Yes, Mary, when she stopped off in Constantinople, waiting for a British commissariat boat

to take her across to Crimea, she went and paid her respects to Florence up at Skutari and was absolutely horrified at the suffering she saw there, not because Florence had neglected the men, but because it was an almost impossible task. There was so many. And of course, as she walked round, having said hello to Florence briefly, walked around, she kept hearing voices say, oh, Mrs. Siegel, Mother Siegel, people who knew her in Jamaica called out. And she went and adjusted a bandage or patted someone's pillow and made them more comfortable.

And what was her reception by Florence like? Well, a lot has been made of it. And we only have Mary's account. so we only have a one-sided view of it. You get a sense that Florence held her at harm's length. She was slightly frosty, but she was very busy. But in a sense, again, in that period, that's not entirely surprising,

a grand white woman formerly employed by the government and the other is a businesswoman from West Indian background heading to the crime. You wouldn't expect that to afford to each other's arms how much we might want that now. But what's quite interesting is that they, assumed Mary had stopped off to volunteer to work with Florence there. Nothing of the sort. She makes it very clear. She didn't want to be stuck in Scutari, the other side of the Black Sea.

She was going to the front. She wanted to go to her sons at the front, not be miles and miles away from them. And I'm very struck by, you know, you said that she was very big on promoting herself. And even in her memoirs, She talks about, you know, the way in which she was greeted by other officers. I mean, and soldiers. She says in her memoirs, what a shout they used to be when I came out of my little caboose, hot and flurried and shouted, Rice Pudding Day, my sons. I love that. I love it.

I have this vision of Mary, Christmas 1855 in Crimea, up to her armpits, boiling Christmas pudding and making mince pies. She had so many orders. She couldn't cope with them. But from scratch, but from scratch. You know, she did everything like just in the middle of a war from scratch. In the middle of the war zone, with these rather unheralded two West Indian cooks and probably a few other locals helping. So I'm just going to read you a little thing from the Times.

And then we should talk about, because it's fascinating as we should talk about what happens after the war to both these women. But the Times in September 1855's, I've just quoted, in the hour of their illness, men of the Army Works Corps had found a kind, successful, position in Mary Seekle, who cured all manner of men with extraordinary success. So, I mean, you know, she's making a difference. She's not just making people happy as Mother Seacol as some kind of, you know, Bob Hope figure on the front line. She's actually curing people as well. Let's now move. So the war finally grinds to a painful end. Tell us what happens to both these women who really have defined who they are during, you know, the fire of conflict here in Crimea.

Well, what I think is kind of really sums it up in a nutshell is what they both go back, they're evacuated, go back to England in the late summer of 1856. Florence Nightingale locks herself away in Harley Street and refuses all in any publicity. Mary courts it. Mary's out there saying, I am a Crimean War heroine. She's loving it. Talk about 15 minutes of fame. She had more than 15 minutes worth.

and she reveled in it because she was absolutely categorical. She downed it. Is she covered by the press? Who's writing about her? Oh, God, yes. By the time, this is the amazing thing. This is a black woman from Jamaica in the mid-1850s. Comes back to Britain as a national heroine.

Not only that, I have absolutely no doubt in my mind from all the research I've done. she was the most famous black woman in the entire British Empire. There wasn't anyone like her. No, and adored because, I mean, she comes out, you mentioned that you know, Thomas Day, the Chancellor, you know, they go bankrupt during this crime experience because of all these officers and journalists, you never pay anything. But the British public do rally around and kind of bail her out, don't they?

When Florence is locked away in her room, Helen, she's haunted by numbers, isn't she? I mean, statistics, again, she's going over and going over, Because, I mean, her, in a way, hers was the most joyless, appalling existence during the war because she just saw men die by and large, didn't she? And it's even worse when she goes back because she, first of all, has pretty much a nervous breakdown. She's pretty ill anyway herself. She'd been ill out there. And she starts analysed because she was a brilliant statistician.

Is it what we call post-traumatic stress? Absolutely. Absolutely. she starts analysing the statistics of deaths and wounds and stuff of her hospital. And she comes to the appalling admission to herself that in many ways her hospital did not do as much good as it should have done because of the rate of infection. Because there had been a problem with what they called measmas in the air. And that for all her scrubbing. It was built on a cesspool, wasn't it?

Yeah, for all her scrubbing and cleaning and. regimentation and dictatorial control of the nurses. She had done everything she could, and yet the men kept on dying because of infection, because of septicemia and all the other things that were insidiously spreading around her hospital. Mary, of course, in Crimea, was much more effective because people she helped were out in the open air and they went to her as soon as they needed help and didn't have to sit on the key side waiting for a ship to Crimea. The public, I mean, you've said the public adulation for Mother Seacol was palpable. Florence Nightingale too, and what about, you know, sort of royalty? What about recognition from, you know, the people who really

matter, Queen Victoria and so on? Oh, well, this is another kind of pet subject to mine. The minute Florence Nightingale came back, she actually went up to Scotland to visit a friend who lived near Balmoral. The minute Queen Victoria, who was up there with Albert, heard that Florence, her heroine, was in the era. She demanded an audience with her

and interrogated her about her experiences, obviously, in the war. Queen Victoria did this with everyone coming back from the war. She demanded they come to tea and tell her everything. Now, this is where I think Florence scotched it for Mrs. Seaco being invited to tea.

because the Queen had invited black people to tea before and she never did with Mary Seacol and I cannot believe it because she must have been gagging with curiosity to meet Mary Seacol. She was a national heroine, her own relatives, you know, Count Glyken, Prince Edward of Saxe Weimar

and Duke of Cambridge and top rass in the army had all known Mary in Crimea, knew of her good works and yet she didn't ask her to tea. I think it's because Florence put the kibosh. I really do. Do you have any evidence for that? Does there anything?

No, my instinct. Because, and it goes back to what I said earlier, Florence disapproved of Mary for three things. She thought she was a quack. And she said that privately to her sister, Parthenopy. When she was ill in Crimea or on the visit, oh, if Mary came to help, she'd only quack me. She deeply, deeply disapproved of Mary.

selling alcohol. And that was anathema too. I'm sure she would have told the queen about that. The other thing is that she, of very, very few people, knew that Mary had an illegitimate daughter by a white British officer. Now, those three things would be enough to put good old Queen Vic, respectable Queen Vic, off asking a nice jolly black woman to tea, wouldn't they? Well, listen, it has been an absolute pleasure and a privilege to talk to you today. Thank you so very much. And also. On your work and research, which is...

No, I mean, this is painstaking work. Putting women back into the place where they are known is no small task. So thank you so much for doing that. And also for telling us all about it. Helen Rappaport, very, very, very well done. Thank you. A woman after Anita's own heart. Oh, no.

Can you tell you? I'm just very excitable today. Anyway, that is all for. from us. Join us again for another episode of Empire. Until then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. Goodbye from me, William Duremberg.