Mary Seacole

Seacole was born in Kingston, Jamaica, to a Scottish officer and a free Black Jamaican woman who ran a boarding house and practised Caribbean herbal medicine, which her daughter learned by watching. She treated cholera in Panama and yellow fever in Jamaica, and by the time the Crimean War began she had more practical experience of epidemic disease than most army surgeons. She applied to the War Office to join the nursing contingent and was turned down at every door she tried; she concluded, and wrote plainly, that the reason was the colour of her skin.

So she funded herself, sailed four thousand miles, and built the British Hotel near Balaclava out of salvaged timber and packing cases — part canteen, part dispensary, part store. She sold provisions to officers to pay for treating soldiers who could not pay, rode out to the battlefield with bandages and food under fire, and was known to the army as Mother Seacole. She came home bankrupt; a benefit festival was organised for her by officers who remembered. Her memoir sold well, then she was largely forgotten for a century, and her grave in Kensal Green was restored in 1973.