Yet the river flows on

Last autumn I first became aware that there were all sorts of works going on down by the river, but I had thought they were more or less finished at that point. I was wrong. By this spring they had done even more.

I was taken aback to see just how far they had gone.  Compare this view of the old mill with the one I showed 18 months ago.

From the bridge it was easier to see the full extent.

In this direction it looked like complete devastation.

It now becomes obvious what it was they were doing to the banks, why there were double rows of wooden stakes.  They have planted between these stakes ...

... alternating willow, looking like an English laid hedge ...

... with rushes.

I still don't know what they plan for the mill itself.  The crack in that wall seems wider than ever, with blue sky clearly visible through it.

It's such a shame that this historic building is falling down.  It dates from the 13th century and has passed through various transformations.  It was a mill for making cloth for the local shirt industry before making electricity, allowing for street lighting before any other towns nearby.  I suspect, though, it will be allowed to disintegrate quietly.  The signs all around clearly say "Keep out". In French of course.

Mary Seacole

I think almost everyone will have heard of Florence Nightingale, born in Florence to a wealthy British family.  She rebelled against the expected path for a well-born young lady and decided to enter nursing.  Her work led to significant improvements in medical care but her most her most well-known effort was in the Crimean War when in 1854 she took volunteer nurses to the main British camp.

By improving the conditions for the medical care of patients, she drastically lowered the death rate amongst the soldiers.  Her family home was Embley Park (now a private school) near the New Forest so she is often thought of as a local here in Hampshire. 

As I was wandering around some of my favourite parts of Winchester the other day, I went into a shop near Winchester College, one of England's oldest public schools, and there I found some postcards of a Crimean War nurse but not Florence Nightingale.

The nurse pictured on the postcard is Mary Seacole who, unlike Nightingale, is hardly known at all.  Yet her contribution to the Crimean War was very similar and, because of her background, possibly even more remarkable.

Born Mary Jane Grant in Jamaica of a Scottish father and a Jamaican mother, she learnt about herbal remedies and nursing from her mother who she described as "an admirable doctress".  By the age of 12 she was helping her mother in her duties.

She travelled widely, including to Cuba, London, and Central America.  When the Crimean War broke out, she travelled again to London and offered her services as a nurse to help Florence Nightingale's venture.  She was refused in spite of having letters of recommendation from doctors in Jamaica and Panama, but nothing daunted, she made her own way to the Crimea and set up the British Hotel to offer food and quarters for sick and convalescent soldiers. 

Sketch of Mary Seacole's British Hotel in Crimea, by Lady Alicia Blackwood (1818–1913), a friend of Florence Nightingale who resided in the neighbouring "Zebra Vicarage"

She also went to the battlefields to tend the wounded, sometimes under fire, giving immediate help whereas the hospitals set up by Florence Nightingale were days' travel away.

After the war ended she returned to England penniless but her supporters raised money to help her.  In spite of this help and publishing her memoirs, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands", available online through Project Gutenberg, she has never had the same recognition that Florence Nightingale had.

All has changed in recent years, and in 2004 she was voted the greatest ever black Briton.  A fund has been set up for a permanent memorial for her which is being helped by the sale of the postcard I found above.  The photo used for it was discovered at Winchester College.  It was found in an album about the Crimean War and is an indication of her standing at the time - hers was the only non-combatant photo in the album.  All funds from the sale of the postcard will be donated to the Mary Seacole Statue Appeal. The statue, designed by Martin Jennings, will stand in the grounds of St. Thomas Hospital, in central London near Big Ben.

Apart from the scanned picture of the postcard, all pictures are from Wikimedia and in the public domain.

History lessons

 

Paint by numbers from Flickr/JenniferJune

Over the last year or so I've been publishing quite a few posts which started off being about my travels, trip reports I suppose you could call them.  I've noticed though, that they have veered off towards historical places recently.  You could say my whole blog has veered off from its original intent, several times and in several directions, but that's another story and besides, that's evolution for you.  The revelation, though, is that I am interested in history, more so than I thought. 

Up to the age of about 11, all I seemed to learn about were the stone age, the bronze age, Greeks, Babylonians and Romans, all of which which seemed so remote at the time that my imagination was never engaged.  Besides, I stopped having anything further to do with it after the teacher asked us to guess the period of something .  "Come on, just guess. I won't be annoyed if you get it wrong."  Some poor girl guessed 2000 BC and, yes, the teacher shouted at her.

Then senior school, and all we seemed to do was learn things parrot fashion, all in chronological order of kings and queens of England.  There was a quick side trip into the French Revolution but only insofar as it touched England. And we literally did have to learn things off by heart.  When important exams came at the age of 16, we were given a list of 20 of the most likely topics and were expected to know our set notes so well that we could just write, write, write, for three hours solid, without having to engage our brains at all.

I believe the teaching history in schools has improved over the intervening years, and I sincerely hope this is true.  A friend's child studied the history of medicine for her exams, which sounds to me vastly more appealing.  Painting-by-numbers doesn't produce works of art and history-by-monarch doesn't, to my mind, produce good history.  Do, or did, Americans have to learn history-by-President?  Do other countries do this trundling through the years via their heads of state and call it history?

So here I am, an indeterminate number of years later, finding I enjoy history, that there is so much more involved than dates.  And I'm frantically trying to catch up on all I've missed.  I have just read Paris in the Fifties (not solely about Paris and only incidentally the fifties) and I'm about to embark on a history of South Africa in French.  That should be interesting in more ways than one.