‘The hype that has built up surrounding this otherwise worthy woman is a disgrace to the serious study of history,’ declares William Curtis of the Crimean War Research Society.
Pioneer? Mary Seacole was voted greatest Black Briton but are people misguided?
She is regarded as our greatest black Briton, a woman who did more to advance the cause of nursing – and race relations – than almost any other individual.
On the Crimea’s bloody battlefields, she is said to have saved the lives of countless wounded soldiers and nursed them to health in a clinic paid for out of her own pocket.
Her name was Mary Seacole, and today she is almost as famous as that other nursing heroine, Florence Nightingale.
For decades after her death in 1881, Seacole’s story was largely overlooked, but for the past 15 years her reputation and exploits have undergone a remarkable rehabilitation.
Schoolchildren are taught about her achievements and for many, Seacole, born in Jamaica in 1805 to a white Scottish officer called Grant and a Creole woman from whom Mary learned her ‘nursing skills’, is seen as a secular saint.
Numerous schools, hospitals and universities have rooms or buildings named after her, and shortly she will get her greatest tribute yet: an 8ft tall bronze statue is to be erected to her memory in the grounds of St Thomas’s Hospital, facing towards the Houses of Parliament.
The £500,000 memorial – larger than the statue of Florence Nightingale near Pall Mall – will show Seacole marching out to the battlefield, a medical bag over her shoulder, a row of medals proudly pinned to her chest.
There’s just one problem: historians around the world are growing increasingly uneasy about the statue, amid claims the adulation of Seacole has gone too far.
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