In Search of Mary Seacole
HELEN RAPPAPORT
(SIMON & SCHUSTER, 416 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064
Mary Seacole, inset, was famous, even notorious, in her time, before fading from history for the best part of a century. She re-emerged in the 1980s, and even schoolchildren now know that she was a Jamaican woman of mixed race who went to the Crimean War in 1855 to look after wounded soldiers. She has a huge statue outside St Thomas’ Hospital in London to prove it. In 2004 she was voted the greatest black Briton. To many, she is a long overlooked heroine, the Black Florence Nightingale.
But as Rappaport shows, a great deal previously believed about Seacole is wrong. Her putative date of birth, celebrated in Jamaica as “Mary Seacole Day”, is nowhere recorded. Her father was probably a Scottish officer called John Grant who died when she was a child. Her mixed-race mother ran a successful hotel patronised by army officers in Kingston. Unfortunately, the engaging memoir, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, published in 1857, has turned out to be wildly unreliable, so her biographer is forced into the depressing task of unpicking much of her version of events. Some facts are clear: in 1836 she married an older, ailing Englishman with naval connections, Edwin Seacole, and nursed him till he died. They had no children, but it seems that later she bore a daughter, Sarah, by a British officer. This scandalous liaison had to be kept secret. Neither Miss Nightingale nor Queen Victoria, both of whom Seacole greatly admired, would have approved.
She never described herself as Black, preferring to call herself yellow, then widely regarded as preferable, and proudly proclaimed herself British. She was educated, partly at the expense of a white “patroness”, and she also learned traditional medicine from her mother and grandmother. The “doctresses” of Jamaica, with their herbal remedies and practical skills, were much needed by the colonists and soldiers in the Caribbean who found the climate and the frequent outbreaks of fevers and cholera hard to tolerate.
