Despite its location in the rather ordinary town of Reading, and the encroachment of some ugly modern architecture at its boundaries, the graveyard surrounding Saint Laurence church has a quiet charm. To one side is the pretty Hospitium of Saint John, once the pilgrims’ dormitory of the twelfth century abbey. In Spring there are daffodils, primroses, and cherry blossom, and it is an agreeable place to be. Nonetheless Henry West would undoubtedly have preferred not to have arrived there quite so early in his life.
Saint Laurence churchyard, Reading, an agreeable place to be
In 1840 the Great Western Railway, engineered by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, arrived in Reading. This was its terminus until a year later when it reached Bristol. The building of the line had not been without tragedies: men had died making the sixty feet deep, two mile long cutting at Sonning. But by March the track was complete. Six days before Reading station was due to open Henry West, a twenty-four-year-old carpenter, was working on the roof of the station lantern. A freak whirlwind tore off a section of the roof, and Henry West was killed.
The horizontal wooden grave board which denotes his burial place was erected by his fellow workmen. A wooden marker of this type is relatively unusual but, softer and more muted than the more common stone markers, it seems an appropriate choice for a young man.
Of course, timber weathers more rapidly, and the grave board was renewed by Henry’s brother in 1862, and by his niece in 1924, until in 1971 the town council took responsibility for it.
IN MEMORY OF HENRY WEST Who lost his life in a WHIRLWIND at the GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY STATION, READING on the 24th of MARCH 1840 Aged 24 Years
The wooden grave board amongst the stone grave markers
After detailing his age and the circumstances of his death, the board bears a verse:
Sudden the change, in a moment fell and had no time to bid my friends farewell,
Yet hushed be all complaint, ’tis sweet, ’tis blest, to change Earth’s stormy scenes for Endless rest,
Dear friends prepare, take warning by my fall, so shall you hear with joy your Saviour’s call.
It is not a sentiment which I can share, I think a young man of twenty-four might have favoured a few more stormy scenes, but perhaps it offered some consolation to his friends and family.
The Highwayman
Chew Magna in Somerset provides a more rural but far from rustic setting. Despite a population of little over a thousand, the village boasts four pubs, one with a Michelin star, a seafood restaurant and bar, a café, a wine shop, a delicatessen, a butcher, a small supermarket, a bakery, florist, gift shop and pottery. Large period houses line the high street. There is nothing new about this affluence: the Bishops of Bath and Wells established a summer palace here, and Chew Magna grew rich on the medieval wool trade. Later Bristol merchants built their houses here. No surprise then that there were always rich pickings for those on the wrong side of the law.
In Saint Andrew’s churchyard, William Fowler’s headstone recalls the violent death of the thirty-two-year-old farmer at the hands of a highwayman. Like pirates and smugglers, highwaymen tend not to be so romantic in reality as they are in stories. In 1814 William Fowler was shot on Dundry Hill as he returned home from Bristol. Following an inquest held in the Pelican Inn, Benjamin Bennett was found guilty of his murder and imprisoned in Ilchester gaol.
William Fowler’s headstone reads,
Sacred
To the Memory of
Mr. WILLIAM FOWLER
of this Parish, who was
Shot by an Highwayman
on Dundry Hill
June 14th, 1814
Aged 32 years
Also of GRACE his wife
Who died Augst. 25th 1839
Aged 55 years
Little else is known of William Fowler although Chew Valley Films have produced a short film, Death on Dundry, dramatizing the incident, and a follow-up detailing the recent restoration of the grave.*
The Biddax
More is known of Richard Roskruge, buried in the churchyard of Saint Anthony in Meneage in Cornwall in 1797. As his stone recalls he was killed by a blow to his head with a biddax, which sounds disturbingly like a plot line in Midsomer Murders.
THIS STONE
Is dedicated to the Memory of
Richard Roskruge
who was
Killed when in the Execution
of his Office as Surveyor of the
Highways by a Blow on his Head
with a Biddax. 14th August
1797 aged 66
Years
Roskruge had been appointed as Surveyor of Highways by the parish. Parishes were designated with keeping their roads in good repair, and to this end every man owning land valued at more than fifty pounds was required to provide labour and tools for six days every year. The Surveyor was responsible for organising this, and it did not make him popular.
Indeed, it led to a quarrel with John Rashleigh, a neighbouring farmer who was responsible for the biddax, a Cornish name for a pickaxe or mattock, attack. Roskruge did not die immediately and was able to identify his attacker who he claimed, “had a corrosive (a grudge) against him.” Rashleigh however fled the scene and was never caught or charged.
Roskruge’s widow chose his epitaph:
Ah! Rueful Fate! Beneath in dust I lie,
Doomed by a cruel ruffian’s hand to die:
By a merciless blow he struck my brain so sure
That death ensued and lo! I am no more.
But this is not what we see on the grave, for the vicar, Reverend Polwhele, persuaded her to accept the more conciliatory:
Doomed by a neighbour’s erring hand to die
For him my spirit breaths from heaven a sigh,
O! while Repentant Prayers the dead atone,
Be mine to waft them to the Eternal Throne.
Thirty years later Roskruge’s wife was buried beside him; there was only just space to squeeze her name on at the base of the stone, so sadly there are no more edifying verses.**
*The film can be seen on YouTube, Death on Dundry, Chew_Valley_Films.
**For more detail see: “A discourse preached at the parish church of Manaccan in consequence of two melancholy events on the 27th August 1791,” a sermon which the vicar had printed. The second melancholy event was a violent storm four days after the murder.
For blog number one hundred, let me introduce you to John Pitt. When he died he was one hundred and one years old, and he had lived in three centuries. Admittedly this is a tenuous link. Moreover I know little else about him. I did however take some trouble to track him down in the churchyard of Saint Juthware and Saint Mary, in the village of Halstock in Dorset. The village has a population of only 420, is surrounded by working farms, and accessed by tortuous lanes. Following recent storms, the latter were flooded last week. Faced with small lakes of uncertain depth my normal, rational reaction would be to retreat, but since this would have meant reversing down long, narrow, winding tracks with the added possibility of running into a tractor or hedge trimmer, I took a deep breath, metaphorically closed my eyes, and ploughed on. I weathered the waters but would undoubtedly still be making futile circuits of the Dorset byroads were it not for the wonders of google maps and satellite navigation.
So here he is, John Pitt born in Halstock in 1799. He worked as a shoemaker. In 1823 he married Tryphena Garrett, and after her death married again to a widow, Mary Tucker, in 1865. He died in 1901 in Sherborne Workhouse, a cruel but still common destiny in the early twentieth century for those who outlasted their working lives. His gravestone was erected by public subscription, perhaps by parishioners impressed by his longevity.
The carved ivy leaves found at each point of the cross on the upper part of the stone were a popular symbol of immortality. Today they are being superseded by the real thing, which I had to peel off to decipher the inscription on the base.
His epitaph reads:
IN MEMORY OF JOHN PITT NATIVE OF THIS PARISH BORN JAN. 26. 1799 DIED JAN. 20. 1901 HE DIED IN A GOOD OLD AGE, AN OLD MAN FULL OF YEARS
The quotation is from Genesis 25, 8. I looked it up. It refers to the death of Abraham, who, according to the previous verse, lived to be 175 years old, thus outclassing John Pitt, and embroiling biblical scholars in serpentine conjectures.
While paying my respects to John Pitt, I had become curious about the identity of the church’s titular saint, Juthware. The earliest records of her existence come from the fifteenth century Sherborne Missal and John Capgrave’s Nova Legenda Angliae, but they place her in the eighth century. Various retellings of her life mix grim fairy tale tropes with the prurient enthusiasm of Christian hagiography for virgin martyrs.
According to these stories, Juthware was a pious girl with a jealous stepmother. After the death of her father Juthware began to suffer chest pains due to her sorrow and the austerities to which she subjected herself with prayer and fasting. Seizing her chance, the wicked stepmother began to spread rumours, telling her son that his half-sister was a fallen woman bearing an illegitimate child. To make this convincing, she slaughtered a lamb, fed its carcass to the wolves in the woods, then led her son to the bloodied remains telling him that they were Juthware’s child.
Meanwhile she had feigned sympathy with her stepdaughter, advising her to apply a poultice of two soft cheeses to ease the pains in her breasts. As Juthware walked to church the cheeses melted and seeped through her clothing, enabling her stepmother to claim that it was breast milk.
Convinced by this calumny, her stepbrother beheaded Juthware outside the church. But milk rather than blood flowed from her wounds, and she picked up her head, walked into the church, and placed the head on the altar as an offering to god. A spring of pure water burst forth where the head had fallen.
Juthware’s relics were translated in the tenth century to Sherborne Abbey where they were venerated until they were destroyed at the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Today she is celebrated in the east window of the former abbey, now a parish church.
She was also remembered when around 1700 a public house opened in Halstock bearing the name Ye Quiet Woman, and with a painted sign of Juthware with her head tucked under her arm. Thomas Hardy took the name for his fictional public house in The Return of the Native.
The pub closed only in the 1990s after almost three hundred years. Although the name is offensive, I regret that I never saw it. But at least, with the aid of Hardy’s novels, I can imagine John Pitt in its dimly lit, smoky interior, sitting on a wooden bench near the fireplace, supping his ale amongst the reddlemen, furze cutters, shepherds, tranters, carriers, and charcoal burners who peopled the village.
It took me some time to cross the South Circular, a vicious road which hurtles from its junction with the North Circular and the M4 at Chiswick, across the Thames via Kew Bridge, and south through Kew and Putney, before veering on a wild course east through Clapham, Dulwich, and Lewisham, to end at the Woolwich ferry. In what was once the hamlet of Kew it severs Kew Green in two, leaving Saint Anne’s church, which originally sat in the centre of the green, stranded in the western half. Saint Anne’s was built in 1714 as a chapel of ease and has been extended several times, but my purpose in manoeuvring across the A205 was not to see the church but the raised churchyard which surrounds it on three sides, and in particular the graves of two eighteenth century painters: Gainsborough and Zoffany.
Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) and Johan Zoffany (1733-1810), both founder members of the Royal Academy, were phenomenally successful in their lifetimes. They had little else in common, apart from fortuitously ending up in the same burial ground: Gainsborough had requested burial there to be close to his friend and fellow artist Joshua Kirby, and Zoffany was resident in the parish, living on the opposite side of the river at Strand on the Green. In Britain Gainsborough’s star has never faded, but Zoffany’s reputation has been more inclined to fluctuation.
Grave of Gainsborough, St. Anne’s, Kew. It has been restored twice, in 1835 and 2012
With Gainsborough are his wife and nephew, Gainsborough Dupont, who was his sole assistant
Grave of Zoffany, St. Anne’s, Kew
“His Widow caused this Tomb to be erected as a Memorial of her Affection”
With Zoffany are his wife and grand daughter, Laura, who died at nine months: “This lovely bud so young so fair called hence by early doom. Just came to show how sweet a flower in Paradise would bloom.”
Born in Sudbury, in Suffolk, Gainsborough studied art in London. On his return to Ipswich, he enjoyed a very modest success with his landscapes and small head portraits of local merchants and squires. Only when he moved to Bath in 1759 did his fame and popularity grow, resulting in lucrative commissions from a stylish clientele in the fashionable spa town. His portraits became larger with life-size, full-length paintings of prominent social figures: actors, playwrights, musicians, and aristocrats.
Thomas Gainsborough, Mr. and Mrs. William Hallett, The Morning Walk. The National Gallery. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Thomas Gainsborough, Mrs. Mary Robinson (Perdita). The Wallace Collection. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
Thomas Gainsborough, Queen Charlotte. The Royal Collection. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
But Gainsborough was inclined to be cantankerous, and he was soon complaining that he was “sick of portraits” and yearned to indulge his real passion for “landskips.” (sic)
After settling in London in 1774, he began to integrate his sitters into landscapes. And gradually the figures shifted to the margins until, in his later years, the sitters disappeared entirely, and he returned to the pure landscapes which gave him most satisfaction. Oddly, unlike his youthful works, these were rarely painted from nature but completed at night by candlelight with model landscapes set up in his studio, using stones, twigs, leaves, and mirrors.
Thomas Gainsborough, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews. ( pushed to the edge of the landscape) The National Gallery Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
Thomas Gainsborough, Landscape, Suffolk. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
And in the Victoria and Albert museum is his strange “showbox”: sometimes Gainsborough painted landscapes with oils on glass, and backlit them with candles in the dark box to be viewed through a magnifying lens.
Gainsborough is credited as a founder member of the British landscape school, and, with Reynolds, as the dominant British portraitist of the late eighteenth century. But I have never been able to summon much enthusiasm for his work. Faced with grey powdered wigs, elaborate fussy hats and dresses, the stiff poses of his sitters, combined with the sludgy colours of the landscapes, I generally find the dogs the most attractive components of the portraits. And when, as with the famous Blue Boy, Gainsborough’s work reveals the influence of Van Dyck in both costume and technique, I find the effect positively weird.
Thomas Gainsborough, The Blue Boy. The Huntington, San Marino, California. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
Zoffany’s work is so much more fun: a merry-go-round of swirling colours; wry, risqué, full of satirical allusion. And his life was as flamboyant as his paintings. Of Hungarian and Bohemian origins, he was born in Frankfurt and when he was seventeen, he walked to Rome to study art. Ten years later he was in England where David Garrick became his first major patron. His depictions of Garrick both in his theatrical performances and with his family secured Zoffany’s fame. Like Gainsborough he was in demand for portraits of actors, musicians, scientists, and society. In 1764 he was taken up as a court painter, joining the expatriate German community around George III and Queen Charlotte.
Johan Zoffany, David Garrick as Jaffier in Venice Preserved. Holburne Museum. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
He combined the exuberance of his painting with a meticulous attention to detail. Commenting on the latter, the art critic Christopher Hussey described him as “the Jane Austen of English painting,” which is apposite only so long as it applies only to his representation of teacups and saucers.
Zoffany espoused the genre of conversation pieces, adapting it specifically to produce theatrical conversation pieces, filling his huge canvasses with large casts of instantly recognisable actors.
Similarly, in The Academicians of the Royal Academy, artists jostled with models and works of art. At the request of the Royal household, he worked for five years on the Tribuna of the Uffizi, but here he came to grief for the bigoted and prudish Charlotte was shocked to recognise two notorious “finger twirlers”, a derogatory term for homosexual men, in the crowded gallery. There were no more Commissions from Charlotte.
Johan Zoffany, The Academicians of The Royal Academy. Royal Collection. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. The two women members of the Royal Academy, Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffman, appear only as portraits on the wall; women were barred from life classes on the grounds of “propriety.”
Johan Zoffany, The Tribuna of the Uffizi. Royal Collection, Windsor Castle Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Unperturbed Zoffany set out for India, the paintings he produced there providing a wonderful insight into what William Dalrymple has described as the intermixing and mingling of people, culture and ideas in eighteenth century India before racial prejudices, arrogant imperial policies, and an ugly desire for British control swept all this away in the nineteenth century. Dalrymple uses a detail from Zoffany’s General William Palmer and Family for the cover of his book White Mughals; in the painting Palmer and his wife, the Mughal Princess, Bibi Faiz Bakhsh appear with their children and her sisters. In Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match, Zoffany portrays a fight between the prize cockerel of the royal family of Awadh and that owned by East India Company men, a painting in which he and his friends also featured.
Johan Zoffany, Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match. Tate Britain Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
He painted an altar piece of the Last Supper for Saint John’s church in Kolkata, using local merchants as models for the apostles, a Greek Orthodox priest as a model for Jesus and, more controversially, the Police Magistrate Blaquiere for Saint John. Blaquiere who had feminine good looks and enjoyed cross dressing, had frequently used female disguise in successfully apprehending bandits, but he was unpopular with some Europeans because of his indifference to Christianity and his sympathy for local religions and customs. It was however Zoffany’s modelling of Judas on William Tulloh, an auctioneer with whom he had fallen out, which landed him with a lawsuit.
As he sailed back to England, Zoffany was shipwrecked off the Andaman Islands. Dalrymple comments drily,
Lots having been drawn among the starving survivors, a young sailor was duly eaten. Zoffany may thus be said with some confidence to have been the first and last Royal Academician to become a cannibal. *
Back in England Zoffany produced a second notorious altarpiece featuring the Last Supper, this a commission from Saint Anne’s at Kew. He used fishermen from Strand on the Green as models for the disciples, modelled Peter on himself and John on his wife. Again, it was Judas who landed him in trouble; he had modelled the latter on his lawyer, who was also a churchwarden at Saint Anne’s. The church authorities refused to pay for the finished work, and he donated it instead to Saint George’s church in Brentford.
In search of the altarpiece, I crossed Kew Bridge and made for Brentford High Street, but Saint George’s had closed, being converted first into a music museum in 1963, and then, after a period of dereliction, and a delay owing to the discovery of graves under the nave, into “an exciting new gated development” with “upscale serviced apartments” in 2017. The altarpiece had been moved to Saint Paul’s, also in Brentford, where it has been relegated to a position high on the wall of a side chapel. And although I am amused by the story of its provenance, I have to admit that it is a very disappointing work. Sadly, I too would have consigned it to a dark corner.
Zoffany’s Last Supper altarpiece, St. Paul’s, Brentford
Detail: the red headed Judas on the right of the picture was modelled on Zoffany’s lawyer
But I found consolation in an excellent coffee and cake in the very welcoming Spire Café in Saint Paul’s church. Highly recommended should you find yourself in Brentford.
According to local tradition, the first cuckoo to return from Africa will sing from the Celtic Cross in Saint Brynach’s churchyard at Nevern in Pembrokeshire every 7 April. Its song, on the feast day of Saint Brynach, heralds the arrival of Spring.
Brynach was an evangelist from Ireland who, in the sixth century, made the Peregrinatio Pro Amore Christi, travelling the coasts of England and Wales establishing small Celtic monasteries. By the time the Celtic Cross was erected in the tenth century thousands of pilgrims were visiting Nevern on the Pilgrim Way to St. David’s, and numbers increased when in the twelfth century Pope Calixtus II declared three pilgrimages to St. David’s the equivalent of one to Jerusalem. But a fallow period was to follow at the Reformation when the monastery and its church fell into disrepair. The church was restored during the Methodist Revival of the 1730s.
The Celtic Cross, Saint Brynach’s Church, Nevern
But while my friends were examining the knotwork and ringwork carvings on the cross, I was more interested in the seven-hundred-year-old yew trees which line the path to the church, and especially in the bleeding yew. For one of the trees produces a blood-red sticky resin. Thin legends have grown up around this phenomenon: the tree will bleed until Nevern Castle, abandoned in 1179, is again occupied by a Welshman; a monk, hanged from the tree for a crime he did not commit, vowed that it would bleed for eternity. More prosaically the release of sap is normal if a yew has been damaged and usually it will heal itself. But this sap is a very red and blood like sap, and the tree shows no sign of healing.
Many explanations have been offered for the common occurrence of ancient yews in the churchyards of England and Wales. My favourite comes from the seventeenth century astrologer, botanist and translator of mystic texts, Robert Turner, who claimed they were planted to protect and purify the dead, absorbing the gases from decomposing corpses. Their branches
draw and imbibe… the gross and oleaginous vapours exhaled out of the grave by the setting sun.
and their roots
suck nourishment from the dead. *
From this it is only a step to imagine vampire-yews sucking blood as well.
The Bleeding Yew… definitely a vampire
As I wandered the graveyard embroidering this ghoulish fantasy, I was distracted by an old gravestone now fixed high on the wall of the churchyard and overhung with ivy. The stone records the deaths in infancy of Anna Letitia and George, the children of David Griffith, vicar of Nevern between 1782 and 1834. Infant mortality was high in those years, and while the deaths did not surprise me, I was taken aback by the strangely jaunty verse which commemorated them:
They tasted of life’s bitter cup.
Refused to drink the potion up
But turned their little heads aside
Disgusted with the taste – and died.
Old gravestone, now affixed high on the wall of the churchyard
ANNA LETITIA and GEORGE, children of Rev. DAVID GRIFFITH,VICAR of this parish, who died in their infancy,A.D.1794
Strangely jaunty verse
It sounded horribly callous and cold-hearted. Could anyone record the death of their children in such insensitive terms? Was it meant to be humorous?
But the jocularity was not entirely unfamiliar: a commemorative brass in Southwark Cathedral begins conventionally enough:
Susanna Barford departed this life the 20th of
August 1652 aged 10 yeares 13 weekes, the non-
-Such of the world for piety and virtue
In soe tender years.
And death and envye both must say twas fitt
Her memory should thus in brasse bee writ.
Here lyes interr’d within this bed of dust
A virgin pure not stained by carnal lust;
Such grace the king of kings bestowed upon her
That now she lives with him a maid of honour.
Her stage was short, her thread was quickly spun
Drawne out and cut, gott heaven, her worke was done.
But the final couplet has a chirpy insouciance like that on the Griffith grave:
This world to her was but a traged play
Shee came and sawt dislikt and passed away.
Brass commemorating a child death in Southwark cathedral
The origin of this and similar couplets may lie in a poem written by Henry Wotton in 1626;recalling the death of his nephew’s widow shortly after that of her husband, it ends:
Hee first deceased; Shee for a little Tryd
To live without him, likd it not, and dyd.
The lines were certainly adapted on the stone of Margaret and John Whiting, found in Saint Bartholomew the Great, when John died a year after his wife in 1681,
Shee first deceased; Hee for a little Tryd
To live without her, likd it not and dyd.
On an adult grave, and where the epitaph also records that the couple had,
“lived lovingly together … 40 yeares and upward…having had issue 12 children”.
the humour sounds gentle and not out of place. But on the child graves the seeming emotional detachment is disturbingly unfeeling and unsympathetic.
Lawrence Stone** has advanced the chilling suggestion that the high infant mortality rate in earlier centuries led parents to make only a limited emotional investment in their children, but I think it is more credible that an age of greater faith may have rendered even child death less traumatic than it is today.
Pat Jalland*** reasons that the evangelical movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century engendered a view of death as an escape from an unhappy world of pain and suffering. As angels in heaven the children would watch over those left below, who should anticipate a joyful reunion, certain of a future life in a happier world. She warns against judging the emotions of an earlier age from our own standpoint where there is reduced prevalence of religious belief.
Certainly, Reverend David Griffith was both a product and a part of the Methodist Revival which espoused these evangelical views. Nonetheless I find the epitaph he chose for the grave of his young children, with its apparent bland and untroubled acceptance, deeply disquieting.
*Quoted in Richard Mabey, Flora Britannica, (1996) p.29.
**Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, (1977) pp651-2.
***Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, (1996) chapters 1 and 6.
In 1853 the Ottoman Empire was in decline and Russian expansion threatened the balance of power. British and French armies united with the Turks fighting the Russians in Crimea. WH Russell’s journalism, Roger Fenton’s photography, Tennyson’s poetry, and the paintings of Elizabeth Butler, Robert Gibb and Harry Payne fostered a jingoistic enthusiasm for the war in Britain such that Alma, Balaklava, and Inkerman still feature as street names today.
Against this background Florence Nightingale emerged as a national heroine, venerated by Victorians as The Lady with the Lamp.
Nightingale (1820-1910) was born into a wealthy British family. She believed, as significant numbers of Victorians did, that she was called by god to serve others. Her decision to realise this through nursing was strongly, and unsurprisingly, opposed by her family. “Nurses” at this time were not far removed from the caricature of Sarah Gamp presented by Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit: untrained, incompetent, negligent and often drunk. Hospitals were filthy places with straw spread on the floors, as it might be in an old butcher’s shop, to soak up blood.
Nightingale however managed to acquire some medical training at a Lutheran religious community in Germany where the deaconesses worked with the sick. In 1853, through social connections, she was appointed Superintendent of the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in Upper Harley Street.
In 1854 Sidney Herbert, the Secretary of State for War, who knew Nightingale well, appointed her to lead a staff of thirty-eight women volunteer nurses at the military hospital in Scutari. Here she found the wounded being treated in horrific conditions with shortage of medicines, hygiene neglected, overworked staff, overcrowding, lack of ventilation, poor nutrition, and rampant infections. Ten times as many soldiers were dying from typhus, typhoid, cholera, and dysentery as from battle wounds.
Five days after her arrival the injured from the battles of Balaklava and Inkerman appeared at the hospital. Nightingale instituted practical measures: cleaning, hand washing, bathing patients, improved nutrition.
The improved hygiene may have reduced the death rate, but the latter remained high until the British Government set out a sanitary commission. Realising that the hospital was built over defective sewers and patients were drinking contaminated water, they flushed out the sewers and improved ventilation. The mortality rate then fell substantially, but not as dramatically as reported at the time since the government concealed accurate figures to avoid criticism.
Meanwhile the media of the day romanticised and arguably exaggerated Nightingale’s achievements. William Russell in The Times:
She is a “ministering angel” without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow’s face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.
A portrait of her with her lamp appeared in The Illustrated London News and Henry Wordsworth Longfellow immortalised her in Santa Filomena, a sentimental and moralising poem which enjoyed great popularity:
Lo! In that house of misery
A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glimmering of the gloom
And flit from room to room.
Lytton Strachey, a man not given to hyperbole, nor to bad poetry, nonetheless praised Nightingale in his book Eminent Victorians which debunked other nineteenth century heroes. His more judicious reasoning suggesting that her achievements were as admirable as her personality was intolerable. The Lady with the Lamp was stubborn and opinionated, he claimed, but these qualities were needed to realise improvements at Scutari.
Although she is most remembered for her time in the Crimea, Nightingale’s achievements when she returned home after the war were greater. In 1860 she set up the first secular training school for nurses at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London. She insisted on autonomous nursing leadership with matrons having full control of their staff, to the chagrin of doctors who saw their authority threatened. The hierarchical structure which she instituted, influenced by her contact with the army, undoubtedly alienated some potential nurses. Yet the teaching hospitals transformed nursing into a respectable, and respected, profession.
Nightingale turned her attention not only to the sanitary design of hospitals but also to working class homes. Working with the sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick she produced statistical models highlighting the causes of mortality. Their mutual commitment to adequate drainage reduced the death rate. A pioneer statistician, Nightingale produced the so called rose diagrams, a type of pie chart, summarising their research in a form which could be quickly understood and used to put pressure on government to introduce reforms.
Nightingale was lauded by the press, received awards and decorations including the Order of Merit, and offered a burial in Westminster Abbey which in accordance with her prior request her family declined. She is buried in St. Margaret’s churchyard, East Wellow, Hampshire near her family home.
The rather stark grave of Florence Nightingale bears only her initials and dates of birth and death
Statues of Nightingale and Sidney Herbert flank the Crimean War Memorial at Waterloo Place in London
But Nightingale was not the only woman whose fame rested largely on her activities in the Crimea. Mary Seacole (1805-1881) was born in Jamaica where her mother ran a boarding house and convalescent home for military and naval staff. She was also a “doctress”: a woman who treated the sick with traditional Caribbean and African herbal medicines. Seacole worked alongside her mother, sometimes providing nursing assistance at the British Army Hospital.
In 1851 while visiting her brother in Panama she helped to treat victims of an outbreak of cholera. Spotting a business opportunity in Panama, where gold prospectors were passing to and from California, she opened the British Hotel and Restaurant to cater for them.
Seacole travelled to England initially to deal with investments which she had acquired in gold mining businesses. She then applied to the War Office to join the second contingent of nurses going to the Crimea, but the full complement had already been secured. She appealed to the trustees of the Crimea Fund, established to support the wounded in Crimea, for sponsorship to travel there but was refused. Seacole suspected a lack of appreciation of her skills as a doctress and an element of racism in this refusal:
In my country, where people know our use, it would have been different; but here it was natural enough…that they should laugh, good-naturedly enough, at my offer….Was it possible that American prejudices against colour had some root here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs? (1)
Seacole used her own resources to travel to Crimea where she opened the New British Hotel at Balaclava in 1855 aiming to provide food and accommodation for sick and convalescent officers. The French chef, Alexis Soyer, who had come to Crimea to help improve the diet of British soldiers, advised her to concentrate on a food and beverage service as the officers slept on their ships or in camp.
For the duration of the war, Seacole combined a successful catering business with medical aid to the wounded. She served officers in the British Hotel and sold provisions near the British camp. After supplying food and drink to spectators who came to view the battles from Cathcart’s Hill, she would head for the battlefield to nurse the casualties.
WH Russell wrote:
She was a warm and successful physician, who doctors and cures all manner of men with extraordinary success. She is always in attendance near the battlefield to aid the wounded and has earned many a poor fellow’s blessing. (2)
“Mother Seacole” as she became known to the soldiers.
out of the goodness of her heart and at her own expense, supplied hot tea to the poor sufferers (wounded men being transported from the peninsula to the hospital at Scutari) while they are waiting to be lifted into the boats…She did not spare herself if she could do any good to the suffering soldiers. In rain and snow, in storm and tempest, day after day she was at her self-chosen post with her stove and kettle, in any shelter she could find, brewing tea for all who wanted it, and there were many. (3)
But Seacole did much more than provide tea; equipped with lint, bandages, needles, and thread she tended to the wounds of soldiers, prepared medicines, and performed minor surgery. (4)
When the war ended and the soldiers left Crimea, Seacole faced financial difficulties with provisions she could no longer sell and creditors demanding payment. But such was her celebrity and popularity that when she returned to England a fund supported by many military men was set up on her behalf.
Mary Seacole continued to travel and in 1857 published her autobiography, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.
In 1860 she had converted to Catholicism, and when she died, she was buried in St. Margaret’s Roman Catholic Cemetery in Kensal Green.
But while Nightingale’s fame endured after her death, Seacole was all but forgotten for a century, until in 1973 her grave was rediscovered and restored by the Jamaican Nurses Association. A memorial service was held on the centenary of her death in 1981.
Grave of Mary Seacole…
..newly restored and easily located amongst the grey stones which surround it
In the 21st century Seacole has achieved more prominence, and since 2007 she has featured on the national curriculum alongside Florence Nightingale.
And then there is Mary Anne Bulkley (1789-1865), more commonly known as James Barry, army surgeon and Inspector General of Military Hospitals, whose passion for improved sanitation rivalled that of Nightingale, and whose emphasis on the importance of good diet surpassed that of Seacole.
Barry was born in Cork and assumed male identity in 1809 when she entered the medical faculty of Edinburgh university, where she would not at that time have been admitted as a woman. She came close to being banned from taking her final exams, not on the suspicion that she was a woman but that her delicate appearance indicated that she was underage. Only the intervention of an influential family friend secured her graduation.
She went on to qualify in surgery at St Thomas’ and Guy’s Hospital and became an army surgeon. Her career was marked by remarkable success and frequent promotions with postings all over the empire, interspersed with violent clashes with fellow surgeons, military officers and officials leading on one occasion to a duel, followed by arrest and demotion.
In Cape Town she became the Colonial Medical Inspector, and it was there that she performed one of the first successful Caesarean sections.
Throughout her career she was concerned with the welfare of the poor and underprivileged, and of rank-and-file soldiers. And from this sprang her obsession with clean water, spotless wards, sterile instruments, improved sanitation, and healthy diet.
Though her professional skill was never in doubt, she earned a reputation for being tactless, impatient, argumentative, imperious, and opinionated.
During the Crimean war she ran a hospital for convalescent soldiers in Corfu, as always putting emphasis on the paramount importance of hygiene, clean hands, and instruments. The hospital had some of the highest recovery rates of the conflict.
Soon after, in 1859, Barry was forcefully retired on the grounds of old age and ill health.
She had left instructions that there should be no examination of her body after death, that she should not be washed, but buried in the clothes she died in wrapped in her bedsheets. Nonetheless her landlady summoned a woman to lay out the body. On discovering that Barry was a woman the latter approached DR McKinnon, Barry’s own physician, hoping to be paid for her silence. When McKinnon refused saying that Barry’s sex was none of his business, she took her story to the press.
There resulted the prurient speculation which McKinnon, and others who had known of Barry’s sex, had sought to avoid. Fortunately, as McKinnon pointed out, there was no family to be distressed by this.
Barry was buried in Kensal Green but when I visited recently the grave looked a little forlorn and forgotten. It features in the cemetery guide produced by the Friends of Kensal Green but is not easy to find and was more overgrown than I remembered from earlier visits.
James Barry, not so easy to find
Barry does not feature on the national curriculum.
And Did The Three Ladies of the Crimea Ever Meet?
Nightingale and Seacole did meet in Scutari, when Seacole was en route to Crimea, and sought a bed for the night. Seacole recorded that one of Nightingale’s colleagues had rebuffed her thinking she sought to join their group, and she inferred that racism was at the root of the rebuttal. But later when Seacole was packing up to leave Crimea she told Soyer,
You must know, M Soyer, that Miss Nightingale is very fond of me. When I passed through Scutari, she very kindly gave me board and lodging.
When Soyer related this to Nightingale, she replied,
I should like to see her before she leaves, as I hear she has done a deal of good work for the poor soldiers. (5)
And yet, Nightingale did not want her nurses associating with Seacole, as she wrote to her brother-in-law, that although
She was very kind to the men and, what is more, to the Officers -and did some good, (she) made many drunk.
She added that Seacole kept “a bad house” in Crimea and that,
I had the greatest difficulty in repelling Mrs. Seacole’s advances, and in preventing association between her and my nurses (absolutely out of the question!). Anyone who employs Mrs. Seacole will introduce much kindness – also much drunkenness and improper conduct. (6)
Relations between Nightingale and Barry were even more fraught during their one recorded meeting. When Barry visited the hospital at Scutari in her role as Inspector General of Army Hospitals she was not impressed by the standards of hygiene and lectured Nightingale on the subject in the presence of her subordinates. For Nightingale who prided herself so much on the improvements which she had made in hygiene at Scutari this must have been particularly galling. After Barry’s death Nightingale wrote, in a letter fairly dripping with rage, and with a wild assortment of personal pronouns in parentheses,
I never had such a blackguard rating in all my life – I who have done more than any woman – from this Barry sitting on (her) horse, while I was crossing the Hospital Square, with only my cap on, in the sun. (He) kept me standing in the mist of quite a crowd of soldiers, commissariat servants, camp followers, etc etc, every one of whom behaved like a gentleman, during the scolding I received, while (she) behaved like a brute. After (she) was dead, I was told (he) was a woman. I should say (she) was the most hardened creature I ever met. (6)
There is no record of Seacole and Barry ever meeting.
And Today?
There are arguments that Seacole’s knowledge of medicine, her skills and her contribution to nursing surpassed those of Nightingale (7) whose work has been more critically reviewed in recent times. Yet others defend Nightingale’s achievements passionately, regarding Seacole as little more than a kind-hearted businesswoman. (8). The erection of a bronze statue of Seacole outside St. Thomas’ Hospital in 2016 proved controversial since the hospital is associated particularly with Nightingale.
Bronze of Mary Seacole placed outside St. Thomas’ Hospital in 2016
What is certain is that soldiers in the Crimea had reason to be grateful to both The Lady with the Lamp and to Mother Seacole – and to James Barry too.
Mary Seacole, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands
The Times, 20 September 1855
National Library of Jamaica, Mary Seacole
Mark Bostridge, Ministering on Distant Shores in The Guardian, 14 February 2004
