The adventurous life of Mary Seacole

Many students who live at Mary Seacole Hall, a residential facility on the Mona campus of The University of the West Indies, did not know who Mary Seacole really was before they moved in, and some might still not know after their sojourn has ended. Likewise, many patients on Mary Seacole Ward at the Kingston Public Hospital do not know why their ward was so appropriately named.

Mary Jane Grant was born in 1805 (slavery days) in Kingston, Jamaica to a Scottish Army officer and a well-to-do free-coloured woman, who operated a boarding house/nursing home called Blundell Hall at East Street. It was popular among British naval and army officers, and their families. Her mother was also known for her knowledge of folk medicine, which she applied to some of her boarders and other afflicted people.

In 1836, Seacole married Edwin Horatio Seacole, an invalid, and moved to Black River, St Elizabeth where they operated a store. Nothing much is said of her father, but she travelled abroad several times. Death separated her from her husband and mother relatively early into her marriage.

She took over Blundell Hall, expanded it, and did what her mother used to do, hosting and nursing, which made her super-busy during the cholera epidemic of 1850, of which she herself was a victim. Then, she was off again, to Central America, spending three years in Panama while the railroad was being built, keeping a hotel and healing people sickened by the diseases that existed in the region.

In another region, The Crimea, situated in the Crimean Peninsular of Europe/Asia, a war had just started and Seacole heard that one of the British regiments sent there was once stationed in Jamaica. She was perhaps familiar with some of the soldiers, for, when she heard of the unspeakable death toll and the great extent of the suffering of the sick and dying, from cholera, yellow fever, malaria and dysentery, she became restless. They needed her, she convinced herself.

Her application to the British War Office after she arrived in England, to visit The Crimea as a nurse, was turned down. Another nurse, Florence Nightingale, known as ‘The lady with the lamp’, was at the time getting ready with a team to depart to The Crimea. But, the War Office could not stop the adventurous spirit and entrepreneurial zeal of Mary Jane Seacole.

She bought goods to sell and off she went to The Crimean War. There, she set up a store, a canteen, and the British Hotel, a lodge for officers and soldiers. Yet, she did not confine herself to the safe space of her businesses; she ventured into battlefields, attending to the injured and the dying, from place to place, on one mule, and another was laden with goodies for the infirmed.

It is said that she worked in “rain and snow, in storm and tempest ... with her stove and ke ttle, in any shelter she could find, brewing tea for all who wanted it”.

“ Even without waiting for a ceasefire, she went on to the battlefield to care for the sick and dying, of enemy or ally, becoming known to all as ‘Mother Seacole’,” Olive Senior writes in Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage.

When the war ended in 1856, Seacole returned to London without a penny, but royalty and people in high places who had heard about her work became associated with her. She was awarded the Crimean Medal and was very popular on the London social scene, and travelled to and from Jamaica regularly. In 1857, she published her memoir, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, which became a bestseller. London is noted as the place of her death in 1881.

“ Despite enormous fame during her lifetime, Mrs Seacole seems to have been forgotten soon after her death, and so remained until the centenary (1954) of The Crimean War rekindled interest,” Olive Senior writes.

To honour her work during that war, the headquarters of the Jamaican Nurses’ Association was named Mary Seacole House. There is a life-size bust of Mary Seacole mounted in the foyer of the headquarters. In 1973, a public reconsecration of her grave in St Mary’s Catholic Cemetery, Harrow Road, London was inspired by a group of West Indian women.

The Jamaica Government in 1991 awarded her posthumously with the country’s third-highest honour, the Order of Merit, and, two years after, the British government, which did not support her efforts to go to The Crimean War, in 1993 announced a bursary valued at £25,000 in Mary Jane Seacole’s name.