 Welcome everyone today too of HIST Fest 2022. Thank you to everyone that's joining us in person and online as well. It's really great to have you involved. We have a really exciting day of talks coming up. So I'm going to introduce our speakers for the first event of today. Speaking about her book is Helen Rappaport. She's a Sunday Times bestselling author, media consultant and historian specialising in the period 1837 to 1918 in Britain and Russia particularly. Born in Bromley Kent, she studied Russian at Leeds University before working as a translator and copy editor and she's been a full-time writer for more than 23 years, publishing critically acclaimed works such as Ekaterinburg, The Last Days of the Romanovs, Conspirator Lenin in Exile, Magnificent Obsession and Court in the Revolution, Petrograd, Russia 1917, A World on the Edge. In 2003 Helen discovered and purchased an 1869 portrait of Mary Seacole which you can see on the cover of her book there and it now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery but it sparked a long investigation into Seacole's life and career and formed the subject of her latest book in search of Mary Seacole. Charing the discussion is Dr Vanda Vaporska who you met yesterday, if you attended yesterday. Vanda is the chief executive of the Society of Genealogists, the national charity that houses the largest archive and library on family history. She previously led the Equality Trust and is a visiting research fellow at the University of York and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She's a historian of the early modern period and her first book Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland 1500-1800 was shortlisted for the Catherine Briggs Folklore Award. Vanda, over to you. Thanks Rebecca, so welcome to what's going to be an absolutely wonderful day today. I'm especially delighted to be speaking to Helen because Helen has been a member of the Society of Genealogists since 1980, so I'm really hoping to have a great conversation afterwards where she'll be teaching me everything that I need to know about the society and a fellow Slovan assist as well, so what more could I ask for. I'd like to start with one of the quotes that was in the beginning of your book which is I think what sets the tone really for history in a sense and for what we're doing today. Research is formalised curiosity, it's poking and prying with a purpose. I mean how wonderful is that that Zora Neil Hurston, and I suspect you know being nosy and being curious is what drives most of us into history, it's certainly certainly got me into it. But thinking about Mary Seacole, I mean even we know her by her not by her name but by her husband's name, who was Mary before she was Mary Seacole? She was Mary Grant in as far as we can be 100% sure. I mean that was the name she got married under, but of course we are reliant on a very fragmentary account of her early life by Mary herself. She is the sole source and as you know in genealogical research you never trust the one source who tells you anything about themselves because people misremember or they get the facts wrong. All that we know is that her mother was a free woman, mixed heritage Jamaican woman and her father was a white Scottish soldier who we assume was called Grant. I mean she never categorically says my father was a soldier called James Grant, John Grant or whatever. She is very very very elusive about her parentage so one snatches at the tiniest clues, the tiniest fragments of evidence so in Mary's case I had to do so much poking and prying. In fact of all my subjects I would say she is the one that turned me into a detective I think because if I couldn't write books I think I'd quite like to do a cold case detection because Mary is such an astonishing challenge. So as far as we know she was Mary Grant but there is no extent baptism at birth or close to birth that I could find. No one could find it. People have wasted years of their lives and gone grey trying to find a baptism and as you know children were usually baptized within six months in case they died or whatever. No sign of a baptism and in fact in the course of researching the book I did verify one very important thing about her and that was she was baptized as a Catholic later, much later in life. So with Mary there are so many challenges simply about her identity. And mentioning her father what comes across very clearly in the book is that she's very proud of her Scottish heritage and that is very important you know we'll talk about this later and how she presents herself. So how did you find a father? Did you find candidates? Imagine I mean those of you who've done genealogy will feel the pain. You are faced with trying to find a soldier called Grant. You don't know his first name. You assume he's Grant because she's Mary Grant and she marries. Sometime in the period of around 1805 but the trouble is Mary's date of birth which is now all over the web I have to say and was I think first posted on the National Library of Jamaica website. It's given us the 23rd of November 1805. I have not found any evidence to support that. I've emailed the National Library of Jamaica endlessly. I've asked people in Jamaica people here who can verify that date. Now in genealogy you never accept any date without back up and further evidence. So okay if she was born in 1805 I was looking for a Scottish soldier called Grant in one of the British regiments in Jamaica around 1804-ish for her to be conceived and when you go and look on the lists in the national archives at Q you can quickly eliminate the regiments that weren't in Jamaica and then you're boiling it down basically to the West India regiments and one or two others the 60th, the 85th but of course you're looking for just a grant and even within that there are quite a lot of grants. So people unfortunately in about 2005 someone suggested her father was a James Grant in the 60th and everyone went chasing off down the trail of this James Grant in the 60th and it was even circular and this is the other awful thing about the web you know once someone says this happened and this person was called that it's all over the web without verification it's one of the downsides of doing genealogy now there's so much unverified material out there so everyone went chasing off after James Grant but when I really looked into him closely I had to get through a lot of military papers and they're not easy and I have to thank my dear friend Phil who is an expert in military papers who went to TNA for me because he could make sense of them where I couldn't and finally we discounted him and the thing that really nailed this James Grant as being the wrong father was I found searching on the internet this time because of digitisation digitisation of army records crucial army records that showed that that particular he was not in a battalion that was in Jamaica his battalion was somewhere else I think they were in Guyarn a British Guyarn or somewhere like that so it wasn't till I found the baptism like when I was writing the book I still didn't know who's Mary's father was beyond Grant Scottish and just to be able to name her parents meant a huge amount to me imagine writing the biography as a major subject and not being able to tell your readers the name of the mother or the father and then I would struck lucky because because of COVID of course I couldn't go to Jamaica to do any research and I found a wonderful genealogist in Jamaica who did the research for me and I said look I know Mary was baptized a Catholic as an adult I need to find that baptism it's my only chance of finding her parents names and everyone had thought again this was a misinterpretation that got circulated across the web over the last 15 20 years that Mary for some reason decided to become a Catholic after the Crimean War so everyone had been looking post 1856 for this adult baptism no sign no sign my researcher went she double checked that area where everyone else had been nothing and we were terribly despondent and then she said to me oh God bless her she said I'm not satisfied I wish I could do her Jamaican acts a lovely Jamaican lilt but I can't and she said I'm going back to the Catholic archives and I'm going to look again and she went further back and what was extraordinary was it was sitting there the baptism of Mary Jane Seacole Grant no Grant Seacole no Seacole Grant excuse me she'd reclaimed Grant as her first name 1848 she was baptized Catholic and that made a big difference because it then told me her parents were John and Rebecca and they were both grants but they weren't married so then it gets more and I could go on forever but it got more and more complicated after that and I think that's a real lesson isn't it I mean it's really it's wonderful having the internet to get access to original sources but also the secondary sources on the internet are not always what we might wish them for so that real emphasis on critical thinking and checking our sources is absolutely absolutely crucial isn't it well especially with you see the thing is with Jamaican genealogy there were so many common law relationships in that period between white merchants planters military and naval people and women of color and black women in Jamaica there were virtually no marriages so they were all common law relationships you're not going to find a marriage I didn't find a marriage of Rebecca Grant and John Grant and I know they were not Mr and Mrs she was a grant in her own right because grants the most 16th most common name in Jamaica she well could well have been given the name Grant because her master slave owner or whoever had been a grant um so she was Rebecca Grant in her own right John Grant oh my god how more how how more common the name is that oh I sighed when I found John Grant I thought oh yeah I've got his name but you know Jay grants and John grants in those lists of military for the right period the conception period uh there were a few but I boiled it down to two John grants in the end and I think I found the father but the the frustrating thing about this whole part of the story is if that date of birth is wrong 23rd November 1805 and I can't verify it nobody has then it could be one or other of two John grants but if it's right then it's John Alexander Francis grant of the 85th but again you see you have to constantly hedge your bets where the genealogy is so patchy and I think you know one of the one of the strategies you took was to look at the siblings at Mary's siblings as well to see whether they were half siblings or not to try and try and tease out more in that direction well of course the bit the first thing I I I suspected it and I very quickly discovered it was that Mary had a sister called Louisa who's claimed fame was of course that Anthony Trollup the writer stayed at her lodging house in Kingston in 1859 when he was sent there on post office business and he talked about Louisa Grant the sister of Mrs Segal everyone again went rushing off in the wrong direction assuming first of all Louisa was Mary's full sister which she wasn't and that she had Mary had owned and run and even been born at Blundle Hall which was the lodging house Louisa ran and it all unraveled once I got the parents names and Amory in Jamaica and I started really unraveling the detail and questioning everything guess what I find Rebecca Grant had at least five children all by different men because these were men who came and went in Jamaica at the time it doesn't necessarily mean she was promiscuous they died or they left it just happened that way and Mary came from a quite a classic extended mixed heritage family of the time in in Kingston so Louisa Grant was only half sister and I found another sister which was astonishing I was gobsmacked because no one had ever mentioned this other sister and and we know that the brother Edward because he was in Panama and encouraged Mary to join him there but there were two other brothers who I suspect died young so this is where you think you know it everything you know about your subject and it all unravels and you suddenly got a completely different scenario I can see why you'd be a detective in another life because this is I can see why the book is called in search of Mary I was in search I was absolute I mean it took me on and off 20 years of searching because of course when I first discovered Mary I found it got into her story before I found the portrait I really wanted to write about it but I could see because I was into genealogy and had been for 20 years I could see so many issues so many stumbling blocks so many problems tracking that story so I kind of picked it up and put it down and I had to do other things to earn a living and eventually I got my first trade book in 2007 and thought well I'm damn well going to write about Mary somehow because no one wanted a biography at that time and I did the women in the Crimean War and gave Mary a whole chapter in that and then I kept trying periodically to get interest in a biography and of course the the response I got then ironically oh no one's interested in black history how times change and but I kept trying and kept trying and even you know as recently you know year or two before Simon and sister god bless Simon and sister signed my book people still weren't interested in signing a biography of Mary so I thought I kind of carried on my research and my search as a hobby because I'm not going to be beaten I'm going to find the truth about Mary I'm going to fill in the gaps and of course the big gap is what happened to a daughter and it's ironic isn't it because you know whenever it comes to I used to work in a teaching union and whenever it came to the end of September we'd have all the teachers saying who's black history month what are we going to do have you got anything and it's always Rosa Parks it's always Martin Luther King it's always Mary Seacole and I think you know when she was voted greatest black Britain in 2004 with Patrick Vernon and the amazing work he's done in terms of black history it was really against a backdrop of people not really knowing anything about black British history so I can fully understand that nobody would be interested in that biography but she is just about the only person that our kids get taught about and despite that they're still not interested well that's because quite categorically and I say it in the book it's certainly in the mid-victorian era she was the most famous black woman in the British Empire undoubtedly undoubtedly and then kind of disappeared and for a long time it was pretty fallow I mean until Mary was rediscovered I think probably the best known mixed heritage woman in Britain was Shirley Bassey and no and I love Shirley Bassey I think she's a wonderful woman but you know that was an entertainer and also Winifredat well I think she was Trinidad wasn't she were known figures and of course we come full circle now with Mary to the point where to be honest she's almost too much centre stage too much of the time and I feel we need to uncover the stories of other black people in history because they're certainly two or three other ones I'm really interested in and I don't want people to feel oh it's always Mary Seacole it's too much overkill on her she's a wonderful vibrant extraordinary woman but we need now to bring out the other elements of black history that have slightly been pushed to the edges I think and I think and you mentioned her daughter there again you know of another mystery can you elaborate a little bit on her daughter or not her daughter oh gosh this is an absolute I mean I said in the book is this the genealogist nightmare absolute nightmare in Crimea several accounts of soldiers but notably the French chef Alexis Soy was the key figure he visited Crimea because he was setting up the field kitchens for the British army and he visited Mary at Spring Hill at her establishment Spring Hill I was delighted to discover this beautiful black haired blue-eyed young woman called Sarah who was her daughter and he called her Sally and he teased her and he developed quite a relationship with her as far as Soy was concerned this was Sally Seacole now Mary never denied that she wasn't Sally Seacole I think she went under the name Grant but the fact is that was substantiated because for a long time people said oh no he just thought she was her daughter she was well what was she doing in Crimea a 14 15-year-old girl with Mary Seacole anyway other one when I searched through all the many many collections of diaries letters accounts Crimean War I found three or four other sources that talked of Mrs Seacole's daughter being with her now the only other person who really substantiates the presence of Sally is Florence Nightingale because after the war in private conversation this was never made public and it you know it private conversation with her sister Parthenope when she was expressing her antipathy towards Mary for running you know for selling alcohol and being you know out of her control basically she said she had a daughter with her aged about 15 the daughter of Colonel Bumbary now yeah Bumbary in Oscar Wilde's Bumbary but it's not um and okay Bumbary that's a bit more of an unusual name say Grant or and but again people have gone off after the wrong Bumbary I searched and searched and searched it's an Irish quite a well-known Irish family name from Cranovan Cranovan I'm not quite sure how you pronounce it um I I found the best candidate a Colonel Thomas Bumbary of the 60th another 60th were in and out of Jamaica he was all over the west Indies at various times in his career but he was not there at the crucial conception period of 1804 to 5 unless you see this is way you have to make his constant leaps and think well it could possibly have happened I mean he was down in the down at not st. Lucia one of the islands right down lower in the Caribbean the leeward islands no um anyway he was briefly governor uh down in that area and now the only way he could have done the deed as it was this Colonel Bumbary is to travel to Jamaica but what is it interesting about Colonel Thomas Bumbary is that he definitely knew Mary and again there's testimony that he she nursed him because in the 1840s and it's too late to be Sally's father by then in the 1840s Colonel Bumbary was promoted to lighthead of the British Army in the west Indies and actually did go out there and with his son Stonehouse wonderful name Stonehouse Bumbary you wouldn't have any difficulty finding him would you um they both went to Jamaica and both fell very sick almost the minute they arrived I mean yellow fever or cholera Mary nursed them both I know it I've got the testimony so she certainly knew this Colonel Bumbary I'm weirdly fast forward he died in 57 just after Mary got back from Crimean War he's buried in St Mary's Roman Catholic cemetery I can't screen about 100 yards away from Mary but I cannot prove how he was conceived how he conceived Mary's child and the other thing of course that kind of gets glossed over in all this if Sally Seacole Sally Grant or what I think she went by the name of Grant um if she was actually 15-ish when she went to Crimea 55 she was born around 1841 maybe uh so she was conceived 3940 but I just can't nail it I just can't nail who it could have been apart from this one candidate that's fascinating isn't it we don't think as historians that we're assigning parentage to people or not as the case may be it's very powerful but what's so heartbreaking about Sally is that she completely disappears people talk you know like I say several soldiers talk about going over to Mississippi because sitting down and talking about the West Indies and having a lovely time because of course a lot of the troops in Crimea had no Mary in the West Indies that's why she went there because she went to look after her sons and people talk about Sally and then there's the Armistice everyone goes home and Sally vanishes because of course when Mary sat down to write her memoir her brief memoir it's not an autobiography it only covers about five years um she couldn't possibly tell her straight-laced white Victorian audience who she was writing it for to get herself out of debt that she had an illegitimate daughter by an English army officer I mean so Sally is totally erased from the record and I think God how tragic is that to have to deny the presence of your own child in your life but I think how Sally was hiding in plain sight and was in London for a while with Mary certainly I don't think she went anywhere else where could she go a single mixed heritage young woman she's better to stay protected by her mother you know and certainly I think she probably did live with her for a while but she's vanished without trace and it breaks my heart not knowing what happened to her there might be descendants she might have married and had children I don't know I know nothing at all about her and it's not helped by the fact I can't be certain what name she went under if she was Sarah Grant that's another extraordinarily common name oh you're up to it Helen you are up to it I am you know everywhere you go with Mary's say called brick wall brick wall brick wall that's why it took 20 years it really is a labour of love isn't it I mean you mentioned Florence Nightingale and we can't we can't let this conversation go without um without further exploration of the relationship or not between Florence and Mary can I stop I think I do wish people would stop saying it was a rivalry that is our modern construct it's an entirely 21st century imposition you've got to remember Florence was at Scutari Mary went to the Crimean Peninsula she stopped off briefly on route to pay her respects the other misnomer is Mary went to volunteer to Florence was she'd already been turned down by Florence's recruiters in London no she went to pay her respects at Scutari she had no intention of wanting to nurse at Scutari she made it very clear I want to be at the front where my sons are I want to be there you know near not on the battlefield she was nowhere near the battlefield you know the front lines were a couple of miles further up but she wanted to do her bit there so Florence operated in a completely different sphere she was lady superintendent all the nurses the British official nurses Mary was complete one-off maverick doing her own thing on Crimea and during her memoir in two or three places she specifically talks to um people like Soya Alex's Soya Singh oh well if you see Miss Nightingale when you go back through Scutari please send her my regards she thought very highly she was always respectful of Florence um but in reverse when Florence Nightingale came to Crimea early in 55 to inspect the small hospitals there she fell sick she was very sick Mary heard and offered to go and nurse Florence's response was no she'll only try and quack me that pretty much sums up Nightingale's attitude to Mary because she was a holistic healer alternative kind of practitioner Florence wanted no truck with Mary and her herbal symbols or whatever you know treatments she offered and Mary was too much of a free wheeler um that she couldn't control so I hate to say and I admire Florence Nightingale and I don't want anyone taking away from Florence Nightingale's credit as the founder of British women's nursing because she was you know she set up nurses training she wrote the learned manuals and all that but the fact remains that there was an antipathy towards Mary on Florence's side for various political social reason whatever you want to call them whereas Mary genuinely held Florence in high regard so they weren't rivals Mary never considered herself as a nursing rival to Florence it's an absurd thing to to say or to try and argue she didn't set up nurses training she didn't write learned books or pamphlets about her nursing practice you can't claim things for Mary that didn't exist but it doesn't take away from what a wonderful person she was so what was she for those who aren't as familiar with with Mary what was she offering when she was there at Crimea well first of all again then there are myths that need to be busted like you know if I'm sorry to say this but there's some really misinformed key stage two stuff which says she built a hospital or she carried wounded soldiers from the battlefield well hang on a minute all the battles were at the previous autumn Balaclava, Incomon and Alma were all over Mary was not there galloping around the front lines like a Victorian paramedic what it just didn't happen we got to get away from these fantasies and see the real woman because the real woman's so much more interesting and authentic so what Mary did she knew the only way she could get herself to Crimea and make enough money to do help the troops and offer her services to set up shop with the one skill she had she was a terrific entrepreneur she was a cook she'd run a boarding house so she set up um what she grandly called the British hotel it wasn't a hotel it was not a hotel she didn't have resident you know soldiers lying groaning on their beds of pain there no that just didn't happen it was a kind of glorified storehouse come office's club but what she did there because word got out that mrs sequel had such skill in nursing enteric disease dysentery cholera she could you know she could stitch a wound she could extract a bullet she dealt with a lot of cases of hypothermia because she had these wonderful skills and years years of experience everyone told everyone else well if you want a dose of stuff for your your you know for your cholera or your dysentery go to mrs sequel and very quickly the men who were based around her establishment at spring hill the land transport corps the army work corps beat a path to her door when they were sick or injured and they had lots of kind of industrial accidents because they were building the roads and you know the railway and stuff they would go to Mary's because every morning you know she'd get up at seven she'd be plucking chickens and making the breakfast long before people started arriving um she would have a kind of drop-in clinic where all the sick and wounded or anyone who needed her help went and she would give them a dose of her medicine or bandage or wound or offer sucker or comfort or help there were accidents with the lta the wounded would be brought to her one terrible accident in particular I mentioned in my book so she had this kind of clinic I don't know how you would describe it it wasn't a hospital and she funded it essentially by you know selling selling food and wine and catering to the officers who could afford to pay or rather who didn't pay her but ran up colossal bills as did the foreign correspondence the war correspondence and everybody else which is why she was bankrupted at the end of the war I've always thought that if I were a soldier and I were on my deathbed I'd rather have been at Mary's oh the florist nightingale absolutely you see the wonderful thing about Mary and I think this is where she inspires it's not about oh she didn't she didn't write books and treatises or even publish her herbal remedies she was a nurse practitioner she would sit by the bedside and hold the hand and mop the fevered brow and I can't emphasise enough her wonderful mothering of the sick and wounded that it was that presence that the troops gravitated towards this love of her men in the British army and the navy because the naval brigade was there as well or anyone you know who came and needed her help because there's descriptions of her going down on the battlefield for the the battle of the Cherniah was a small engagement in august just august 55 with between the russians and the sardinians actually mainly and Mary went down on the battlefield and was seen helping the russian wounded and you can imagine their eyes was on stalks who was this extraordinary woman so she didn't choose who she helped she would help anyone who needed her and that's where I find her inspiration and it's this wonderful warmth and humanity and caregiving instinct but that's why they all called her mother's sequel and the one thing that Florence Nightingale was furious about was that she had already nominated herself as mother of the army and there's missy sequel not calling herself mother sequel but the soldiers all referred to her as mother sequel and so she kind of hijacked Florence's title but she never consciously ever as I and I have searched ever in any way try to undermine Florence or what Florence did for Nightingale she always admired her and I think it's really important isn't it to remember that so many of these relationships are placed as a rivalry as you were saying but it doesn't have to be you know it can be and it doesn't have to be either or it can be and two very different women so I want to expunge that word rivalry from any discussion of Mary and Florence because it's just not right it's like um people love saying oh she was the black Florence Nightingale no she was not she was wasn't the black Florence Nightingale any more than Florence Nightingale was the white Mary sequel quite different women quite different like disciplines concepts of what nursing involved and I think we need to appreciate them in their own rights this equals but very different instead of constantly trying trying to find ways to say well she was better than her or she was you know she did this she did that no they did quite different things and they operated in such different spheres it sounds like a lazy history examiner's question doesn't it and speaking of questions we already have a question in online from the wonderful Bandit Queen as ever um so just a reminder that we will have questions after this if you're online please do put your questions in otherwise if you're in the audience start thinking about your questions as well please I mean the wonderful thing about Mary as well is that she really gets around she's in Panama she comes to London obviously she's in Crimea can you talk a little bit about her entrepreneurship as he as he mentioned yeah I think I think I worked out that she must have sailed the Atlantic at least nine times and that's in the old sailing ships okay then then the early screw steamers which were coming in by the you know the 40s and 50s she thought nothing of hopping on a ship and going nine you know right up to Cuba hey she Bahamas in her youth she travelled around the Caribbean as an entrepreneur she bought and sold she also with when she was in Kingston exploited the natural herbal richness of Jamaica making pickles and jams and again selling them and I think that's what brought her to England in the 1820s again incredibly early she came with her goods to try and set up deal deals I think with the oil and Italian warehouses which were all over the city of London who dealt in pickles and spices and import and export of those kind of things so she was incredibly enterprising she thought nothing of hopping on a ship anywhere to go anywhere and then there she is in 1851 late 1851 hops on a ship to go to Panama now Panama then was like the wild west what was happening was the gold rush of 1848 round in the Sierra where the Sierra Nevada in California had sent everyone in America crazy to get out to go gold prospecting but they were faced with that incredible wagon train journey right across America which would have been extremely arduous and probably quite dangerous or taking a shortcut going down to the Panama isthmus the 50 miles down the isthmus and then getting a ship round up to California that way so they were all cutting across the isthmus but it was absolutely gun law there it was really dangerous there was hardly any infrastructure they just started building a railway line down the isthmus which had attracted a lot of Jamaican labour a lot of the men went out there from Jamaica to get work Mary went there as an entrepreneur because her brother had gone set up sort of ramshackle restaurants I wouldn't call them hotels I mean the hotels in Panama were like tents really that's all they were but she was incredibly intrepid and she talks about us getting going down to get to Cruces where she set herself up having to get in a bongo boat in a crinoline and a bonnet you know with all her luggage and I just think she's phenomenal and intrepid is the only word I can think of to describe that so she was well travelled even by time crime Ian war broke out and then of course she was in Panama when she knew the war broke out she gets on the boat Panama England England Constantine Opel as another god knows how many that's 6000 miles I don't know she thought nothing of it and I think you know again we have to remember at this time she was a woman who is of mixed heritage a woman you know one of the things that you know one of the small things I love love among many in your book is that when the times reports that a hotel has been set up by Mrs Seacole and then the rest of the journalists just amend that mrs to mr to mr because I can't believe a woman could do that no no I mean if she bucked every social convention of race colour you know her sex you name it Mary just did things the way she wanted to do them nothing would stop her short of becoming sick or incapacitated does what such an amazing woman I mean the more I mean I I thought I knew a bit about Mary Seacole but then I read this book and was just absolutely blown away because you know we do as you say there are so many myths so many misconceptions and I think you know one of the key things where I which I think has obviously fed into these misconceptions has been her wonderful adventure of mrs Seacole in many lands so which as you said people have taken as an autobiography now you know we all know if we're writing about ourselves you know we might just gloss over some of the bits we don't like or you know big ourselves up a little bit and actually we were talking about this yesterday when we were talking about one of the dudleys when they were about to you know if you're facing the block or you're making a confession you're gonna mitigate you're gonna have a different different version of your different version of yourself sorry it was Lady Jane Gray wasn't it and what she was writing when she was about to face death and saying well it wasn't my fault I didn't want to be queen this sort of thing so how'd you go about untangling it yeah it's the first principle of biography is never ever trust to what your subject says about themselves they are always economical with the truth I doesn't mean they're lying I mean Mary is horribly economical with the truth as I say in the book if you look at her memoir she um she describes her first 45 years and about two and a half pages she doesn't even tell us the name of her parents and what's what's really interesting um is okay she says she married Mr Seacole she doesn't tell her audience he's white and I think probably victorian audience assume Mr Seacole was black but no I mean she leaves so much out she totally airbrushes out her daughter so the thing with the memoir wonderful adventures of Mary Seacole in many lines is an extraordinary vivid idiosyncratic witty moving account of a black woman seeing war firsthand it's a wonderful book but it when you boil it down apart from the first two and a half pages that take her to the age of 45 it doesn't really begin until she goes to Panama in the end autumn 1851 and it ends when she gets off the boat back in England in 1856 so it's it's not please don't call it an autobiography it just isn't and and at that point she wrote that very deliberately to get herself out of debt and also to lay claim to her legacy as a crime in war heroine because she did she was not modest about that she knew she'd done good and she felt she wanted to make her mark and tell the world about what she'd done then but unfortunately then what you're left with another after 1856 you're left with another 25 years of her life to fill in and she didn't write again about herself or her life or publish anything at all and this is the worst of it of course there's no paper trail with Mary when when you're researching biography night most people have got archives they've got family letters they've got journals they've got photograph albums you name it there are archival sources left right and center the astonishing thing with Mary it says no paper trail she had a collection of all her letters of thanks and testimonials that were sent to her for her nursing over the years but particularly in Crimea us to gone you know in the dustbin when she died where all her herbal remedies all her receipts all her recipes nothing um of her correspondence there are only two two manuscript letters by Mary survived Florence Nightingale left 14 000 letters there's no comparison so with Mary you haven't got that personal archive you haven't even got a tangential archive the only real archive you have are the newspapers and magazines and the memoirs of the Crimean War the letters and diaries of people who went to Crimea so that means whether I liked it or not the focus of her life is those five years because that's the best documented part but it's only thanks to digitisation that I've been able to fill in a lot more gaps searching the the newspapers are just how I did anything before newspapers went well I know I know how I did it I can remember you know bound volumes of the time sitting in the Bodleian library you know searching that teeny when you print you go blind looking and people don't know how lucky they are now to have that all at a fingertip it's transformed history writing it's transformed biography I'm sure so that has made a massive difference in terms I think probably that's why it took me 20 years because when I started the internet age was just beginning and the first few things were being digitised you know then but since so much more has become available that hasn't made it possible possible for me to fill in many of the gaps that I could never have filled in otherwise and I suppose we hope really that somewhere there's a collection of her papers and that they weren't just put in the bin that somebody out there has a collection am I am I being too optimistic there is there any possibility the one thing I do hope is somewhere sitting in family papers are odd letters from Mary she clearly kept in touch with a lot of the Crimean veterans she wrote them but of course the thing that annoys me infuriates me there's nothing in the royal archives and Count Glychan who did that wonderful terracotta bust um the Duke of Cambridge Prince Edward of Saxe Weimar um Count Glychan himself several the royals were her patrons several of the top military top brass were her patrons and supported the funds for her after the war it was was ended several of them I think consulted her privately for her holistic skills I've tried and tried looking for their archives to see if there are any mention of Mary there's just nothing it's like she's been written out of the the royal record and of course the one thing I did many years ago because it annoyed me like fury why didn't Queen Victoria ask her to tea the first thing she did when she heard Florence Nightingale was back from Crimea and Victoria was up at Balmoral at the time she heard Florence was visiting um Dr Greta um Dr Clark Queen Victoria's personal position who lived near had at Burke Hall nearby she demanded Florence Nightingale go to tea and tell her all about the Crimean War anyone coming back from the war had to go and you know have tea with the queen and tell her all about it she was absolutely voracious in her demand to hear stories and yet why didn't she ask Mrs Segal to tea because she did invite other black people to meet her she took in Sarah Sarah Forbes Bonetta in 1851 the little um girl from um that no well where is your where is it anyway I can't remember sorry I took in the little girl who's gifted to her by an African King Kingaso of Dachamay sorry I forgot she invited the only black exhibitor at the 1851 great exhibition Josiah Henson who was the model for Uncle Tom in Uncle Tom's cabin she invited him to the palace she invited Mrs Ricks an old black lady who made a beautiful quilt and presented it to her she had a fascination with her black and Asian subjects but I can't believe that Queen the Queen was not gagging to meet Mary Segal and why didn't she meet her because Florence told her no you can't do that you know inappropriate behaviour oh she sold alcohol in the crime she may have even told Queen Vic oh you know that she had an illegitimate child which would have been anathema I guess just too improper I don't know but I just it doesn't for everything I know about Queen Victoria and I've studied her on and off for a long time as well doesn't make sense that she didn't meet Mrs Segal so it shows you there was a kind of conspiracy which meant that there's no paper trail there's nothing in Queen Victoria's journals hundred volumes of journals not a mention of Mrs Segal's exploit it doesn't make sense well I'm afraid I blame that on Beatrice who transcribed them and then torched them unvery but then who else has been edited out of Queen Victoria's journals lots of people lots of people and it's it's as important to know what isn't there oh yeah but you can kind of guess what isn't there yeah because you know Beatrice was very judgmental when she transcribed and like you know you can see her sort of anonymising the Scottish servants or cutting them out all together and I'm sure she probably took some more controversial stuff about John Brown out of the Queen's journals it's just well I think it's a tragedy but then I'm just jolly grateful that we have what we have because Victoria is such an important source for the 19th century so coming now to the end of Mary Segal those I think he said 25 years when we don't know anything about her she's falling into debt people are trying to raise money for her they have they hold an event for her but the money mysteriously disappears so how how does she end her life well um she I think but again this makes it so frustrating because I can't prove a lot of things but it what I write in the book is based in on valued judgments I don't like to say I'm guessing I'm not guessing it's valued judgments of what to know about her and her life and everything but I'm pretty sure after she came back from the war it's very interesting apart from the fundraising that was done when she to get her out of bankruptcy because she was straight into the bankruptcy court I think because she was female she couldn't train as a nurse she couldn't practice as or train as a doctor of course women weren't allowed to she certainly couldn't publicly practice as a holistic kind of practitioner I think she had a privately intel amongst the royalty and our and top brass military because the really interesting thing and I have a whole chapter of it here is that um at the time the homeopathic movement was gathering ground in London late 1850s the Hanaman homeopathic hospital was opened and Mary was not a homeopath I hasten to add she she was a kind of holistic practitioner but I think what is so interesting is a lot of the British Royals patronised homeopathy as did Lord Rokeby who was her almost her lead patron one of the top brass from the war and various other people it who supported the sick or funds I think she developed privately until who went to her for her collar appeals or whatever medicines and the most interesting thing but again the royal archives are totally silent I am convinced that she treated Princess Alexandra the Princess of Wales for her very painful knee but of course Alexandra left instructions all her papers should be destroyed when she died so I can't prove it but I'm pretty sure because Alexandra and Bertie were interested in homeopathy their relatives were the Duke of Cambridge and various other people I'm sure they recommended Mary to Alexandra for massage she went and gave her her massage treatment and so for a while I think she carried on operating privately then she went back to Jamaica once or twice she went back to Panama briefly and tried to set up shop again she never stopped you know if she ran out of money she tried well what can I do next get on a ship go back to Panama in uh 80 60 and extraordinarily there she is in Panama back in Panama City this time setting up shop and guess who should meet her but Richard Burton the famous Richard Burton the traveller and his wife who were passing he he was passing through on his travels to the Rockies or somewhere so there is there are eyewitness I found some great eyewitnesses of Mary going back to Panama she went to Jamaica to sort out her sister run into trouble running Blundle Hall and had to give it up in the end she bought a couple of little properties in Kingston but interestingly I think her last trip to Jamaica was around uh she came back around the 74 75 1870 and into almost total obscurity for the last few years of her life and died in Paddington in rented rooms in 1881 and she's buried she's buried at St Mary's Council Green she's specifically asked to be buried as a Catholic interesting because Colonel Thomas Bumbry as I said and there's a picture in the book I found his grave I had to really search for it anyone who's done genealogy knows the fun of searching graveyards we love graveyards oh my goodness I'm so thrilled I found it it was only a very flat tomb completely unauthentitious but what was so extraordinary was it Mary's is almost 100 200 yards away was she buried there because of Bumbry is that coincidence I just I just tried to be nuts that can't find Sally I you know I want to know what happened to that that lovely charming girl because the descriptions of her by by Alexis Sawyer are so sweet well there's so many mysteries that have been opened up and fortunately our online audience have come up with the questions that I absolutely wanted to ask but didn't have time so fantastic um but I'm going to turn first to our audience in person here are there any questions here yes this lady in the middle please the lady in the middle with the fetching cap very sorry I should say very thank you so much for telling us about Mary Segal first of all she sounds like a typical Sagittarian so please well she is someone tell me 23rd November is correct I just don't change that date please also where did she learn her herbal remedies was it her mother oh yeah this mentioned her mother well we know very little um yes and I'm sure that her daughter destroyed the vital things like Beatrice you know Queen Victoria and I don't know sounds very typical I don't know because I when Mary died there's no mention of her daughter in her will and I was told by a Jamaican professor that they never mentioned their illegitimate children in their wills I think what happened was Sarah Kent who was the wife of Mary's white nephew William Kent probably cleared the house and thought oh no one wants this in the bin in the bin so so tragic it's it's just very difficult I grew up in Jamaica so I have a very yeah oh right thank you very much um we're going to bandit queen as we always do I just love saying that so she says why do you think we've been taught so much about Florence Nightingale rather than Mary Seacole where Mary is so much more interesting controversial and was so popular amongst the soldiers she took great care of was she excluded from history because of her race and mixed heritage uh I don't think so actually to a certain extent but not completely the weight of evidence on Florence is enormous I've talked about her legacy 14 000 letters she's written on you know notes on nursing's never gone out of print endless bio I don't know when our last count is about 20 biographies it's obvious the weight of evidence evidence is going to be on her I think the real issue with Mary's story not persisting after her death obviously changing attitudes to race come into it I'm not going to deny that one has to remember because she had no written archive because there was a daughter who we don't know what happened to there was no one to carry on her legacy to preserve her legacy to continue it there weren't letters and journals and and recipe books or whatever to be published and said so in the case of Mary Seacole her legacy was largely oral and it lived on in the memories of the veterans the soldiers who'd known her in Crimea who talked about her and remembered her with such warmth I I can't emphasise enough the wonderfully warm accounts of Mary the recall of her and it went on for a while and one or two Christian publishers published accounts of her Mary briefly but as such I think as the veterans died the memory of Mary receded and receded and was lost because the white Victorian establishment was obviously not going to be interested in mixed heritage heroes at that time and we had to wait a century for attitudes to begin to change and it's far too long in Jamaica they began rediscovering Mary it there was a flurry of interest in the 1930s but the first real mention for again came a century later when they celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Crimean War and then people said oh why don't we we think more about this wonderful good Jamaican perfect example of a good loyal colonial subject doing their bit for for the empire and that was where a kind of a degree of interest was revived but it took really until the rise of feminism and an interest the booming interest in black history for her really really to be rediscovered properly thank you another question from the audience that you had your hand up if you can thank you Helen for a very interesting talk could you say something about how Jamaica and Jamaicans feel about the way that British people have slightly stolen um Mary Seacour I mean calling her the greatest black Britain yeah I mean how how do Jamaicans feel about that well I don't personally know because I've yet to go because I was supported by Covid I think that is a very interesting point because I often feel in a way we've hijacked her from the Jamaican people and the Jamaican people are intensely proud of Mary but they haven't had the resources or the money or all the infrastructure to really promote her in the same way we have in Britain and now that they've latched on to the 23rd of November whether or not it's right they now have created that as Mary Seacour day and it's they're going to be their annual celebration of Mary and I think that's really really important to them because I think they really feel they want to have more claim to Mary as their heroine their national heroine and the other thing of course the biggest irony of it all and you'll find it if you read Mary's memoir she would never have referred to herself as black ever she didn't consider herself to be black she actually in Jamaican uh kind of terminology was brown which is a woman of colour Mary considered herself um you know cut above being black and that's a huge irony of her her story in her situation because in order to get on in the world she knew she had to aspire to get on in white Victorian society and in order to do that to a certain extent she had to downplay her blackness now some people feel that is the downside of Mary but she was only operating within the constraints and attitudes of her times and I think we have to if we're going to evaluate that we have to evaluate it within the terms of the 1850s when she was writing this book for white Victorian public consumption you know um but I think the Jamaicans definitely want to create uh their own claim and make more of their own claim on Mary they have named public buildings after they've now got their national day I hope I might be able to go over for it I really hope and pray they've asked me to go and I hope I can um and you know they want they want to claim Mary back to a certain extent I think and I think that is a complex issue isn't it because yeah there was so much colourism and there still is you know it has always been perceived as better and more advantageous to be lighter yes and in terms of Jamaica and the Caribbean at that point you know they were part of the British Empire and as we know from the whole Windrush scandal people saw themselves as British she called herself English father exactly she in the box says I am an English woman because she in in her sense of English she meant British of course in in how we were but she was a British loyal British patriot and subject and so she and she was deeply proud of being Scottish and it's almost as though she plays up the Scottishness and the white side of her ancestry um more than she does her natural heritage which we don't know fully except probably came from enslaved people on to the second question which is the question that I really wanted to put but it was such a fascinating conversation that I completely forgot to ask this but thank you very much to Claire Thomas um who says can you tell us more about the portrait of Mary and how it was painted what it tells about her and are there other are there any other images of her oh gosh we need another hour sorry um this portrait well first of all I think it's astonishing that this was painted in 1869 it's very modernistic impressionistic but what is so incredibly striking about it first of all the young man who painted this was about 22 when he painted it but this is such a powerful proud image of a black woman in her own right I mean Mary is not taking any prisoners in this image she's saying I am a British patriot I'm a crimean war hero and you know she's got the medals on and a woman absolutely fully assured of her place in history and I think it's quite an astonishing painting and what is even more astonishing was it turned up in a boot sale uh and it's quite a long and involved account I can't do it now because it would take me too long but fundamentally um it someone a dealer I never found out who he was was rummaging through a boxel of assorted pictures and prints all Victorian pictures and prints at a posh boot sale in Berford in Oxfordshire and he found what he thought was quite an interesting framed print and he bought it I don't even know what he played for it and took it home and the back of the frame was wood and on it it had written a c challon and he thought oh that's a bit odd he opened the frame now if he hadn't done that we'd never have had this because he opened it and Mary was facing inward covered covered by this cheap print or whatever it was someone at some point had discarded her and thought oh we don't want that person on the wall anymore we'll cover it up now of course this sent me down endless rabbit holes then trying to find the artist a c challon but what was amazing about it was that there is no other known painting by Albert Charles Challon anywhere I've yet to find any mention of him in any source the whole of the Heinz archive at national portrait gallery couldn't couldn't find a single word on him but what I did do of course within two weeks of getting hold it takes too long to describe how I got hold of it but I did by various means I took it in the national portrait gallery it was x-ray pigment test the whole thing and they said to me what's really important about this picture is if it was actually painted in 69 it's contemporaneous and not posthumous and that was so integral to really its importance but what's so interesting of course is I discovered it was submitted to the first summer exhibition of the royal academy and was turned down of course and trying to figure out what happened to that painting but I've come to the conclusion after over 20 years working on this that Mary never owned a picture and it stayed within Albert Charles Challon's family because when I did all the genealogy for his family what was so poignant was I discovered that Albert Charles Challon died three months after Mary of TB and he was only 32 so he'd never had a career I can't believe there are no other paintings of by him somewhere out there but as yet nothing's come turned up so it's kind of I think it's a really touching coda that that painting was painted by him why how did he know Mary I just don't know but I have figured out that it stayed I'm sure with his eldest unmarried sister Matilda who lived for many many years out at East Hendred which is now Oxfordshire and her unmarried niece Dora went to live with her and I think they probably had material relating to Mary's sequel because it was a letter Mary wrote to miss Matilda Challon that confirmed about it being submitted to the royal academy and what happened well Matilda died 43 Dora died 67 and I tracked someone related to the Challons when she died what happens when people die when there's no close family a relative goes in and dumps it all in the skip and you know what wasn't saleable I suspect there were letters from between Mary and Matilda Challon that got dumped but somewhere I think in that house in East Hendred this painting was there on the wall hidden and who'd hidden it and when and why and then it ended up in birford dinner boots sale but you know I don't know how I had it in between oh god that's another puzzle I'll never solve sorry and one more question from the audience please yes and just a comment I wonder how you feel about it I was as you know researching my London sherry blossom book and went to the cherry to the Chelsea flower show last year and there was a Florence 19 gail garden well there is a Mary Seacole one I think they've been built isn't there there's I'm sure there's because I was yeah I've heard about it there's a Mary Seacole garden somewhere I'm sorry I can't remember the details I'm sure there is I'm really glad to hear that because yeah nothing is Jane I'll try and trick it out and send you an email I'm sure there is a Mary Seacole garden yeah thank you and thank you for your passion well thank you well once you start going down the road trying to chase Mary you get a bit passionate about it you probably get infuriated as well trying to fill in the gaps and I think finally one more question from online from I'm going to mispronounce this is it Moira or Moira sorry in advance because I hate it when people get my name wrong McClintock what do you think is the biggest impact Mary Seacole had on the world of medicine stroke nursing she didn't have an impact in terms of the techniques or practicalities and nursing we have to accept that you know she didn't produce any learned tomes about the practice of nursing or nurses training I think her impact absolutely is as a figure of inspiration as a role model for other nurses and care workers about the whole importance of hand hands on patient by the bedside care Florence is very good at all the practicalities and you know stand by your beds with your caps on and all very stiff and starchy and very well drilled side of nursing that kind of practice which is fading now I think but Mary is all about the patient patient care being there caring loving mothering I think that is really her where she's so inspirational in that sense I think you're right and I I come from quite well my my aunts and my father and and many of my family from Barbados went into the nursing profession and of course there are so many nurses here in the UK and around the world who've come from the West Indies who will have seen her also as an inspirational figure to see a black woman nursing so I think that's you know there's a there's a broader sort of inspiration there not just to us now but also to the nursing profession in general to sort of say yes you know nursing is for everybody so yes absolutely absolutely and the saddest thing of all was there were one or two very enlightened British military doctors in the earths early as the 1840s out in the West Indies who recognised the wonderful gift that the Jamaican and other West Indian nurses had their wonderful skills and who tried to push for them to be used more because they have precisely what was needed in that war and I think it's such a shame that those wonderful skills were never recognised by the British army or indeed the British establishment establishment and made use of well thank you to everybody for your questions everybody online and everybody in the audience as well but an even bigger thank you to Helen it's been an absolute pleasure and I thank you so much a lot as I'm sure everybody has thank you