The Crimean War: A Hisory

by Orlando Figes

Mary Seacole, a Jamaican woman who provided hearty meals and hospitality, herbal remedies and medicines at the ‘British Hotel’ she set up at a place she named Spring Hill near Kadikoi. Born in Kingston in 1805 to a Scottish father and Creole mother, this extraordinary woman had worked as a nurse in the British military stations in Jamaica and had married an Englishman called Seacole, who died within a year. She had later run a hotel and general store with her brother in Panama, where she had coped with outbreaks of disease. At the start of the Crimean War she travelled to England and attempted to get herself recruited as a nurse with Florence Nightingale, but she was rejected several times, no doubt partly because of the colour of her skin. Determined to make money and to help the war effort as a sutler and hotelier, she teamed up with Thomas Day, one of her husband’s distant relatives, to set up a company, ‘Seacole and Day’. Setting sail from Gravesend on 15 February, they collected stores in Constantinople, where they also recruited a young Greek Jew (whom she would call ‘Jew Johnny’). Although rather grandly named, the ‘British Hotel’ was really just a restaurant and general store in what Russell described as ‘an iron storehouse with wooden sheds’, but it was much loved by British officers, its main clientele, for whom it was a sort of club, where they could indulge themselves and enjoy comfort food that reminded them of home.