Mary Seacole

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Mary Jane Seacole OM was a Jamaican business woman who set up the British Hotel behind the lines during the Crimean War. She described this as "a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers", and provided succour for wounded servicemen on the battlefield. She was posthumously awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1991. In 2004 she was voted the greatest black Briton.

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Seacole did a lot of travelling and visted other parts of the Caribbean, including Cuba, Haiti and the Bahamas, as well as Central America and Britain. She had a good education, and developed an interest in medicine and nursing from her mother, who was a traditional healer. In 1836 she married Edwin Horatio Seacole, a naval officer. He died in 1844, shortly before Mary’s mother also died. Mary remained in Kingston but spent a lot of time nursing in Panama, where a cholera epidemic was raging.

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When the Crimean War broke out, she applied to the War Office to assist but was refused. Instead of giving up, Mary Seacole sailed to the Crimea at her own expense. She and Thomas Day (a relative in the shipping business) opened the British Hotel near Balaclava a few months later in 1855. The roughly built hotel was also an officers’ club and had a popular canteen serving good food. Using it as a base, she would take mules laden with food, wine and medicines across country to the battlefield front lines at Redan, Sebastopol and Tchernaya. She obtained special passes, which allowed her to look after the wounded and dying on both sides.

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Seacole visited Nightingale at the Barrack Hospital in Scutari, where she asked for a bed for the night, because she intended to travel to Balaclava the next day to join her business partner. In her memoirs, she reported that her meeting with Nightingale was friendly, with Nightingale asking "What do you want, Mrs. Seacole? Anything we can do for you? If it lies in my power, I shall be very happy."

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Lacking proper building materials, Seacole gathered abandoned metal and wood in her spare moments, with a view to using the debris to build her hotel. She found a site for the hotel at a place she christened Spring Hill, near Kadikoi, 3½ miles along the main British supply road from Balaclava to the British camp near Sevastopol, and within a mile of the British headquarters.

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The hotel was built from the salvaged driftwood, packing cases, iron sheets, and salvaged architectural items such as glass doors and window frames, from the village of Kamara, using hired local labour. The new British Hotel opened in March 1855. An early visitor was Alexis Soyer, a noted French chef who had travelled to Crimea to help improve the diet of British soldiers. He records meeting Seacole in his 1857 work A Culinary Campaign and describes Seacole as "an old dame of a jovial appearance, but a few shades darker than the white lily". Seacole requested Soyer's advice on how to manage her business, and was advised to concentrate on food and beverage service, and not to have beds for visitors.

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Seacole often went out to the troops as a sutler, selling her provisions near the British camp at Kadikoi, and attending to casualties brought out from the trenches around Sevastopol or from the Tchernaya valley. She was widely known to the British Army as "Mother Seacole"

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After the war she returned to England destitute and in ill health. The press highlighted her plight and in July 1857 a benefit festival was organised to raise money for her, attracting thousands of people. Later that year, Seacole published her memoirs, 'The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands'.

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After her death, she was largely forgotten for almost a century but today is celebrated as a woman who successfully combated racial prejudice. A statue of her was erected at St Thomas' Hospital, London in 2016, describing her as a "pioneer nurse"

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Source: wikipedia.org • bbc.co.uk • sciencemuseum.org.uk

A portrait of Seacole, circa 1869,

by Albert Charles Challen

Sketch of Mary Seacole's British Hotel in Crimea, by Lady Alicia Blackwood

Statue of Mary Seacole at

St Thomas' Hospital, London

Photo: OwenBlacker • Licensed for reuse under CC0 1.0 - Public Domain Dedication