The Her Edit

Black History Month · Then & Now

When she was turned away, she paid her own way to the front line of war. A reflection on care, courage and refusing to wait for permission.

There’s a particular moment in Mary Seacole’s life that I return to often.

She has travelled to London. She has years of experience caring for people through cholera and yellow fever. She knows she can help. And she is turned away.

What she does next is the reason we still say her name.

A healer’s daughter

Mary was born Mary Jane Grant in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1805. Her father was a Scottish soldier; her mother was a Jamaican “doctress” — a healer who used traditional Caribbean and African remedies, and who ran a boarding house where she nursed sick soldiers and sailors.

Mary learned at her mother’s side. She watched, she practised, she absorbed. Caring for people was not something she discovered later in life. It was something she grew up inside.

As a young woman, she travelled widely — to the Bahamas, to Haiti, to Cuba, and later to Panama, where she treated people during a cholera outbreak. She married Edwin Horatio Seacole, who died only a few years later. She kept going.

Turned away

In 1854, war broke out in Crimea. News reached Britain of soldiers suffering and dying, not only from battle wounds but from disease — the very illnesses Mary knew how to treat.

She travelled to London and applied to join the nurses being sent to the front. She was refused. She later wrote about this in her memoir, wondering whether the colour of her skin had played a part.

Many people would have stopped there. Mary didn’t.

She went anyway

Using her own money, Mary made the long journey to Crimea herself. Near Balaclava, with a business partner, she built the “British Hotel” — a place where soldiers could find food, comfort, a warm drink and medical care.

She rode out to the battlefield, too, carrying supplies and tending to the wounded, sometimes while fighting was still going on. The soldiers called her “Mother Seacole.” Many of them never forgot her.

Care, when it’s real, doesn’t wait for permission.

A life, written in her own words

When the war ended, Mary returned to England with very little money. The soldiers she had cared for didn’t forget her — a benefit festival was held in her honour, and thousands attended.

In 1857, she published her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands — one of the first autobiographies written by a Black woman in Britain. I love that she told her own story. So often, women like Mary are written about. She wrote herself into history.

She died in London in 1881. For many years afterwards, her story faded from public memory. But it never disappeared completely. In 2004, she was voted the greatest Black Briton. And in 2016, a statue of Mary was unveiled outside St Thomas’ Hospital in London — the first statue in the UK to honour a named Black woman.

What I take from her

I’ve come to realise how often we wait for permission. For someone to tell us we’re qualified enough, experienced enough, ready enough.

Mary had the experience. She had the skill. What she didn’t have was the approval. And instead of letting that define what she could do, she found another way.

It doesn’t mean rejection didn’t hurt. I’m sure it did. But there’s something deeply freeing in her story: the idea that a “no” at one door isn’t always the end of the road. Sometimes it’s simply a sign that you’ll need to build your own door — or your own hotel on a hillside, halfway across the world.

Softly, Fiona x.