Mary Seacole

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts Hello, and welcome to Homeschool Histories.

Greg Jenner (0:10)

I'm Greg Jenner, the historian behind TV's Horrible Histories, and the host of the BBC Radio 4 podcast, You're Dead To Me. I'm here to deliver a snappy history lesson to entertain and educate the whole family, who says that homeschooling can't be fun. And today, we are going back to the 19th century to meet an extraordinary woman who traveled the world, all whilst helping the sick and injured, it's the marvellous Mary Seacole. Mary was born Mary Grant in 1805 on the Caribbean island of Jamaica, which at the time was a British colony. It would have been jam-packed with soldiers and sailors.

Mary's dad was a Scottish army officer called James Grant. Sadly, we don't know Mary's mum's name, but we know that she was a mixed-race Jamaican woman who owned a hotel in King's Town called Blundell Hall. Mary also had a sister, Louisa, and a half-brother, Edward. Blundell Hall was considered one of the best hotels in Jamaica's capital, Kingston. Mary was fascinated by healing. Her mum was known as a doctress, meaning she practiced traditional African and Jamaican herbal medicine. And when she was a little girl, Mary practiced her healing skills on her dolls. She said there was no disease in Kingston that her poor dollies didn't catch at some point.

But it wasn't all make-believe. Some of the British officers staying in Mary's mum's hotel caught nasty diseases such as yellow fever, so Mary would have seen some very poorly people. And growing up, Mary was also supported by a wealthy woman who was a bit like a grandmother to her. She gave Mary an education, while Mary's mum showed her how to run a hotel business. Mary visited London twice as a teenager, and in those days, the journey from Jamaica to Britain took at least six weeks by boat. Bad luck if you got easily seasick. And that wasn't the only thing that Mary had to worry about. She was a young mixed-race woman and she later wrote that her Jamaican friends got bullied in London for the colour of their skin. Horrible. The second time Mary went to London, she travelled alone as a businesswoman.

Well okay, business not quite woman. Business teenager. Yeah, probably something like that. Anyway, she was selling Caribbean pickles and preserves. Mary then returned to Jamaica to work at Blundell Hall. When she was 31, she married a white English merchant called Edwin Horatio Hamilton Seacole. Great name. This was quite unusual at the time as mixed-race marriages were not common in Jamaica. Mary and her new hubby opened a shop.

But sadly, the business did not go well.

So back they went to Blundell Hall, and this was when things went really bad for Mary. In 1843, Blundell Hall burned down, and the year after, both Mary's husband and mother tragically died.

Poor Mary had to pick herself back up and rebuild Blundell Hall, which she imaginatively renamed New Blundell Hall. Yeah, fair enough. After Edwin died, Mary got plenty of blokes asking to marry her, but she turned them all down. In 1850, there was an outbreak of a terrible disease called cholera. Once that was over, Mary was in her mid-forties, and she decided to go travelling again, but not to London. No, she headed to Panama in Central America.

She went there to help her half-brother, Edward, with his new hotel, but when Mary arrived, the hotel was at total shambles.

Mary and her maid had to sleep under the dining room table, and Edward and the other staff had to sleep on top of it. Come on, people, it's a table, not a bunk bed. One night, a guest suddenly dropped down dead. Mary examined the body, and she soon discovered it was the dreaded cholera again. Mary bravely stepped up to help people as the disease spread, not least because the only other medically trained person in town was described by Mary as a timid little dentist. Rich people paid Mary for her herbal remedies, but she treated poor people for free. Nice one, Mary. Without modern medicine, some people died, and Mary didn't always know how best to treat people with cholera, but she did her best, and she probably saved some lives. Indeed, people really appreciated what she'd done for them, although some of them had a slightly funny way of showing it. Mary wrote that one American guy said she was great, but it was a pity she wasn't white-skinned or American so that more people paid respect to her.

SPEAKER_3 (4:42)

Rude.

Greg Jenner (4:43)

Mary responded by saying she was proud of her darker skin, and if all Americans were as rude as he was, then she wasn't missing out on much, was she? You tell him, Mary. While Mary was trying to save her patients, she caught cholera. Luckily, she recovered, and she felt that the experience helped her better understand how to care for the patients. When the cholera crisis was over, Mary opened her own restaurant in Panama called the British Hotel.