Mary Seacole



She was a British business woman who showed great kindness and bravery tending to sick and wounded soldiers during the Crimean War.Mary seacole was born in 1805 in Kingston, Jamaica.Her father was a Scottish soldier stationed on the island – at that time, Jamaica was part of the British Empire – and her mother was a Jamaican nurse and healer.We don’t know if Mary went to school, but we do know that from a very young age she had an interest in medicine and nursing. When she was just 12, she was helping her mother run a boarding house in Kingston, where many of the guests were sick or injured soldiers. She visited other Caribbean islands and spent time living in Britain as a teenager. In 1836, Mary married Edwin Seacole, an English naval officer. They ran a shop together but in 1844 Edwin died , just eight years after their marriage.Mary returned to Kingston in 1853, but she didn’t stay long. On hearing news of British soldiers going off to Russia to fight in the bloody battles of the Crimean War, she wanted to help, so she went to the the War Office in London to requesting to join Florence Nightingale and her team of nurses treating wounded and sick soldiers in the Crimea but was refused (perhaps because of her race, age or lack of hospital experienc).Mary was turned down, along with several other nurses. That did not stop Mary. Together with her friend Thomas Day, in 1866 she set off to the Crimea in a ship stocked with medical supplies.She arrived to a terrible state. Many of the soldiers were cold, dirty and hungry, and those that were sick and wounded weren’t being cared for.Mary decided something had to be done and so, with her friend Thomas, she opened a “British Hotel” near to the battlefields.It was basically a hut made of metal sheets, where soldiers could rest and buy hot food, drinks and equipment.Mary used the money spent there to help treat and care for sick and wounded soldiers.She did something incredibly brave – she rode on horseback into the battlefields, even when under fire, to nurse wounded men from both sides of the war.After the Crimean War ended in, Mary returned to London with very little money and in poor health. But her hard work didn’t go unrecognised – many of the soldiers wrote to the newspapers about all she had done for them, and 80,000 people attended a charity gala in 1857 to raise money for her.