Belle - a film review Catherine Johnson

Sarah Gadon as Elizabeth and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Dido

This film Belle, is remarkable for many reasons, it's directed by a black woman (and ex Grange Hill-er Amma Asante) it's historical and there is a woman of colour in the lead wearing what can only be described as Utterly Fabulous Frocks. These are the frocks of my nine year old dreams, the frocks that I longed to wear and now at last they're here larger than life and completely beautiful (as are the female leads by the way).

It uses the life of Belle as the starting point for a froth of romance and politics that entwines the case of the slave ship Zong  (a insurance scam in which ill slaves were drowned at sea rather than sold at a loss) with Belle's unusual social standing just as racism was being properly and fully industrialised. How fantastic to see another facet of British history bought to the screen in a stylish and entertaining manner. 

I'm not going to give you all the history, safe to say Dido Belle was bought up as a lady even though she was illegitimate and mixed race. She did marry, but her husband was not a preachers firebrand campaigning lawyer but a steward and they lived in Mayfair, were married at St George's that lovely church just by Hanover Square and she was buried in the burial ground behind Connaught Square.

Did I mention the clothes? i think I did, and I had been looking forward to this film for a very long time. My mother went to see it and loved it and she has good taste I took my best friend, she wept buckets while I myself did manage a moist eye.

I think the team did an excellent job with setting and costume, no mean feat for a British (read low budget) feature. The performances by the female leads and the older generation - Miranda Richardson, Tom Wilkinson and Penelope Wilton were all brilliant, sadly I found the love interest and the evil suitor a little lacking.

It was not the art house smash that is 12 Years a Slave but I would recommend it most wholeheartedly. Belle combines rock solid storytelling and a very handsome look at class and race constraints in 18th century Britain. Let's hope this is the first of many such films that explore all our history. There are so many stories that are waiting for this sort of treatment.

Of course if you'd like to explore this period in a book I can offer you Sawbones! Which by the way won the Young Quills 12+ best historical fiction award earlier this week. And I shall leave you with the portrait of Dido and her cousin Elizabeth which inspired the film.

Dido Belle and Elizabeth Murray 1779. Attributed to Zoffany

Catherine.

"The Black Loyalists" by Ruth Holmes Whitehead, reviewed by Katherine Langrish

“They had a passion for freedom, and they acted upon it.”

This wonderful book is by my friend Ruth Holmes Whitehead, a distinguished historian and ethnologist who worked for over forty years at the Nova Scotia Museum. Ruth is the author of several books on the history, culture and stories of the Mi’kmaq, the Native American nation which still inhabits New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. We met while I was writing my third book for children, the story of a 10^th century viking ship’s landfall on the coast of North America and the crew’s encounters with Native Americans. I approached Ruth for guidance after reading her collection of Mi’kmaq tales: ‘Stories from the Six Worlds’. She lent me the benefit of her years of study, and helped me escape many a pitfall.

Now she has turned to a different but equally fascinating subject: the “more than four thousand black men, women and children [who came] to Nova Scotia as a direct result of the American Revolution (1755-1783).  They came as freeborn persons, as former slaves who had seized freedom from the chaos of war, or as indentured servants. Some came still chained to their enslavers. They came fleeing the British surrender of the thirteen American colonies… [As] these colonies fell to the Americans, mass evacuations of British forces and supporters to their remaining centres of power began to take place.”  The book concentrates on the South Carolina Black Loyalists, many of whose names survive in ‘The Book of Negroes’, a record of black people evacuated from the port of New York.

Early in the war, the British government had offered emancipation to any slaves who would desert their rebel masters.  This was no moral imperative, but a pragmatic attempt to impoverish the American economy and weaken the rebel war effort. Motives aside, however, freedom was on the table, and many enslaved men, women and children took advantage of the offer, escaping behind the British lines, or to the British ships patrolling the east coast from Maine to Georgia.

Runaways risked much.  There were severe punishments on recapture – up to and including death:

“Whoever apprehends the said run away, and delivers him to the warden of the workhouse, shall have Three Pounds reward…” wrote William Harris in 1752, “but whoever brings his head alone, shall be paid Ten Pounds.”  The price of murder continued to rise. Three years later, Thomas Smith offered £10 for Frank, alive, but promised £20 for his head. By 1770, William Waight was offering £10 for a man named May, alive, and £100 for his head alone.

Such savage penalties were clearly designed to terrify.  Ruth Whitehead describes how the wealth and economy of the Carolinas depended upon slaves; many slave-owners were extremely rich. The estate of Thomas Shubrick, a South Carolina landowner, was valued at his death at “the Sum of two Million, one hundred three thousand, eight hundreds Pounds Currency”; this sum was inclusive of over three hundred enslaved people, whose names are tersely recorded in a seemingly endless list: “Dye, Will, Moll, Peter, Philander, Ammon, Dick, Attus, Duke, Richmond, Mingo, London, George, Cuff, Bram, Cato, Molly, Castalia, Jemmy, Mary, Phillis, John, Tony, Nancy…”

A pass issued by the British to Cato Rammsay: illustration from the back cover of the book

The Black Loyalists illuminates a fascinating and moving episode of history which I’d known nothing about. There are so many paradoxes, not least that black people should fight on the side of the King – for the promise of freedom – in the very war which Americans fought for independence. It was not an easy transition. Many of the men joined the Loyalist armies as soldiers. But what about families, what about the women? The children? And what happened when the British surrendered? The American forces under George Washington demanded the restoration of property, including slaves, and it fell to individual British commanders to interpret orders and make decisions on whether to honour early promises. Some Black Loyalists were abandoned, but for those who made it to Nova Scotia, there were still many challenges to face: home-building, earning a living, and coping with often hostile attitudes from local communities.

Each and every one of their stories, if we could fully know it, would be an adventure. What about Savinah Miles, twenty-five years old, who “ran from John Miles’s plantation in the Indian Lands of South Carolina, taking her daughter, Venus, with her. Venus was only nine years old when she escaped with her mother, who kept her free for the next nine years, before boarding L’Abondance [the Royal Navy transport which took the largest complement of Black Loyalists to Nova Scotia].”

‘Kept her free for nine years.’ If only we could know more.

Ruth Holmes Whitehead took eighteen years to write and research this book which is both a work of scholarship and a labour of love, gracefully and clearly written with some poignant personal touches. Ruth herself was born in South Carolina and has found slave owners among her own ancestors; her co-researcher Carmelita Robertson has “multiple Black Loyalist ancestors who escaped … during the American Revolution.”  As Ruth says:

I sat beside a dying woman once, at Remley’s Point, South Carolina.  She liked the sofa in the living room where she could gaze out all night long through her open door. “I lies here,” she said, “and dead people come and put their hands on my head.” Dead people come and put their hands on my head: a really good metaphor for living in the Carolinas. The weight of a past that includes slavery lies heavily on the landscape, yet there have always been moments of grace and basic goodness. Those who were enslaved here experienced that dichotomy of good and evil.

Black Loyalists

Southern Settlers of Nova Scotia’s First Free Black Communities

by Ruth Holmes Whitehead, Nimbus Publishing 2013

It Ain't Necessarily So - by Katherine Langrish

While Government education ministers moan about the history curriculum in English schools, I shake my head.  There is no way, no way at all, to fit the whole of British history into two or three lessons a week over the course of a few brief school years, so obviously stuff has to be left out, and the question: what? is highly political.

In my own youth it used to be the case that ‘school history’ ignored the Roman conquest, skipped the Dark Ages and the early English kings, even Alfred, and began with the Norman conquest in 1066. This was presented as ‘the last time a foreign army ever conquered England’ but also as the event which created ‘the language of Shakespeare’ and therefore, as Messrs. Sellar and Yeatman would say, A Good Thing.

Our history lessons then hopped several centuries to the Wars of the Roses in the late 1400’s, dwelt adoringly on the Tudors (especially Elizabeth the First, and the failure of the Spanish Armada: another Good Thing); did a little swift footwork over the Stuarts and the Civil War (leaving us with the impression that the Stuarts were a bit flaky but after all they were really only Scottish/French, weren’t they, and practically foreigners?), hurdled the next couple of centuries (we knew nothing of Queen Anne, for instance) to arrive breathless and panting at the Napoleonic Wars (Waterloo, Trafalgar: Britain in her habitual role of Holding the Tyrant at Bay). 

After this, apparently nothing of much note occurred before the Industrial Revolution (a Good Thing because it made Britain Richest Nation and Top World Power): the downside of which in terms of human suffering was redeemed by heroic reformers like Fry, Wilberforce and Shaftesbury (English People with Moral Principles who Improved Lives). Our history lessons finally drew to a close in the mud of Flanders: the First World War was too close and terrible to be airbrushed in any way; my generation all had granddads who had survived it or died in it. And the Second World War wasn’t history at all, but something which belonged to your mother’s childhood, and she could tell you stories about it – dashing down to the air raid shelter with the cat – shivering to the explosion of the bomb that missed – listening to Churchill on the radio.

And so, albeit with several lacunae, schoolchildren of my era did get a general sense of the progression of British history – a sense of the order into which the different portions fell.

This is useful.  But it is not the only important, nor even the most important thing. For every version of history written by the victors, a different version is remembered by the victims; and when – as often happens – victors and victims switch places, their historical narratives switcharoo, till a single set of historical events may yield two opposing storylines that snake across each other’s paths like sine and cosine waves, intersecting at a few bare points of reference.

Henry VIII

Hence the Catholic view of the English Reformation goes like this: Because monstrous Henry VIII wanted to divorce his wife he broke with Rome, dissolved the monasteries, turned nuns and monks into beggars and led England away from the true path.  Queen Mary I briefly restored the Catholic faith, till England reverted to Protestantism under Elizabeth I. The Catholic persecution was renewed and continued for centuries (not until this year, 2013, was the constitution amended to allow the monarch to marry a Catholic). Over 300 English Catholics were martyred (hanged, drawn and quartered) between 1534 to 1680.

But the Protestant view of the Reformation goes this way: Henry VIII merely hurried the English Reformation along: it was inevitable, ever since Martin Luther and the unforgettably named Diet of Worms.  It’s a bit embarrassing Henry was such a monster, but the Reformation was still a good thing.  Of course you shouldn’t be encouraged to pay money to the Church to buy God’s forgiveness!  Of course people should have access to the Bible in English!  Under Bloody Mary (Queen Mary I) over 300 English Protestants were martyred (burned at the stake) between 1554 and 1558. And what about Catholic plots against Elizabeth I?

I was brought up on the Protestant narrative, the Official Version in state education and in my own home.  I went to a perfectly ordinary rural grammar school where there were few Catholics, fewer Jews, and absolutely no Muslims.  I was therefore astonished at age eighteen, in the course of a conversation with a new friend who happened to be a Roman Catholic nun, when she quietly remarked, “The Reformation was the worst thing that ever happened to England.”

I was utterly taken aback. Not once in my life had it occurred to me that anyone might question the view expressed in every history book (fictional or non-fictional) I’d ever read, that the Reformation was not only A Good Thing, but A Very Good Thing. It paved the way for Elizabeth the First, didn’t it – Gloriana herself?  And dim recollections of simony and the selling of indulgences, mixed up with memories of carousing friars and false prelates from stories about Robin Hood, had led me to take for granted that the late medieval Catholic Church had been sadly lacking in moral fibre.

Many years on, I still wouldn’t actually agree that the Reformation was the worst thing ever to happen to England, but my views on it are more nuanced, and at least I know it’s possible to have the argument.  Much more important, however, was my belated realisation that what you read in a history book ain’t necessarily so.

Robert Bellah, in his interesting book  "Religion in Human Evolution" (Harvard 2011) writes:

Families, nations, religions (but also corporations, universities, departments of sociology) know who they are by the stories they tell. The modern discipline of history is closely related to the emergence of the nation-state. Families and religions have seldom been concerned with 'scientific accuracy' in the stories they tell. Modern nations have required national histories that will be, in a claimed objective sense, true. ...But the narrative shape of national history is not more scientific (or less mythical) than the narrative shape of other identity tellings, something that it does not take debunkers to notice. Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities recounts both the widespread establishment of chairs of history within a generation of the French Revolution and its unleashing of nationalist fervour, and of the strange mix of memory and forgetting that that history produced (not so strange to those familiar with other forms of self-telling). [My italics]

Ignatius Sancho

The narrative of British history taught to me in school was concerned with aggrandisement of Britain as a nation and the British as a race - with a fairly narrow definition of race. It's good to feel good about yourself, but not if it encourages blindness, ignorance and prejudice about your neighbours, local and international. For example, there have been black inhabitants of these islands since at least Roman times, but we were never told anything about that in my schooldays. They were invisible. Including them in the history curriculum was a step not merely towards a new and better national narrative, but also towards a more accurate one. It's got to make it harder to view black British people as foreigners, newcomers and interlopers if you've been taught about black Elizabethans like the trumpet player John Blanke, black Georgians and Victorians like the writer Ignatius Sancho and the composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor, black First World War soldiers... No wonder there was an outcry when Michael Gove tried to remove Mary Seacole from our children's history lessons.

In my daughters’ time in school, during the last decade, I’ve been pleased that the history they have learned was very differently taught from the rather odd mixture of rote learning and essays which constituted my history lessons (the battle plans and dates of Napoleon's campaigns have long faded from my memory: but I enjoyed writing short imaginative essays about how it might feel to be sent down a mine at age seven.)  They've been constantly asked to pay attention to the sources. They’ve been shown the difference between primary and secondary sources and asked to evaluate the trustworthiness of each.  They’ve been taught to think carefully, not just about what was said to have happened, but also about who was saying it, and why, and whether this person might be in any way biased.  Suppose Henry VIII had written a personal account of his break from Rome. It would be an important primary source: but you wouldn’t take it at face value, would you?  

Rote learning of facts and dates is far less important than the skills my daughters learned in history, skills which will serve them well in life.  Especially in an age when you can look up facts and dates on the internet (which may not be accurate), it’s good to think for yourself.  It’s good to have an enquiring mind.  It’s good to retain a healthy suspicion of people with axes to grind. Above all, it’s good to know that you shouldn’t believe everything you read.  Just because it’s in a book – or available online – doesn’t make it true.

Who wrote that book or that blog?  And for what purpose?  Is the author telling the truth?

It ain’t necessarily so.

Credits:

Cover illustration by John Reynolds of '1066 And All That' by Sellar and Yeatman - published by Methuen http://www.methuen.co.uk/1066-and-all-that/b/3

Henry VIII, in the Royal Collection:  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1491_Henry_VIII.jpg

Ignatius Sancho: portrait by Thomas Gainsborough:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IgnatiusSancho.jpg

: 'It Ain't Necessarily So' from George Gershwin's 'Porgy and Bess', Trevor Nunn, 2006 (Youtube)

Unfinished Histories by Imogen Robertson

Joshua Reynolds - Study of a black man c.1770

I wonder how much black history is hiding in plain sight in the archives? I’m taking up Louise’s theme from yesterday here and Catherine Johnson's from earlier in the month, it’s one I hope we hear more of in the future, and that is how long, various and multi-faceted black history is in England. Naturally when we talk about race in the 18th century attention focusses on the horrors of the slave trade and the efforts of abolitionists, black and white, to bring it to an end. There is enough to talk about there to keep us going for at least another century, of particular interest to me at the moment is how culpable white abolitionists were in portraying Africans as poor victims, and failing to recruit black voices to campaign alongside them. I'm glad there were black writers who did not need recruiting to make their voices heard such as the first recorded black voter, Ignatius Sancho, and abolitionist campaigners Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano all of whom wrote best-selling books. Their activism isn’t well enough known though and often our thinking tends to be wrongly polarized between the oppressed slaves and the white masters. While I’m not for a second minimising the horrors of slavery, it’s just as important to remember there were black people at every level in English society in the 18th century. It’s surprising how many people think there just wasn’t a black community in England before the 20th century. It’s just not true. We’ve been a country of immigration since year dot and people of all races have been coming here, settling down and getting on with life ever since. 

That said, the experience of the mass of the black population of England is largely hidden from us. Just as we see the experience of the vast proportion of the English in general only through the observations of the book and letter reading classes, so outside of those writers mentioned above, we tend to get only hints of the black community. Nevertheless it is enough to know there was a strong black community here even as the slave trade boomed. For instance when two black men were confined to Bridewell for begging in 1773 some three hundred black people visited them to offer support; there were clubs to support fellow blacks who were without a place, and after the Somerset verdict in 1772 the black community held a subscription ball to celebrate. That is not to say the black community was not well integrated too and that leads me back to my first question about how much black history is hidden in plain sight. Unless someone mentioned in a text is specifically referred to as black we tend to assume they are white and that is simply not always the case. 

I’ve been ferreting around in the Old Bailey records. You can learn a great deal about 18th century London by reading them, and there we see black Britons as prosecutors, witnesses and prosecuted. It is clear that the evidence of a black man or woman was as good as anyone else's, and there are plenty of cases where white criminals are transported or executed on the evidence of black witnesses. Sometimes a witness is asked if he is a Christian. One man who said he had been going to church for four years testified, another called Guardaloup who helped chase down a thief did not, because he said he knew nothing of religion. Now, I found those cases, and those of Isaac George, the messenger whose money was stolen after he went to a dance, Thomas Guy, a black highwayman who complained there were a thousand black men in London so why were they picking on him, and William Smith who was acquitted of pick-pocketing because of the ‘people of quality’ ready to testify to his character, because they are all referred to as black in the transcripts, but we should not assume that every person of colour who came up before the court was so designated.

For instance I have been reading about the short and very criminal life of Ann Duck. She was the daughter of a black man and a white woman. Her father taught the use of the small sword to gentleman and was acknowledged a ‘very good master.’ He provided for a good education for Ann, but after his death she began to run wild and ended up in 1743 being repeatedly tried for violent theft.  In fact she was up before the court five times and in only one trial is the fact she is black mentioned. In her account of her crimes given before her execution she herself mentions it only once:

...while the Punch was making, he began to be very rude and troublesome; particularly to Ann Barefoot; (for he seem'd to have no liking to me, he swore he did not like my Face, being of a tawny Complexion) upon which Barefoot severely reprimanded him, and ask'd him what he meant by it? What, did he take them to be Women of the Town? If you do, you are much mistaken, for we are both married Women, and have two very good Husbands (and God knows neither of us were ever married, but we have had many that we call'd Husbands, God forgive us!) Whereupon he began to be a little more civil, and we told him at the same time, it was a Thing they never did in their Lives, go into a House with a strange Man, and that he may take it as a particular Favour.

They got him drunk and stole twenty shillings from him, by the way. 

I wish the Ordinary of Newgate had asked her about her father’s career. Still, looking through those trials it is clear that there was nothing exotic or peculiar about seeing black faces on the streets of London, or in the inns or taverns, lodging houses or grand palaces or the courts. Most of the stories of black Britons have disappeared into time along with those of their friends and neighbours, but that doesn’t mean they are not there. 

Zoffany - Dido Lindsay and Elizabeth Murray

You can find the accounts of the trials of Ann Duck by searching for her name at www.oldbaileyonline.org and, like Louise I recommend Black London - Life Before Emancipation by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina. 

'Mary Seacole and the Black and White of History' by A L Berridge

I love Black History Month. Every year I learn something I didn’t know, some achievement that’s been lost in the whitewashing of history – or even in the whitewashing of current affairs.

And there’s the rub. We can get a lovely self-congratulatory glow from righting the injustices of the past, but sometimes it feels more like examining history through the lens of 21st century perception, and exclaiming at the ignorance of primitive people who didn’t see things as we do in this much more enlightened age.

A more enlightened age...?

To which I’m inclined to say a very rude word. Manda Scott’s fabulous post about early Christian acceptance of same-sex marriages has already pointed out that in some ways we were more enlightened in the past than we are now. We tend to assume that the march of civilisation has always been one of progress, but is that really always true? In women’s rights, for instance, is Iran in 2012 better than the Persia of 1960? In human rights, is 21st century America better than the 18th century Europe that consigned judicial torture to the dustbin of history? Sometimes, I’m afraid, we regress.

As a white-privileged writer from a country with an appallingly imperial past, I never thought this would apply to any aspect of racism – until I started my second Crimean novel and came across the life of Mary Seacole. 

In 2004 Mary Seacole was voted the Greatest Black Briton of all time. There’s no room here for a proper study, but in simple terms she was a mixed-race Jamaican woman who learned herbal and folk medicine from her mother, and used it to transform the lives of the sick. When she was turned down for Florence Nightingale’s nursing mission, she funded her own expedition to the Crimea with a business partner and set up her famous ‘British Hotel’ at Spring Hill near Balaklava.

What she did there is heartbreakingly wonderful. She was supposed to make her living by selling home comforts to the soldiers – but if they hadn’t the money she often gave it to them anyway. Like her Russian counterpart, ‘Dasha of Sevastopol’, she would take medicines and dressings out onto the battlefield to treat the men as they lay – but Mary Seacole tended Russian and British alike. Her heart was open to any sick man, and the French chef Alexis Soyer described her greeting newly-arrived patients with open arms and a bellow of ‘Who is my new son?’ The soldiers in turn called her ‘Mother Seacole’, or often just ‘Mother’ or ‘Mama’. They loved her, and it’s not for nothing that the 2005 Channel 4 documentary about her was entitled ‘The Real Angel of the Crimea’.

Contemporary engraving in Punch

 Yet it’s only in the last ten years that I’d even heard of her. White upper class Florence Nightingale, yes – but Mary Seacole who? It looks like a classic case of historical whitewashing, and the popular narrative concerning her now is of a woman who fought and triumphed over racial oppression all her life. That certainly was what I expected, and I turned to my research with the patronising zeal of a white writer determined not to repeat racist mistakes of the past.

And I was wrong. Mary Jane Seacole was an astoundingly strong woman who doesn’t need my patronage or anyone else’s, and would have been appalled to hear herself described as a victim. That, of course, needn’t mean she wasn’t one, and when I read her autobiography, ‘The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole in Many Lands’, I naturally pounced on the evidence of racism in the rejection of her offers to go and help in the Crimea. The War Office turned her down, so did Florence Nightingale’s companions, and even the Crimean Relief Fund gave her a polite refusal. Mary describes crying in the street after this last, wondering if it is in fact her colour that has caused her to be rejected.

So far so predictable – until we look more closely. Her book may have been ghost-written and was certainly heavily edited, but the sentiments are presumably her own, and this is what she actually wrote: ‘Doubts rose in my mind for the first and last time, thank Heaven. Was it possible that American prejudices against colour had some root here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs?’ At this time she’d have been nearly fifty – yet this was the first time she’d even questioned the possibility of racism in Britain. Is that likely to be the case with a black woman today?

Mary’s autobiography consistently presents a Britain in which racism was not a significant problem – although she feared it might become so in the future. It’s true it was never in her interest to criticize the country on which her welfare depended, but the claim is still, I think, worth investigating. Was the Britain of 1854 genuinely less racist than it was later to become?

The Rosa Parks of 1852?

 I’m not experienced in race matters, but I’m inclined to agree with Dr Kathleen Chater that our perception of British racial history is muddied by conflating it with America’s. Mary certainly made no bones about the difference – especially when in 1852 she took an American ship back to Jamaica instead of waiting for an English one. 

The American ladies refused to have her in the saloon, their children spat in her servant’s face, and when an Englishman remonstrated and advised Mary to sit wherever she liked, the stewardess said, ‘If the Britishers is so took up with coloured people, that’s their business; but it won’t do here.’

There was a difference, and if we can remove the lens of 21st century superiority then British history should lead us to expect it. It wasn’t until the 18th century that moves began to abolish slavery in the colonies, but in Britain itself slavery had been illegal since the 14th. As early as 1603 Shakespeare wrote about the nobility of Othello and presented his greatest ever villain as a monstrous racist.

Spot the middle trumpeter on the right...

 This fascinating BBC article talks about Britain’s first black community in the Tudor period, and how black people settled here after being freed from slavery in the Spanish ships.  There was no legal colour bar in Britain. Mixed marriages were common and met with no disapproval, while black men actually had the vote before white women.

 That was the world as Mary Seacole knew it. The product of a mixed marriage herself, she married a white man rumoured to be the illegitimate son of Nelson and Lady Hamilton, and never seems to have encountered the slightest difficulty about it.  Prejudice may well have played a part in her rejection by Florence Nightingale’s mission, but as Gretchen Gerzina points out in ‘Black England: Life Before Emancipation’, prejudice in those times was more likely to be down to class than colour. Sternly well-bred Miss Nightingale wanted a very particular kind of woman for her nurses, and Mary was far from the only one rejected. Even the third heroic British Crimean nurse, Welshwoman Betsi Cadwaladr, was accepted against Florence Nightingale’s will. There may well have been a bar, but it wasn’t necessarily one of colour.

We still shouldn’t whitewash, and there were (and are) many ways in which racism can be practised within the law. Mary may have escaped the brunt of it because of her mixed race, but a darker friend was subjected to insult on the streets of London itself. There’s also an insidiously poisonous tone of assumed superiority, and even Soyer who admired Mary so much describes her gratingly as ‘several shades duskier than the lily’. No-one can or should pretend there was anything like racial equality in 19th century Britain.

Mary Seacole's meeting with Alexis Soyer

 But neither is there now, and to some extent British racism in the 20th century was worse than in the 19th. Many of us have heard of white elderly patients in hospital frightened to be tended by a black nurse or doctor, but that problem simply didn’t exist in the Crimea. Mary Seacole was a woman. Sick soldiers confused her with their wife or mother, and the difference in colour meant nothing at all. 

Nor was theirs merely a love born of necessity, and when Mary returned bankrupt from the Crimea it was her white ‘sons’ who rallied round to save her. A special Seacole Benefit Fund was set up, and her growing list of patrons and supporters expanded to include senior military commanders from the Crimea as well as the Dukes of Wellington, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Cambridge – and the Prince of Wales. On her death in 1881 her estate was valued at over £2,500.

Bust by Henry Weekes

This doesn’t quite fit the official story of racial oppression and neglect. In her lifetime she was celebrated alongside Florence Nightingale herself – poems were written about her, portraits painted, and in 1859 this bust of her was sculpted by Henry Weekes. It’s only after her death that we see her memory fade, and the star of Florence Nightingale eclipse Mary’s in the history books. If this is down to racism, then it’s a racism of the 20th century, not the 19th.

But there may be other reasons for the imbalance too. Mary Seacole brought sunshine into the lives of everyone who met her, but the sterile light of Florence Nightingale’s lamp illuminated generations not yet born. Her notions of hygiene and discipline changed the nursing profession for ever, and (as the spread of superbugs in modern hospitals can testify) we dismiss those ideas at our peril. In the strict march of medical progress, Nightingale’s legacy is ultimately greater than Seacole’s, and it would be a shame if praise of one of these two great women were automatically seen as denigration of the other.

That’s not to say that Mary Seacole wasn’t a scientist. She explored new cures for cholera and yellow fever, she even performed a post-mortem on a baby who died of cholera, and to dismiss her as a kind of cosy Mammy figure would be as inaccurate as it is offensive. But I hope it’s fair to say that the history of social change encompasses humanity as well as science, and Mary was a pioneer in more than herbal and tropical medicine.

She really was. There’s little to praise in her white acquaintances ‘not being racist’ – but the astonishing fact is that Mary wasn’t either. She admits to prejudice against Americans, especially ladies of those States that still practised slavery, but ‘if any of them came to me sick and suffering… I forgot everything, except that she was my sister and it was my duty to help her.’ It’s easy for me to type those words, but when I think what level of forgiveness would be required for Mary to think them then it takes my breath away. 

 She wasn’t a saint, and she took a definite pride in the lightness of her own complexion, but she told the Americans she’d have been happy to have skin ‘dark as any nigger’s’, and I believe her. She was not above making slighting remarks about Indians she met in Panama, and she called her servant by the cringeworthy name of ‘Jew Johnny’ – but had they ever fallen ill then both Jew and Indians would have been her sons. Mary’s world was one best described in the words of another great black historical figure – Dr Martin Luther King Jr:

'I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.'

Mary Seacole never expressed that dream. She lived her life as if it were already reality, and for those whose lives she touched, it came true. If her life and example can inspire others to follow it to the rainbow’s end, then she won’t just be the ‘Greatest Black Briton’, she’ll be one of the greatest human beings of all time.

***

A L Berridge's website is here.

She'd love to link you to her second Crimean novel, but unfortunately she's still finishing it.