In autumn 1854, a Jamaican woman arrived in London: Mary Seacole. She hoped to travel to Crimea as an army nurse supporting British troops, but her applications at the War Office were rejected, so she paid her own way. Once in Crimea, she set up a hotel near Sevastopol that became popular with British soldiers, many of whom called her ‘Mother Seacole’.
The mixed-race nurse who tended to wounded troops during the Crimean War is now familiar to many. What’s less well known is that this wasn’t her first visit to the imperial metropole, nor even her second. An avid traveller, Seacole had spent her teenage years imagining what it might be like to visit London. As she wrote in her famous autobiography The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands: “I was never weary of tracing upon an old map the route to England; and never followed within my gaze the stately ships homeward bound without longing to be in them.”
In her memoir, she’s cagey about what took her to London the first time – indeed, she does not share when she went, though it seems to have been in the early 1820s – but she travelled with relatives and stayed for about a year. Shortly after returning to Jamaica, she ventured to London once more, this time spying a business opportunity. She took with her “a large stock of West Indian preserves and pickles for sale”.
This story is from the July 2023 edition of BBC History UK.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the July 2023 edition of BBC History UK.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
The Aztecs at war
RHIANNON DAVIES discovers why war was so important to the Mesoamerican people - and why they believed a badly cooked meal could prevent a soldier from shooting straight
Towering achievement
NATHEN AMIN explores a 13th-century stronghold that was built to subdue independent-minded Welsh people, yet has since become a symbol of courage in the face of overwhelming odds
Eighteenth-century mushroom ketchup
ELEANOR BARNETT shares her instructions for making a flavourful sauce with roots in south-east Asia
Goodbye to the gilded age
JOHN JACOB WOOLF is won over by an exploration of the Edwardian era, which looks beyond the golden-era cliché to find a nation beset by a sense of unease
The power of the few
Subhadra Das's first book catches two particular waves in current publishing.
The 'badass' icon
One of the problems with biography, if an author is not careful, is that it can quickly become hagiography.
Ghosts of Germany's past
KATJA HOYER is impressed by a study of a nation's attempts to grapple with the crimes it perpetrated during the Second World War
A window onto England's soul
SARAH FOOT has high praise for a book that traces the evolution of English Christianity over the course of 1400 years, through the lives of its greatest thinkers
"There was a general perception that Queen Victoria's mourning was neither normal nor acceptable”
JUDITH FLANDERS talks to Rebecca Franks about her new book, which delves into the customs surrounding dying, death and mourning in Victorian Britain
"Indigenous children were forcibly separated from their families"
HIDDEN HISTORIES... KAVITA PURI on the legacy of Canada's residential schools