There are two main aspects of the stories of Mary Seacole and John Blanke though which make it justified to describe Britain’s Black History Month, as well as the various books and websites dealing with the supposed history of black people in Britain, as a racket or, to use a more demotic expression, a scam.
There can be few people in Britain who have not heard of Mary Seacole, the Jamaican-British woman who ran an exclusive restaurant for officers during the Crimean War and sometimes administered medical treatment of dubious benefit to injured or sick people. Since the 1981 centenary of her death, Seacole’s reputation has grown and her legacy has now eclipsed Florence Nightingale’s in becoming the most famous British nurse of the nineteenth century. When London’s St Thomas’s Hospital wished to erect a statue to commemorate a nurse in 2016, for instance, it was Mary Seacole whom they chose to depict, rather than Nightingale.
The case of Mary Seacole is interesting for the light which it sheds on a very modern preoccupation in Britain: that of hunting down and bringing to public attention people from the past who have lived in the country while happening to have had African ancestry. A recent example of this tendency is that of somebody from the sixteenth century who, after being illuminated by the black history searchlight, shows every sign of becoming as iconic as Seacole. This person, the focus of the illustration below, was a man called John Blanke, a trumpeter in Tudor England. Although almost nothing is known of his background, nationality, ancestry, or life, the mere fact that he appears to be black has been enough to propel him to stardom. The idolised image of this insignificant and obscure figure now features widely during Black History Month, which in Britain takes place in October.
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