The Private Life of Florence Nightingale

by Richard Gordon

  ‘You would seem in a hurry.’

  ‘I am being pursued by a man with a horsewhip.’

  ‘Surely not unusual for a gentleman in your profession? Come with me.’

  She took my hand, as though I were a child.

  The houses in Frith Street are well-to-do. We slipped between a pair of them, and I found myself in a crooked alley, barely wide enough for two abreast. Miss Bancroft said nothing. She wore the same black dress, with a shawl and a plain black bonnet tied under her chin. The alley led into a narrow street which ran between the main thoroughfares of Soho. I doubted if the respectable residents of Frith Street ever braved it, or even admitted its existence. Miss Bancroft had led me into the slums.

  ‘He won’t follow you here,’ she assured me.

  The houses were half brick, half wood, all looking ready to collapse with a shove at one end of the row. They were human rookeries. Men and women sat in every doorway, leant from every window, lolled against every wall. The roadway had lost much of its cobbles, to become rutted and garnished with excrement which was not exclusively animal. There was a dead cat, a living donkey. A shattered pitcher, a holed bucket, a broken patten. No shred of old clothes, no dry crust, no strayed lump of coal, all being too valuable for the inhabitants. The chimney pots pointed from the huddled roofs in several directions, like the frenzied fingers of a madman trying to tear from his suffocating cell.

  ‘What’s the name of this place?’

  ‘Cholera Court. Well, that’s Miss Nightingale’s name for it. It furnishes us with one or two cases a day.’

  In an open doorway, a human bundle lay enveloped in a ragged blanket. A man leant smoking his short clay pipe from the window above. Outside, children were laughing as happily, and playing as ingeniously, as those in Berkeley Square. I shivered.

  ‘You too would be on nodding terms with death if you lived here, Mr Darling.’

  ‘You venture into so dangerous a place alone?’ My concern over Angus was replaced by the likelihood of the bystanders turning upon our fine clothes and having us run an unpleasant gauntlet.

  ‘Oh, I’m perfectly safe. I’m known as the cholera lady. In my company, they’ll take you for a medical man.’

  ‘Everyone knows there is cholera in London. But I didn’t know that people were dying of it under the eaves of gentlefolk.’

  ‘The slums are of little interest to the readers of newspapers. Surely you know that, Mr Darling?’

  ‘Where do you take the sufferers? The nursing home?’

  ‘Oh, that would never do. They are hardly gentlewomen. The Ladies’ Committee would overrule even Miss Nightingale. We have asked leave of absence to nurse them at the Middlesex Hospital. Why not come with me now, to call upon Miss Nightingale? Yes, you must,’ she said, as decisively as her mistress. ‘It isn’t far. Last time you came to us with unkindness in your heart. Now you can see what Miss Nightingale is doing for these poor wretches. You will be moved, I’m sure of it.’

  I never wished to meet Miss Nightingale again in my life. But I relished half a mile’s company of Miss Bancroft, my feelings were already stirred by the poor humans round me, I was curious to see what became of them.

  We emerged suddenly into Oxford Street, busy with hansoms, carriages and omnibuses, the world going home to sup or out to dine. I flicked a farthing to the ragged-trousered boy with the crossing-sweeper’s broom. The Middlesex Hospital was a pleasant building, two wings embracing a court, set in a small garden behind railings. Miss Bancroft walked through the front entrance with a brisk step. I followed, for the second time that evening affected with fear. I had never been before into a cholera ward, nor a ward of any hospital.

  I found myself in a room the size of a church in a prosperous parish. The ceiling was whitewashed, the walls covered with umber distemper, a dozen windows down each side were open to the airless twilight, with which conspired a low fire beneath kettle and cauldron in the grate. It held thirty sturdy beds with canopies and curtains at their heads, above each a shelf for bottles of medicine, mug, metal plate and spittoon, under each a chamberpot. The floorboards were bare and stained, the furniture rough tables and benches, the upholstered chair was a single luxury and the decorations framed notices of the hospital regulations.

  Every bed was occupied by one or two women and children, white and pinch-faced against the blankets. More were laid on the floor between and down the central aisle, some were on palliasses, some on the boards. Some were moaning, some writhing, some dribbling, some vomiting, some were still, some were open-mouthed and expressionless, all reeked of sweat, excreta, sickness and death.

  In the middle was Miss Nightingale, as though welcoming me to her drawing-room.

  ‘Well, Mr Darling! Have you come to mock us again?’

  She wore the same black dress and lace cap, hands clasped reposefully before her. Behind her conversed two young men, one in a fustian waistcoat with flashy buttons, the other with loud plaid trousers, both smoking cigars, who from their lack of affliction by or concern with the surrounding misery I assumed to be medical students.

  ‘If I succeeded here,’ I told her feelingly, ‘you could salute me as a second Alexander Pope.’

  The gentlewomen’s nursing home, with its smell of soap and limewater, its polished boards and patent bells and unrustling nurses, I had found amusingly genteel, petty and sentimental. This parade of poverty, dirt and illness changed cholera from a comfortably remote abstraction to shocking reality. There is an immense difference between hearing of a battle and seeing a man freshly wounded in it – as I was to find with unexpected dispatch.

  I jerked round, at a screech from the doorway. A bedraggled woman, her tawdry gown torn and muddied round the hem, her dyed hair lank, face chalky under the paint and dirt, age uncertain, was being half-carried in by a hospital porter.

  ‘Take your hands away! I’m a lady, I’ll have you know.’ She had grotesque grandeur. ‘But a week ago, I was in silk and satins. In silk and satins! Dancing at Woolwich.’ She looked down at herself, voice fading. ‘For all I am so dirty, I am draped in silks and satins sometimes, real French silks and satins.’ Her eyes met Miss Nightingale. ‘I am a nurse, ma’am, like you, earning my five guineas a week, nursing ladies. But it goes…’

  Her legs slowly crumpled, either through her disease or the spirits she had taken to relieve it. I was struck by the creature’s fight to preserve herself, an individual of rags, paint, dirt and vice, but a human being different from every other on earth, even in sight of impartial death.

  ‘These are nearly all women of the unfortunate class,’ Miss Nightingale told me in her matter-of-fact way, as two of the broad-aproned, big-bonneted hospital nurses caught the new arrival and searched for a place among the crammed humans. ‘From Soho, Seven Dials, Drury Lane. At night, they come in every half hour, staggering off their beat. All filthy, often drunken, always frightened. The hospital has had to empty itself of usual patients to receive them.’

  ‘What can you do for the wretches?’ I asked, appalled.

  ‘We put them to bed and wash them. We apply our turpentine stupes. Sometimes they recover, more often they are dead of the cholera within hours, dry as a stick, their stomach and bowels unable to hold even a mouthful of water.’

  I frowned half in mystification, half in anger. ‘But what causes this dreadful illness?’

  ‘Overcrowding and accumulated filth. Not contagion. That is an invention of some London doctors, which I equate with witchcraft and superstition. The contagion theory of spreading disease,’ she said forthrightly, ‘is disproved by good sanitation, which stops the outbreaks of fever whenever it is introduced.’

  Miss Nightingale had a passionate disbelief in germs, and a lasting one. I heard that in her seventies she revoked a legacy for a professorial chair of statistics, lest the money be blown by the breeze of modern ideas ‘to endow some bacillus or microbe’. She did not believe in specific diseases, only in unhealthy conditions. Her panacea was sanitation.r />
  ‘So if you provide better sanitation for the slums, you would provide their denizens with half a lifetime?’ I suggested.

  ‘You might as well talk of providing them with £100 apiece. Where’s the money coming from?’

  ‘Some politician might be persuaded to prick the public conscience.’ The only one of my acquaintance being Mr Wakley-Barlow, the plan seemed unpromising. Then it struck me that I could translate his own plot from evil to good. ‘I could raise an outcry by writing of this room for the Penny Pioneer, in such a way that its readers would eat their breakfast with an uneasy conscience, if they could face it at all.’

  ‘What? Are you changing from a gossip to a scold? You’ll be for the ducking-stool next. Well, I should readily enlist you in the service of sanitation, Mr Darling. As I remarked, you are a clever little devil.’

  A woman in the bed beside us, eyes staring at the ceiling, made a low moaning noise as though blowing bubbles deep in her throat.

  ‘There is no point in hiding your light under a bushel, Miss Nightingale, if the bushel doesn’t burst into flames. Nobody in Town knows your name. But unlike other philanthropists, you risk both your health and your susceptibilities. No other ladies but yourself and Miss Bancroft could face these horrors.’

  ‘The sick are not horrible,’ she told me sharply. ‘They must be nursed. And they must rely too often on such women as you have just seen received. Women who have lost their characters, who you would find in the beds of the male patients, who are subject to liberties by the surgeons and dressers, and who are nourished mainly by spirits. Of course, there are nuns. I could have turned nun, to nurse with social impunity. But Roman Catholicism does not appeal to me. I distrust its easy enchantments, its self-discipline is for me unnecessary. Not that I am much impressed by the Church of England, either. It has for men bishoprics, archbishoprics and a little work. For women, it has what?’

  She gave the impression of readiness to reorganize either religion on sound practical principles, if given its topmost job. Then she turned abruptly to the moaning woman, who now lay quiet, bright yellow fluid dribbling from the corner of her mouth. With a shock, I saw that she was no more. For the first time, I had heard the death-rattle.

  6

  The cold wind first blew from the Crimea on October 12 1854.

  It was a lunatic war, madder than our antics in South Africa – an insanity made clear to readers of the Daily Pioneer, particularly those who were incited to burn it in public. The Russians and the Turks had fought regularly, every twenty years for two centuries, hurting no one but themselves. We went to war because the British Army had gone without a battle since 1815, and having beaten Napoleon must be usefully invincible. Wellington’s cannonade still deafened military ears, and was about to kill 16,334 unwounded British soldiers.

  There was a squabble over the Holy Places at Bethlehem – the Turkish police shot a Russian monk or two – painstakingly aggravated by our cleverly devious ambassador, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, and the cleverly bombastic French one, the Marquis de la Valette. Czar Nicholas I had just dropped his famous sigh over Turkey, ‘We have on our hands a sick man – a very sick man,’ and Lord Aberdeen’s Coalition took fright that the Czar might dismember the corpse before the invalid obliged by dying. That would never do, the Czar in Constantinople, astride the route to India. Even if he proposed to let us grab unmolested Rhodes, Crete and Egypt as compensation.

  Then the Russian fleet sank a Turkish flotilla off Sinope on the north Turkish coast, their new Paixhans naval shells splintering old wooden walls like garden fencing, disgracefully disregarding the Royal Navy anchored in minatory majesty in the Bosphorus. Palmerston resigned in disgust, within a month howled back to office. The mediating Prince Albert found himself vilefied as a Russian catspaw. John Bull shook his daily newspaper in his clenched fist and roared for war. John Bright shook his head and told the House of Commons the enduring truth, ‘If war be not itself a crime, it is the inevitable parent of innumerable crimes.’

  Our allies were the French. They had a brand new Emperor, happy to stimulate his subjects with a little war, and to smudge a map of Europe newly drawn on his uncle’s departure to St Helena. The Russians’ allies were the Austrians, but their brand new Emperor Franz-Josef had the sense to wriggle out. The war should anyway have been fought in the Baltic, not the Black Sea. The Crimea was a sideshow which grew like a deadly fungus.

  While Admiral Sir Charles Napier was banging about ineffectively off St Petersburg, our troops which started as an ‘Army of Observation’ at Malta in spring, and in summer sailed to Bulgaria, were landing on the west coast of ‘Crim Tartary’, the Crimean peninsula. Our plan was to guillotine the Crimea, with its fortress, arsenal and dockyard of Sebastopol, at its neck with Russia. But we discovered on the spot a sea too shallow to bear a ship within sight of shore. Our commander was Lord Raglan, veteran of another Peninsula. He was so wedded to his experience as Wellington’s aide-de-camp, that he generally referred to his present enemy as ‘the French’.

  The bloody little battle of the Alma river was fought on September 20, a victory acclaimed and expected. For the well-nourished middle class at home, the war pinched only as an official excuse for postponing the abolition of income-tax, an innovation which has occurred to no British Government since.

  On that October Thursday, I had gone as usual about eleven in the morning to the Penny Pioneer offices in Salisbury Square off Fleet Street. They were only a couple of rooms with plain deal walls, scampering with messenger boys. Copy and proofs were strewn everywhere, impaled on spikes, or on nails between the batteries of brass speaking tubes. At inky desks with green-shaded gas-lamps, liberally scattered with bottles and tankards, men in their hats and their shirtsleeves worked amid the pots of paste and scissors on chain, closely and sometimes frenziedly together like sailors below decks, an impression emphasized by the regular thud of the steam presses next door, as unending as the engines at sea.

  I picked from the floor a copy of that morning’s Times. It carried a dispatch from ‘Our Special Correspondent’, dated Constantinople, September 30. That was Mr William Howard Russell, whom I had often seen in the Cheshire Cheese opposite. He was a short, thick-set man with a florid face richly decorated with black hair and whiskers, lavish in his consumption of brandy-and-water and cigars, particularly at someone’s expense. It was hard to escape his brogue telling his ring of admirers stories which, like any Irishman’s, were always ludicrous and always too long. Sometimes he burst into song. I had taken a dislike to him on sight, which can be as persistent and often as illogical as one painfully developed by acquaintance.

  It is with feelings of surprise and anger that the public will learn that no sufficient preparations have been made for the proper care of the wounded, Russell wrote.

  Not only are there not sufficient surgeons – that, it might be urged, was unavoidable; not only are there no dressers and nurses – that might be a defect of system for which no one is to blame; but what will be said when it is known that there is not even linen to make bandages for the wounded? The greatest commiseration prevails for the sufferings of the unhappy inmates of Scutari, and every family is giving sheets and old garments to supply their want. But why could not this clearly foreseen want have been supplied? Can it be said that the Battle of the Alma has been an event to take the world by surprise? Has not the expedition to the Crimea been the talk of the last four months?

  I was interrupted by the copy-boy poking my ribs, bringing a galley-proof of my own article for our next morning’s edition. I could not take my eyes from Russell’s work. Mine was about Miss Nightingale and the cholera, written to put the British public off its breakfast. Russell’s would have soured the milk and rotted the eggs.

  And when the Turks gave up to our use the vast barracks to form a hospital and depot, was it not on the ground that the loss of the English troops was sure to be considerable when engaged in so dangerous an enterprise? continued Mr John Delane’s ma
n at the war.

  And yet, after the troops have been six months in the country, there is no preparation for the commonest surgical operations! Not only are the men kept, in some cases, for a week without the hand of a medical man coming near their wounds; not only are they left to expire in agony, unheeded and shaken off, though catching desperately at the surgeon whenever he makes his rounds through the fetid ship; but now, when they are placed in the spacious building, where we were led to believe that everything was ready which could ease their pain or facilitate their recovery, it was found that the commonest appliances of a workhouse sick-ward were wanting, and that the men must die through the medical staff of the British army having forgotten that old rags are necessary for the dressing of wounds.

  How feeble, how ill-disciplined my own attack, I thought. I glanced regretfully at the proof in my hand. I had discovered some terrible facts. The cholera had killed 10,000 Londoners over the summer, 500 in an area of Soho barely 250 yards across. But I could find no phrase more pungent than labelling the Chairman of the Westminster vestrymen, who was responsible for the drains, ‘Defender of the Filth’. I finished Russell’s dispatch.

  The manner in which the sick and wounded are treated is worthy only of the savages of Dahomy. The worn-out pensioners who were brought as an ambulance corps are totally useless. There are no dressers or nurses to carry out the surgeon’s directions, and to attend to the sick during the intervals between his visits. Here the French are greatly our superiors. Their medical arrangements are extremely good, their surgeons more numerous, and they have the help of 50 Sisters of Charity who have accompanied the expedition. Why have we no Sisters of Charity? There are numbers of able-bodied and tenderhearted English women who would joyfully and with alacrity go out to devote themselves to nursing the sick and wounded, if only they could be associated for that purpose, and placed under proper protection.

  That picture of the Scutari hospitals, across the Bosphorus from Constantinople, aroused immediately in the country resentment and its spouse anger, bearing their child, pity. So much was to be read in the faces of men going to work, heard in the voices of women at the washtub. Seldom have I seen such national indignation fired by a newspaper, to be expressed as hotly inside a penny omnibus as inside the Reform Club. (I must admit sometimes trying to engineer it, and sometimes successfully, though most regrettably from political expedience or simply to increase circulation.)