Posted: Tue 12 Apr 2005 23:10 Post subject: Mary Seacole: She wasn't black.
Quote:
The other Nightingale: the once-forgotten Jamaican who nursed soldiers in the Crimea has become a symbol of black pride. But, asks Kathy Watson, was she really black?
New Statesman, Jan 17, 2005 by Kathy Watson
Kathy Watson
Mary Seacole: the charismatic black nurse who became a heroine of the Crimea
Last year, Mary Seacole came first in an online poll to nominate 100 great black Britons and placed sixth in the New Nation's list of 100 black icons, between Muhammad Ali and Oprah Winfrey. This year, the determined Jamaican woman who nursed soldiers in the Crimean war will be celebrated in a programme of events marking the bicentenary of her birth. Right on cue comes Jane Robinson's Mary Seacole, the first full-length biography. Seacole was lauded during her lifetime, but unlike that other heroine of the Crimean war, Florence Nightingale, she was largely forgotten after her death--until, that is, the second half of the 20th century, when black pride and black history reclaimed her.
But was she black? Modern opinion says yes, but as Robinson's sympathetic biography makes clear, Seacole did not think so. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, she called herself Creole, a term that emphasised her European rather than African descent. In her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (first published in 1857 and reprinted next month by Penguin), Seacole described her complexion as "yellow" and "only a little brown". Her mother, a hotel-keeper and "doctress", was what we would now call mixed-race. Her father was Scottish.
Robinson does a good job of unpicking the riddle of history, race and nationality thrown up by Seacole's story. She is particularly clear-sighted on 19th-century Jamaica's insane determination to classify everyone according to the number of black or white grandparents they had. She shows the contradictory ways in which this grading system--with its labels such as "octoroon" and "mustee"--affected Seacole. On the one hand, it denied her the respect given to white women. On the other, it left her free to travel widely and go into business, first buying and selling pickles and jams throughout the Caribbean, and then opening a hotel in Panama. Nursing was something Seacole did alongside hotel-keeping: she was in Panama during the cholera epidemic of the 1850s.
Robinson claims that, since her death, Seacole has been put into "narrow, politically correct boxes", and while she is willing to concede that Seacole is in part a "black heroine" and "an alternative Florence Nightingale", hers is essentially an apolitical biography. Her tone is affectionate and admiring, and she stresses her subject's uniqueness: "She advanced no cause but her own ... [and] never saw herself as a representative." Seacole certainly did not see herself as a role model, but her autobiography contains passages that clearly attack slavery. So when Robinson suggests that, faced with a slave revolt, Seacole would have sided with the masters, one can sense another biographical box being created--that of the "true eccentric".
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
For source material, Robinson has relied heavily on Seacole's autobiography. The problem is, Seacole was coy about many of the things that matter to a biographer. For example, she did not reveal her date of birth and she wrote only briefly about her early life. She sums up her marriage to Edwin Horatio Hamilton in eight lines. Robinson has filled in these gaps through detailed research into the Kingston of Seacole's childhood. With the help of army lists and parish registers, she is able to identify Seacole's father and take an informed guess at her mother's name. All this is convincing. Less successful is her speculation about the young Seacole's emotional life. Robinson describes her, on a visit to London, watching the Household Cavalry and wandering through the street markets. Such passages are vivid, and feel authentic, but they are still make-believe.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Once Seacole sails away to offer her services to the British army, Robinson is on surer ground. The Crimean war was the great adventure of Seacole's life, and she gave it due prominence in her autobiography. She also had walk-on parts in the memoirs of people she met there: soldiers, visitors, hotel workers, journalists. Seacole went to the Crimea late, and unofficially. By the time she even applied, Florence Nightingale and her band of nurses had already left. Seacole pushed hard at the various war offices, but no one in authority was prepared to send her. The rejection hurt so much that she burst into tears in the street.
Ever resourceful, she soon cheered up and prepared to go out under her own steam. She printed some business cards announcing the opening of the British Hotel (how this daughter of colonialism loved the empire), promising the army and navy "a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers". To describe Seacole as a nurse is slightly misleading. The highly trained professional in a uniform had not yet been born, although she was being gestated by Florence Nightingale at Scutari. Practical and helpful, but also commercial, Seacole provided meals as well as medicine. Her kit for the battlefield contained cheese sandwiches as well as bandages.
Seacole met Nightingale only once. She wrote enthusiastically of "that Englishwoman whose name shall never die, but sound like music on the lips of British men until the hour of doom". The warmth was not reciprocated. Nightingale acknowledged Seacole's kindness, but also accused her of keeping something very like a "bad house" in the Crimea, holding her responsible for "much drunkenness and improper conduct".
Power, prejudice and arrogance on one side, eagerness and sycophancy on the other--the relationship between these two strong-willed women can be seen as a microcosm of the empire. Adjudicating over the disagreement, Robinson gives Seacole the benefit of the doubt, refuting the Victorian lady's hostility and priggishness with the equally Victorian virtue of modesty. "Mary has always struck me as a person of integrity," she writes firmly. She admits it is possible that the British Hotel was a place where officers got drunk and chased girls, but she seems unnecessarily worried that the reader might dislike Seacole as a result. Such misplaced defensiveness gives the book a slightly anachronistic flavour.
Yet there is something appealing about Robinson's affection for Seacole. In humanising her heroine, she demonstrates that there is an intelligent middle way between hagiography and debunking. Robinson does not pull Seacole off her pedestal or expose her feet of clay. Instead, she escorts us on Seacole's many adventures and lets us feel her warm and loving heart. Robinson does exactly what she sets out to do: "clean the glass ... that separates our world from hers and look through".
Kathy Watson is the author of The Devil Kissed Her: the story of Mary Lamb (Bloomsbury)
Mary Seacole was born in Kingston, Jamaica. Her father was a Scottish soldier and her mother was of mixed race. During the Crimean War, Mary helped to look after the troops by feeding them and treating their wounds. She also went to the front line to tend to the wounded. In 1856 she returned to England penniless and remained this way until 1867 when the Seacole Fund was set up, supported by Queen Victoria. This provided her with enough money to continue practising as a ‘doctress’ until her death in 1881.
Portrait of Mary Seacole painted by Albert Charles Challen Courtesy of: National Portrait Gallery, London
Courtesy of: National Institute of Jamaica.
An early example of women at war was Mary Seacole who was born in 1805 in Kingston, Jamaica. Her father was a scotish army officer and her mother a black Jamaican herbalist. During the Crimean War she worked as a nurse in Balaclava where she was highly valued for her nursing skills and knowledge of tropical diseases.
Posted: Fri 11 Jan 2008 13:53 Post subject: My Learning: Mary Seacole photograph
Sepia photograph of Mary Seacole in old age sitting with a bowl. Photograph of Mary Seacole, courtesy of Fotolibra
Mary Seacole, 1805-1881
A Creole, Mary Jane Grant Seacole was born circa 1805 in Kingston, Jamaica of a Scottish army officer and a free black boardinghouse keeper. Little is known of her childhood, but she received training in herbal medicine from her mother, whom Mary described as "an admirable doctress". Widowed soon after marrying Mr. Seacole, Mary went to Panama during the early 1850s to help her brother manage his hotel and store. When cholera struck there, and medical doctors were not available, she succeeded in saving some of the patients by the use of herbal medicine.
By early 1853, having returned to Jamaica, Mary was again offering her services in another medical emergency. This time it was yellow fever. Her home soon filled with British officers and their wives and children. Soon thereafter, the medical authorities, becoming overwhelmed by the suffering and lack of help, sent for Mary in order that she provide nurses for the sick in camp. Going to the British camp, she worked feverishly but little could be done to mitigate the severity of the epidemic.
Returning to Panama in late 1853, she opened a store in Colon and remained there for three months. Much bloodshed occurred between the natives and passing strangers, and Mary soon decided to go to the goldfields at Escribanos and devote her time to some prospecting for gold and silver, but finding only fools gold, waste, and lawlessness While in the goldfields, Mary kept her medical skills sharpened, assisting the mining company's doctor.
Tiring of this existence, and disgusted by what she perceived as American interference in the area, Mary left Escribanos stopped briefly in Colon, then traveled directly to London. Before leaving Jamaica, Russia and Turkey had begun what has become known as the Crimean War, and by March of 1854 England and France had joined the conflict. Desiring to join the British army in the Crimea, Mary visited numerous military and civilian departments in London trying to obtain official approval. Failing in this, she finally decided to obtain passage on her own to Balaklava, leaving London on 25 January, 1855 and sailing aboard the screw-steamer Hollander as far as Constantinople.
Arriving safely in Constantinople, Mary crossed the straights to Scutari and met with Florence Nightingale. Contrary to reports, Mary was not dismissed by Ms Nightingale, and only requested a room for the night which was provided. Realizing that she was more needed at the front than in Scutari, Mary continued on to Balaklava on the Medora, arriving during the winter of 1855 in the midst the carnage of war.
Having brought stores with her on board ship, Mary spent the next few weeks getting then ashore, attending to the wounded lying around the wharf awaiting transport to Scutari, and establishing a store in a nearby location called "Spring Hill", which was situated approximately two miles from Balaklava. At Spring Hill, with the help of the Turks, Mary established the British Hotel, which was a long iron building with several wooden structures nearby. In the wooden buildings she and her servants lived, while in the iron structure she served food to the officers and men of the Allied forces. The second floor held the storerooms. Livestock consisting of horses, mules, geese, and fowls grazed outside. The complex itself is reported to have cost Mary no less than £800.
Many of the rank-and-file had serious objections to going into the hospital for anything but urgent reasons, and many times the regimental doctors would send the wounded to Mary to be nursed. When not engaged in cooking, and tending to the men at Spring Hill, she would visit the nearby hospital taking books and newspapers to the patients. Moreover, there were times when Mary would fill a bag with lint, bandages, needles, thread, and medicines as well as food and spirits, load them on a mule, and while sometimes under fire from the Russian guns, take herself up the Woronzoff Road toward the day's action.
With war's end, Mary returned to London where she found herself in the public eye. Having spend all of her fortune in her endeavors in the Crimea, she was destitute. Friends in England attempted through numerous fund-raising efforts to restore her to financial respectability, but had little success.
In the years following her return, many of the men whom she had helped visited her in London, and she is said to have received French, and Turkish decorations for her wartime service. In the 1870s, Mary became friends with the Princess of Wales. Mary died on May 14, 1881.
Mary Seacole is buried in Saint Mary's Catholic Cemetery, Kensal Green, a suburb of London. Recently, her grave has been refurbished. The thumbnail to the left was taken in May, 2003.
For further information on this remarkable woman, read the reprinted version, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-505249. Additionally, visit http://www.maryseacole.com. Moreover, should you be interested in helping with the Mary Seacole Memorial Fund, visit http://www.maryseacoleappeal.org.uk/.
Narendra Makanji helps Professor Elizabeth Anionwu open The Whittington Hospital’s new Mary Seacole ward in memory of the Jamaican nurse who tended soldiers during the Crimean War Picture:
A COMMUNITY stalwart who helped turn around once-struggling The Whittington Hospital has spoken out about being dumped in favour of a money-man.
Narendra Makanji was told he would not be reappointed as chairman of the hospital in Magdala Avenue, Archway - even though he had overseen steady improvement over four years.
The former Haringey councillor is tomorrow (Thursday) being replaced by chartered accountant Joe Liddane, managing director of consultants Setanta Performance International.
Mr Makanji, 55, has helped the hospital achieve a "good" rating for both services and use of resources, and seen it become financially stable for the past three years. He said: "I had an ambition for the local community. I wanted it to have an excellent hospital. It wasn't getting the resources and leadership it needed. We have been working to turn it around. I am very proud of the achievements but I'm disappointed that it's not complete.
"The second phase of the new £40million development - new day surgery facilities - is not finished and we wanted to rebuild the maternity and children's care. The next challenge is to be rated excellent and as part of that we would have to get the cleanliness right. Even though the infection numbers are low, they are not zero."
Mr Makanji had hoped to take on a second four-year term, but even his own deputy Peter Farmer had called for him to be replaced as the hospital aimed for foundation trust status in April 2008, to give it more financial independence.
Mr Makanji said: "They said that because Mr Liddane had a business background and I didn't, they chose him. But the hospital exists for the community. The community is going to be far tougher on cutting out waste. You don't have to be from a classic business background."
A spokeswoman for the independent Appointments Commission, which chose Mr Liddane, said: "An independent regulator has said that it wants to see a range of skills on NHS boards - particularly senior management, financial and governance skills. The role of the chair of a board going towards financial trust status can be quite different. It is not unusual for that to go to open competition. Selection and appointment is made on merit. The skills that Mr Makanji had to get the job in the first place may not be appropriate.
Professor Andrew Lever (second on right) with Ward D10 staff
The Mary Seacole Unit, a special facility for treating patients with infectious diseases, was officially opened at Addenbrooke's on Thursday 26 January 2006 by Professor Andrew Lever, Consultant in Infectious Diseases.
The unit, which opened in May 2005, is located on Ward D10 at the hospital, which has ten separate rooms for treating patients with infectious diseases such as drug-resistant TB, and assessing tropical diseases in patients from around the region.
The Mary Seacole Unit provides a higher grade of isolation facility, including a separate airflow system, and also has an ante room where staff can change and decontaminate before and after seeing their patient. The state-of-the-art equipment means that the patient can be monitored remotely from outside the room.
The unit was named after Mary Seacole, a nurse who, during the time of the Crimea War in the mid-nineteenth century, was a leader in infectious diseases.
Speaking about the new facilities, Professor Lever said: "The new facility gives a new capability for treating patients with diseases like drug-resistant TB and other diseases that require isolation in the knowledge that patients and staff are safe. It's a facility most hospitals don't have and puts Addenbrooke's ahead of the pack.
"It is also a concrete example of how seriously the hospital takes infection, and reflects the good work that has been going on for many years in D10 and has largely gone unsung. It's not for nothing that the unit has recently gained the very prestigious practice development award."
The official opening was also an opportunity to celebrate Ward D10's recent level two accreditation for practice development - working in partnership with patients to ensure they are the focus of effective care - by Leeds University. The staff have achieved this through their work on projects focusing on improved patient stay and clinical care, including the introduction of colour-coded scrubs to aid staff identification and communication for all users of D10.
Professor Elizabeth Anionwu, Head of the Mary Seacole Centre for Nursing Practice at Thames Valley University and founder member of the Mary Seacole Memorial Statue Appeal
Questions: Was Mary Seacole "black" as defined to the views on race in Jamaica in the 1800s? Was Mary Seacole "black" according to views on race in Jamaica today? Based upon my personal experience in Jamaica and with Jamaicans I believe the answers to those two questions are not the same.
Mixed people aren't referred to as "creoles" in Jamaican society. It is puzzling that she would have described herself with that term.
Mixed people of Afro-Euro ancestry are called "brown" people in modern day Jamaica but it is my understanding that long ago they would have been "colored" or "mulatto".
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Courtesy of: National Institute of Jamaica.
