QI The Book of the Dead

pomp, pride and circumstance of glorious war’. Needless to say, a loud and rumbustious fifty-year-old woman of mixed race and brightly coloured attire was not what either Florence Nightingale or the War Office were looking for. Though laden with letters of recommendation, each of her several applications were rejected.
    But Mary was undeterred. She had grown up surrounded by British soldiers and was convinced that her ‘sons’, as she called them, would need her special form of bedside care. So she borrowed some money, bought a one-way ticket and printed some business cards:

    BRITISH HOTEL MRS.
MARY SEACOLE
(Late of Kingston, Jamaica),
Respectfully announces to her former kind friends, and to the
Officers of the Army and Navy generally,
That she has taken her passage in the screw-steamer Hollander ,
to start from London on the 25th of January, intending on her
arrival at Balaclava to establish a mess table and comfortable
quarters for sick and convalescent officers.
     
    It was an astounding declaration, but she was as good as her word. In Balaclava, she bumped into an old business colleague of her husband’s, Thomas Day, and they set up a partnership. Using local labourers and any materials they could salvage – packing cases, driftwood, scrap metal – they built a small hotel. It opened in March 1855, on the main supply route to Sevastopol, two miles from the front line.
    The British Hotel became a Crimean institution. The restaurant alone was legendary – Mary’s rice puddings and sponge cakes reminded the troops of home – but the hotel also served as a bar, a hospital and a general store that stocked anything from ‘a needle to an anchor’. From there each day Mary would ride to the trenches surrounding Sevastopol, sometimes under fire, with two mules – one carrying medicine, the other food and wine – to nurse and feed the wounded. Known to all as ‘Mother Seacole’, she was a warm, reassuring presence amid the slaughter, dressed in startling combinations of yellow, blue and red. She was on hand to care for the British after the ill-fated assault on the Redan outside Sevastopol in June 1855, in which a quarter of the men were killed or wounded. Two months later, after the battle at theTchernaya River, she tended wounded Russians as well as French and Italians but was ready the next day to throw ‘a capital lunch on the ground’ at a British regimental cricket match. In September, when Sevastopol finally fell to the allies, after a horrific year-long siege in which 100,000 Russians died, Mary Seacole was the first woman to enter the burning city.
    In 1856, the war over, Mary set off for England, penniless for the third time, ill, alone and pursued by creditors. This would have been an unthinkable disaster for most women of her age, but she was unbowed: ‘I do not think I have ever known what it is to despair, or even to despond,’ she wrote later. She took to wearing medals to remind people of her outstanding service to the military cause (although there is no record she was ever awarded any) and within a few months had mobilised her friends in the upper echelons of the army and the popular press to set up the Seacole Fund to save her from bankruptcy. It did that and more. In July 1857 the fund staged a four-day festival featuring over 1,000 performers including eleven military bands. It was a kind of SeacoleAid, attended by a crowd of 40,000 people.
    A month earlier, Mary had published her autobiography, the Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands . It was bound in bright yellow boards, with scarlet lettering and a portrait of Mary on the front in military garb, wearing a Creole kerchief and an extravagantly feathered hat. If that didn’t pull in the Victorian reader, the opening paragraph was a real lapel-grasper:
    All my life long I have followed the impulse which led me to be up and doing, and so far from resting idle anywhere, I have never wanted inclination to rove, nor will powerful enough to find a way to carry out my wishes .
     

    With its vivid and moving account of the war, it became an immediate best-seller and cemented Mary’s celebrity status.
    The last twenty-five years of Mary’s life were (by her somewhat frenzied standards) restrained and comfortable, and she died at her house in Paddington in 1881, aged seventy-six. Both The Times and the Manchester Guardian ran glowing obituaries. Her subsequent disappearance from the public record is usually blamed on the