_Multifarious work and many honours—Jubilee Nurses—Nursing
Association—Death of father and mother—Lady Verney and her
husband—No respecter of persons—From within four walls—South
Africa and America._
Her activities were so multitudinous that it is difficult even to name
them all in such a brief sketch as this. Besides those at which we have
already glanced, prison reform, help to Bosnian fugitives, Manchester
Police Court Mission for Lads, Indian Famine Fund—merely glancing
down two pages of her biography, I find all these mentioned. She was
herself, of course, decorated with the Red Cross, but M. Henri Dunant’s
magnificent Red Cross scheme for helping the wounded on the battlefield
may be said to have been really the outcome of her own work and example.
For it was the extension of her own activities, by means of the Red
Cross Societies, which throughout the European continent act in concert
with their respective armies and governments.
She was the first woman to be decorated with the Order of Merit, which
was bestowed on her in 1907, and in the following year she received,
as the Baroness Burdett Coutts had done, the “Freedom of the City of
London,” having already been awarded, among many like honours, the French
Gold Medal of Secours aux blessés Militaires, and the German Order of
the Cross of Merit. On May 10, 1910, she received the badge of honour of
the Norwegian Red Cross Society. But there was another distinction, even
more unique, which was already hers. For when £70,000 came into Queen
Victoria’s hands as a gift from the women of her empire at the time of
her Jubilee, so much had the Queen been impressed by the work of the
Nursing Association and all that had been done for the sick poor, that
the interest of this Women’s Jubilee Fund, £2,000 a year, was devoted to
an Institution for Training and Maintaining Nurses for the Sick Poor; and
the National Association for Providing Trained Nurses, which owed so
much to Miss Nightingale, was affiliated with it, though it still keeps
its old headquarters at 23 Bloomsbury Square, where for so many years
would arrive at Christmas from her old home a consignment of beautiful
holly and other evergreens for Christmas festivities. H.R.H. the Princess
Christian is President of the Nursing Association, and Miss Nightingale’s
old friend and fellow-worker, Mr. Henry Bonham Carter, is the Secretary.
The influence of Miss Florence Lees, described by Kinglake as “the gifted
and radiant pupil of Florence Nightingale,” who afterwards became Mrs.
Dacre Craven, and was the first Superintendent-General, has been a very
vitalizing influence there, and the home owes much also to her husband,
the Rev. Dacre Craven, of St. Andrew’s, Holborn. Miss Nightingale’s warm
friendship for Miss Florence Lees brought her into peculiarly intimate
relations with the home, and both the Association and the Queen’s Jubilee
Institute are the fruit of Miss Nightingale’s teaching, and a noble
double memorial of the national—nay, imperial—recognition of its value.
The Royal Pension Fund for Nurses also, in which Queen Alexandra
was so specially interested, helped to crown the fulfilment of Miss
Nightingale’s early dream and long, steadfast life-work.
But equally important, though less striking, has been the growing harvest
of her quiet, courteous efforts to help village mothers to understand
the laws of health, her pioneer-work in regard to all the dangers of
careless milk-farms, her insistence on the importance of pure air as
well as pure water, though she had always been careful to treat the poor
man’s rooftree as his castle and never to cross his doorstep except by
permission or invitation.
After the death of her father at Embley in 1874—a very peaceful death,
commemorated in the inscription on his tomb, “In Thy light we shall see
light,” which suggests in him a nature at once devout and sincere—she was
much with her mother, in the old homes at Embley and Lea Hurst, though
Lea Hurst was the one she loved best, and the beech-wood walk in Lea
Woods, with its radiant shower of golden leaves in the autumn, for which
she would sometimes delay her leaving, is still specially associated with
her memory: and her thoughtfulness for the poor still expressed itself in
many different ways—in careful gifts, for instance, through one whom she
trusted for knowledge and tact; in her arrangement that pure milk should
be sent daily from the home dairy at Lea Hurst to those in need of it.
With faithful love she tended her mother to the time of her death in
1880, and there seems to be a joyous thanksgiving for that mother’s
beauty of character in the words the two sisters inscribed to her memory:
“God is love—Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits.”
After her mother’s death, when the property had passed into the hands of
Mr. William Shore Nightingale, she still visited her kinsman there and
kept up her interest in the people of the district.
Among the outward events of her life, after her return from the Crimea,
one of the earliest had been the marriage of her sister Parthenope, who
in 1858 became the second wife of Sir Harry Verney,[20] and her home
at Claydon in Buckinghamshire was thenceforth a second home to Miss
Nightingale. It need hardly be said that in Sir Harry Verney’s various
generous schemes for the good of the neighbourhood, schemes in which his
wife cordially co-operated, Miss Nightingale took a warm and sympathetic
pleasure. His keen interest in army reform was, of course, a special
ground of comradeship. Miss Nightingale divided her time chiefly between
her own home in South Street, Park Lane, and visits to the rooms that
were reserved for her at Claydon. One of her great interests while at
Claydon, soon after her sister’s marriage, had been the building of the
new Buckinghamshire Infirmary in 1861, of which her sister laid the
foundation; and her bust still adorns the entrance hall.
Mrs. Tooley reminds us that not only was Lady Verney well known in
literary and political circles, but also her books on social questions
had the distinction of being quoted in the House of Commons. She gives
many interesting details with regard to the philanthropic and political
work of Sir Harry Verney and his family, but it is hardly necessary to
duplicate them here, since her book is still available. Lady Verney’s
death in 1890, after a long and painful illness, following on that of her
father and mother, bereaved Miss Nightingale of a lifelong companionship,
and might have left her very lonely but for her absorbing work and her
troops of friends.
How fruitful that work was we may dimly see when we remember that—to
instance one branch of it only—in ten years the death-rate in the army
in India, which her efforts so determinately strove to lessen, fell from
sixty-nine per thousand to eighteen per thousand.[21] She strove—and not
in vain—to improve the sanitary conditions of immense areas of undrained
country, but she also endeavoured to bring home to the rank and file of
the army individual teaching.
She gives in one of her pamphlets a delightful story of men who came to
a district in India supposed to be fatal to any new-comer, but, strong
in their new hygienic knowledge, determined _not_ to have cholera. They
lived carefully, they grew their own garden produce, they did not give
way to fear, and _all_, without exception, escaped.
To return for a moment to Britain, since a separate chapter is reserved
for India. She was before her day in contending that foul air was one
of the great causes of consumption and other diseases. And her teaching
was ever given with courtesy and consideration. How strongly she felt
on this and kindred subjects, and how practical her help was, we see
clearly in her letters and pamphlets. She delighted in making festivities
for companies of nurses and of her other hard-working friends. And in
St. Paul’s fine sense of the phrase, she was no “respecter of persons”:
she reverenced personality, not accidental rank. She had no patience
with those visiting ladies who think they may intrude at all hours
of the day into the homes of the poor, and her quick sense of humour
delighted in many of the odd speeches which would have shocked the prim
and conventional. She thought the highest compliment ever paid to her
staff of nurses who visited in the homes of the poor was the speech of
the grubby ragamuffin, who seemed to think they could wash off even the
blackness of the Arch-fiend and, when being scrubbed, cried out, “You may
bathe the divil.”
But with all her fun and relish of life, how sane, how practical, she was!
Do you remember how she laughed at the silly idea that nothing was needed
to make a good nurse except what the “Early Victorian” used to call “a
disappointment in love”?
Here are other of her shrewd sayings from her _Nursing Notes_:—
“Another extraordinary fallacy is the dread of night air.
What air can we breathe at night but night air? The choice
is between pure night air from without and foul air from
within. Most people prefer the latter.... Without cleanliness
within and without your house, ventilation is comparatively
useless.... And now, you think these things trifles, or at
least exaggerated. But what you ‘think’ or what I ‘think’
matters little. Let us see what God thinks of them. God
always justifies His ways. While we are thinking, He has been
teaching. I have known cases of hospital pyæmia quite as severe
in handsome private houses as in any of the worst hospitals,
and from the same cause—viz., foul air. Yet nobody learnt the
lesson. Nobody learnt _anything_ at all from it. They went on
_thinking_—thinking that the sufferer had scratched his thumb,
or that it was singular that ‘all the servants’ had ‘whitlows,’
or that something was ‘much about this year.’”
If there had been any hope at first that Miss Nightingale might grow
strong enough to stand visibly among those who were being trained as
nurses by the fund raised in her honour, that hope was now past, and when
the great new wing of St. Thomas’s was built—the finest building for its
purpose in Europe—the outward reins of government had to be delivered
over into the hands of another, though hers was throughout the directing
hand. And the results of her work are written in big type upon the page
of history.
In India and America she is acclaimed as an adored benefactress, but
what has she not done for our own country alone? To sum up even a few of
the points on which I have touched: she initiated sick nursing among the
poor, through her special appeal was built the Central Home for Nurses,
she was the pioneer in the hygienic work of county councils, and, besides
the great nursing school at St. Thomas’s, to her was largely due the
reform of nursing in workhouses and infirmaries. And in 1890, with the
£70,000 of the Women’s Jubilee Fund, the establishment of the Queen’s
Nurses received its charter.
In affairs of military nursing it is no exaggeration to say that she
was consulted throughout the world. America came to her in the Civil
War; South Africa owed much to her; India infinitely more; and so vital
have been the reforms introduced by Lord Herbert and herself that even
as early as 1880, when General Gordon was waging war in China during
the Taiping Rebellion, the death-rate as compared with the Crimea was
reduced from sixty per cent. to little more than three in every hundred
yearly.[22]
We have seen that, though she was so much more seriously broken in health
than any one at first realized, that did not prevent her incessant work,
though it did in the end make her life more or less a hidden life, spent
within four walls, and chiefly on her bed.
Yet from those four walls what electric messages of help and common sense
were continuously flashing across the length and breadth of the world!
She was regarded as an expert in her own subjects, and long before her
Jubilee Fund enabled her to send forth the Queen’s Nurses, she was, as we
have already seen, busy writing and working to improve not only nursing
in general, but especially the nursing of the sick poor; and unceasingly
she still laboured for the army.
Repeated mention has been made of General Evatt, to whose memory of Miss
Nightingale I am much indebted.
General Evatt served in the last Afghan campaign, and what he there
experienced determined him to seek an interview, as soon as he returned
to England, with her whom he regarded as the great reformer of military
hygiene—Florence Nightingale. In this way and on this subject there arose
between them a delightful and enduring friendship. Many and many a time
in that quiet room in South Street where she lay upon her bed—its dainty
coverlet all strewn with the letters and papers that might have befitted
the desk or office of a busy statesman, and surrounded by books and by
the flowers that she loved so well—he had talked with her for four hours
on end, admiring with a sort of wonder her great staying power and her
big, untiring brain.
He did not, like another acquaintance of mine, say that he came away
feeling like a sucked orange, with all hoarded knowledge on matters great
and small gently, resistlessly drawn from him by his charming companion;
but so voracious was the eager, sympathetic interest of Miss Nightingale
in the men and women of that active world whose streets, at the time he
learned to know her, she no longer walked, that no conversation on human
affairs ever seemed, he said, to tire her.
And her mind was ever working towards new measures for the health and
uplifting of her fellow-creatures.
We have seen how eager she was to use for good every municipal
opportunity, but she did not stop at the municipality, for she knew that
there are many womanly duties also at the imperial hearth; and without
entering on any controversy, it is necessary to state clearly that she
very early declared herself in favour of household suffrage for women,
and that “the North of England Society for Women’s Suffrage is the proud
possessor of her signature to an address to Mr. Disraeli, thanking him
for his favourable vote in the House of Commons, and begging him to
do his utmost to remove the injustice under which women householders
suffered by being deprived of the parliamentary vote.”[23]
[Illustration: Florence Nightingale’s London House, 10 South Street, Park
Lane (house with balcony), where she died, August 14, 1910.]
Whatever could aid womanly service—as a voice in choosing our great
domestic executive nowadays undoubtedly can—had her sympathy and
interest; but what she emphasized most, I take it, at all times, was that
when any door opened for service, woman should be not only willing, but
also nobly _efficient_. She herself opened many such doors, and her lamp
was always trimmed and filled and ready to give light and comfort in the
darkest room.
It has been well said that in describing a friend in the following words,
she unconsciously drew a picture of herself:—
“She had the gracefulness, the wit, the unfailing
cheerfulness—qualities so remarkable, but so much overlooked,
in our Saviour’s life. She had the absence of all
‘mortification’ for mortification’s sake, which characterized
His work, and any real work in the present day as in His day.
And how did she do all this?... She was always filled with the
thought that she must be about her Father’s business.”