Uncover the life of Britain’s Caribbean nursing heroine
In 2004, Mary Seacole was voted the greatest Black Briton. Remembered for her work nursing the sick and wounded during the Crimean War, she is idolised by many who view her as a pioneer of nursing and as an inspirational Black female figure in British history. Often compared to and overshadowed by the Lady of the Lamp, Florence Nightingale, little is known about much of Seacole’s life. However, what we do know about her paints a picture of a hugely enterprising and generous woman who made her mark in a way that no other Black woman of her time was able to. So, who really was Mary Seacole and how did she come to occupy such a prestigious position in Victorian England?
Life in Jamaica
Historians know very little about Seacole’s origins in Jamaica. One of the reasons for this, according to Seacole’s biographer Helen Rappaport, is that Seacole herself made very little of her Jamaican roots in her own memoir The Wonderful Adventures Of Mrs Seacole In Many Lands, which she wrote after the Crimean War. “The problem with Mary Seacole’s early life is that the only account we have of it comes from her memoir which is not an autobiography – it only covers about five and a half years of her life – and in that she draws a complete veil, deliberately, over her birth origins, her parents and her childhood. She gets to the age of 45 inside about four pages, so we know very little about Mary’s early life that she tells us,” explains Rappaport.
What we do know about Mary Seacole is that she was born Mary Grant in Kingston, Jamaica around 1805. Her mother was a free Jamaican woman of colour and her father was a Scottish soldier. Rappaport explains that Seacole did not give more information about her background because she was an illegitimate child. It was not unusual in Jamaica at that time for white men, especially visiting military men, to father children with Jamaican women according to Rappaport, and many of these men gave their children their surnames and provided for them financially. However, we do not know if this was the case with Seacole’s father because she gives no other information about him. Historians have assumed that his surname was Grant because this was the name Seacole gave as an adult when she married.
Seacole’s mother, we do know from Seacole’s own writing, was a practitioner of Jamaican traditional medicine known as a ‘doctress’. “That’s a native Jamaican woman, often a woman of
