Claire Chatterton
On 19 June 1856, Jane Welsh Carlyle, the Scottish writer, then living in London, recorded in her journal,
Dined at old Mr. Richardson’s, – a pleasant Party as Parties go. The Milmans, Aldersons, Lord Minto (eyes much too close), Dr. Lushington, and a good many intelligent-looking men dropt in after dinner; besides Mary Stanley of Crimean notoriety (a very considerable of a goose, I think).[1]
2024 sees the 170th anniversary of British and Irish nurses arriving at Scutari, to nurse the wounded of the Crimean War. As the Crimea is once again beset by war, it is timely to explore aspects of this earlier conflict. Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole are well known for their work in the Crimean War but the contributions and even the names of many other women who nursed in that conflict are not.[2] In addition, discussions about nursing in the Crimean War include a variety of conflicting and sometimes contentious narratives, such as concerning Nightingale’s relations with Seacole.[3] This article focusses on Mary Stanley, who led the second group of nurses that travelled from Britain to the East, to the chagrin of Nightingale who did not welcome their arrival.[4] It is part of a wider study that aims to explore Mary Stanley’s life and her contribution to the history of nursing, as little is known about her. It will also detail and dissect the events that involved her during the Crimean War and will reflect on why Jane Welsh Carlyle referred to her in such pejorative terms.
Early life
When Mary Stanley encountered Jane Welsh Carlyle, she was by then forty two, having been born in Cheshire in December 1813. Both her parents came from well-connected Cheshire families. Her father, Edward Stanley, was a younger son of the aristocratic Stanley family, Barons of Alderley, and was the rector of St Mary’s church, Alderley.[5] Her mother Catherine, known as Kitty, was a clergyman’s daughter and member of the wealthy Leycester family. They had five children; Owen, then Mary, followed by Arthur (known in later life as Arthur Penrhyn, the latter being his middle name), Charles (or Charlie/ Charley) and Catherine (often called Kate).[6] All the children were born in the rectory, which still stands next to the church.[7] Her father has been described as an ‘erudite man’ who was a great supporter of education but her mother’s contribution to her children’s education has not always been acknowledged.[8] Kitty Stanley kept a diary in which she recorded the progress of her children noting their first words, their changing heights and temperaments, and as they progressed, their educational achievements. It is clear from this documentary evidence that she was a well-educated woman who took a great deal of interest in her daughters’ education, as much as in her sons’.[9] As was the norm at that time, the three boys all went away to boarding school and it seems that Mrs Stanley educated the girls at home herself. A biographer of Mary Stanley’s brother, Arthur, characterised their early childhood as being part of Jane Austen’s, ‘tranquil world of lord and baronets, patrons and parsons, country houses and Queen Anne rectories’.[10]
In 1836, after thirty-two years as rector of Alderley, Mary Stanley’s father was offered the Bishopric of Norwich. By then Owen was away at sea, Arthur was an Oxford undergraduate, and Charles was in the Royal Engineers, so it was to be Mary, her younger sister Kate, and their former nurse, Sarah Burgess, who were to accompany the parents to Norwich. Now twenty three years old, Mary Stanley had led the life of a conventional clergyman’s daughter, engaged in philanthropic activities such as parish visiting, which were rooted in her deep Christian faith and in support of her father’s ministry. Her brother said that after her move to Norwich she continued with this work and ‘was first able to show those remarkable powers of organisation and devotion to public objects which distinguished her subsequent career’. She supported their father as, ‘his right hand in all his projects of benevolence’.[11] These projects included savings clubs and schools.[12] In 1846, her cousin’s wife who was visiting Norwich, described a visit that she had made with Mary, ‘to her home for factory girls where she has also got her Valenciennes lace workers’.[13] The Stanley family were also cultured and Mary ‘was brought into contact with some of the highest intellects of the day’ as her father took a great interest in the arts, including befriending the famous singer, Jenny Lind.[14] In addition, her family had the financial means to enable her to travel frequently with family members such as her mother, sister and brother, Arthur. The latter’s biographer described him as ‘having a lifelong love of travel’ and Mary seems to have shared this.[15]
Her travels would provide her with opportunities to meet influential people and in 1847, whilst in Rome, she first met Florence Nightingale. Nightingale was spending the winter months there with family friends, Charles and Selina Bracebridge, after a period of ill health.[16] Also in Rome was Edward Manning, then an Anglican clergyman and Archdeacon of Chichester, (but later to join the Roman Catholic church in 1851).[17] The MP, Sidney Herbert and his new wife Elizabeth (Liz) Herbert, who were already known to the Bracebridges and Manning and were on a belated honeymoon, were to befriend both Nightingale and Stanley.[18] It was to be a propitious meeting for them all and it seems that this newly formed circle of friends was to enjoy their time together in Rome, maintaining those links in the coming years. Selina Bainbridge illustrated this in a comment in a letter she wrote to Parthenope Nightingale, Florence’s sister; ‘Did you hear of (Flo’s) dissipation that day? Going out to dinner with the Herberts & then on to an evening party at the Stanleys?’[19] Nightingale, in particular, seems to have formed a close attachment to Sidney Herbert, which proved to have important consequences in the future. She also became friends with Stanley, based on their shared interests in nursing and hospital care. Dingwall et al have described this as an ‘intense friendship’ and the two women seem to have remained in close contact in the years that followed.[20]
Mary Stanley lived in Norwich for eleven years, until the sudden death of her father in August 1849, while on a family holiday in Scotland. This was to be the first of three significant bereavements for her and her family, with the death of two of her brothers, Charles and Owen, following soon after their father’s. Her remaining brother, Arthur, was at the time a Fellow at University College, Oxford, having been ordained in 1839. Mary’s younger sister, Kate, had married Arthur’s schoolfriend, the Rev Charles Vaughan and moved to Harrow, where her husband was headmaster of the famous public school. So, the widowed Kitty Stanley and her remaining daughter, Mary, left Norwich to move to a new home in London at Grosvenor Cresent in Mayfair. Mary was to live there for the rest of her life (although she and her mother also lived part of the time in the Cathedral close at Canterbury, while Arthur was a Canon there, between 1851 and 1857).[21]
[Figure 1] Photographic portrait of Mary Stanley published in Augustus Hare, Story of my Life volume 3 (London: George Allan, 1896), 318.
The main source of information about Mary Stanley’s life to this point can be found in her prolific letter writing (some of which survives) and the letters, memoirs and biographies of her brother, Arthur, to whom she was extremely close and with whom she kept up a voluminous correspondence. Her cousin, Augustus Hare, also speaks of her often, and fondly, in his autobiographical writing.[22] She also wrote a book, originally published anonymously in 1854, Hospitals and Sisterhoods, which illustrates the interests that underpinned her and Nightingale’s friendship, those of nursing and hospital provision and a deep religious faith.[23] It also revealed some differences between the two women on these issues too, which were to impact on subsequent events. For example, while both women were members of the Church of England at that time and corresponded regularly with Dr, later Cardinal, Manning, Mary Stanley was ‘High Church’ or Anglo-Catholic, (sometimes described in that period as a ‘Puseyite’), and was later to convert to Roman Catholicism, whereas Florence Nightingale remained in the Church of England, despite having been attracted to the Catholic church.[24] In addition, their views on who should be nurses and the nature of nursing work varied. According to Baly, Stanley saw, ‘nursing as a pastoral calling, where sisters and ladies supervised the work, not themselves being strong enough for manual work’ unlike Nightingale, whom she argued believed that ‘all nurses, whatever their class, must undergo the same training’.[25]
Crimean War
In 1854, when Britain entered the Crimean War, there was an opportunity for both Nightingale and Stanley to put their ideas and interests to the test.[26] The war had broken out the previous year when the Ottoman (or Turkish) Empire declared war on Russia in March 1853. In March 1854, France and Britain did the same. These allied forces were to be joined in 1855 by the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont.[27] As Orlando Figes points out, ‘Each power entered the Crimean War with its own motives. Nationalism and imperial rivalries combined with religious interests as causes of the conflict’.[28] It ended in March 1856, with a Russian defeat. The losses and human suffering on all sides were immense, with an estimated total death toll, across the opposing armies, of 640,000, of which British casualties numbered 22,000 (4,000 lost in battle and 18,000 to disease).[29] The first battle of the war took place on 22 September 1854, known as the Battle of the Alma. Although declared a victory for Britain and her allies, the huge loss of life and high level of injury in this battle led to a succession of reports and headlines in the press, which caused some consternation in Britain and galvanised all manner of philanthropic activities to support the war effort.[30] Mary Stanley was one of many women who stepped forward to help. In the words of the Nursing Record, ‘she, with other Englishwomen, was stirred to the depths by the news of the privations and sufferings of the Crimean soldiers’.[31]
Stanley soon found herself at the centre of the operation to recruit nurses to go out to the conflict. Her great aunt noted in a letter to her daughter-in-law, ‘I daresay you will hear that Mary & Florence Nightingale are employed hunting up nurses with a detachment of which Florence is about to set off to Scutari’.[32] It was the first time that female nurses were to be sent out to what was effectively a war zone and it was Stanley’s old friend, Florence Nightingale, who was to lead the group. Their mutual friend, Sidney Herbert, was now in the Cabinet and was the Secretary at War and it was at his behest that Nightingale and her party were to leave imminently for Turkey.[33] There was less than a week between Nightingale agreeing to go and her actual departure, so the huge efforts to recruit nurses to join her in this short timeframe can only be imagined. Bostridge describes it as a time ‘of harassed preparation’ as nurses were recruited, uniforms were sourced and travel arrangements made, all of which Stanley supported.[34]
The Herberts’ London home, 49, Belgrave Square, became the centre of operations where ‘its rooms were given up to interviews and correspondence.’[35] At the heart of this were Liz Herbert and Mary Stanley, aided by Nightingale’s sister Parthenope and Selina Bracebridge who, together with her husband, would accompany Nightingale when she left London with her party of nurses on 21 October 1854.[36] Later Stanley would reflect on their efforts to recruit Nightingale’s party: ‘All London was scoured for them. We sent emissaries in every direction to every likely place’.[37] The aim had been to send forty, but in the end, recruitment proved challenging and thirty eight women were to go with Nightingale; twenty four religious sisters (fourteen Anglican and ten Roman Catholic) and fourteen women with civilian nursing experience.[38] They arrived in Constantinople on 4 November. While they were at sea, the Russian army had moved towards the British lines, resulting in another battle, the Battle of Balaclava (and the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade) on 25 October, thus exacerbating the already dire situation for casualties.
Meanwhile back in London, Mary Stanley and Liz Herbert continued to recruit nurses. According to Summers, Nightingale had on leaving, ‘entrusted to them the task of interviewing, selecting, and where necessary, arranging the training of the candidates who might be required to reinforce the members of the original party’.[39] Catherine Gladstone, wife of William, the Chancellor of the Exchequer joined them with the ‘good work of providing nurses for the military hospitals in Turkey’ together with Mrs Talbot, Lady Charlotte Canning and later, Lady Cranworth.[40] Applications continued to come in, as the large file of them in the National Archives attests, and were scrutinised carefully.[41] An insight into the recruitment process was given by one successful recruit, Elizabeth Davis (now more usually referred to by her original Welsh name of Betsi Cadwaladr), who later recalled that she took a written recommendation,
to Mrs Sidney Herbert’s. The servant there showed me the way to Miss Stanley’s at No 6, Grosvenor Crescent. I saw Miss Stanley and she asked me many questions, and wrote down a great deal … a day or two passed by, then I received a letter from Mrs Herbert telling me to call that day … to settle about going to the East.[42]
From this quote, it is clear that a decision had been made to send out more nurses. Maybe the news that was filtering through from the Crimea of a rising tide of casualties, particularly after another battle (Inkerman) on 5 November, promoted the idea that more nurses were needed. Certainly, another recruit who went out in this second group, Frances (usually known as Fanny) Taylor, believed this when she later wrote ‘the numbers of nurses already gone were but as a drop in the ocean amidst the thousands now in the Eastern hospitals’. She said that the ‘summons came in a letter from Mr Bracebridge to Mr Herbert, who anxious that as many sick as possible should benefit by the care of nurses, determined to send out as many as were ready’.[43] A second party was therefore assembled to travel out to Turkey to join Nightingale and her original group and on 1 December 1854, they assembled at the Herberts’ home to be addressed by Sidney Herbert. The party was bigger than Nightingale’s original party with a total of forty six.[44] Described as a ‘mixed lot’, the group consisted of nine ladies, twenty two nurses and fifteen Roman Catholic nuns.[45]According to Fanny Taylor, ‘Miss Stanley was requested to go out in charge of them, and place them under Miss Nightingale’s care, after which it was her intention to return home’.[46] This seems to have been decided upon quickly. Stanley’s mother noted in a letter to Nightingale’s sister,
You will be startled but pleased to hear that probably after all Mary is going out with the nurses on Saturday-! Every stone has been turned in vain to get someone & and this morning the nail was clinched by a letter from Mrs Bracebridge … so the Herberts urged the thing so very strongly that Mary has consented to take them out & deliver them into Florence’s hands.[47]
The group was to be accompanied by an MP, The Hon. Josceline Percy, and a physician, Dr John Meyer.[48]
There were several differences between the composition of this second group and the original party and this was to have a significant impact on what happened next. Firstly, ladies were included in this group as well as those described as nurses. As noted earlier, Stanley and Nightingale’s views on this differed. Ladies, described by Summers as ‘philanthropic, non-professional gentlewomen’, did not belong in in a hospital setting in Nightingale’s view.[49] Secondly the proportion of Roman Catholics to Protestants was much higher in this second group, at a time when British society was virulently anti-Catholic. There was much debate in the press, with allegations made that they would proselytise the sick and vulnerable, which it was feared would cause ‘an outcry and jeopardise the operation’.[50] In addition, the contingent of Catholic Nuns, all Sisters of Mercy, that had been formed from various convents in Ireland and England, to join the second party, had their own leader in Mother Francis Bridgeman, a very able, forceful and charismatic Mother Superior.[51] This arrangement was negotiated through Dr Manning (who had been involved in their recruitment) and Bostridge notes, ‘was in sharp contrast to the position of Mother Clare Moore and her Bermondsey nuns in the first party’, who had come under Nightingale’s leadership.[52]
Stanley’s group left from London Bridge station on 2 December 1854, travelling first to Folkestone where they crossed the channel and then by train across France, before sailing from Marseilles on the Egyptus. It was not an easy journey. Later Stanley would recall, ‘After a stormy tedious passage in a French steamer which for the emergency of the times, would have been consigned to the docks long before, and whose unseaworthy state added greatly to the sufferings of all on board, we anchored, one cold December day, in the Golden Horn’.[53] They arrived on Sunday 17 December 1854.[54] The news reached Nightingale that this second party was coming whilst they were still at sea and she was, according to Rappaport, ‘incensed’.[55] This was because, Tastard asserts, ‘there was no space to accommodate them. She could not supervise an additional number of nurses, and she had always resisted well-meaning lady volunteers’.[56]She was also concerned about the balance between Protestant and Catholic nurses with the potential for ‘sectarian bickerings’, as Cook described them. As he points out,
She was intensely desirous of making her experiment of women nurses a success, and she felt acutely the danger of wrecking it by even the suspicion of sectarian prejudice. This fact supplies a further explanation of the alarm with which she received the coming of the second batch of nurses under Miss Stanley.[57]
Also, and most importantly, Sidney Herbert and Nightingale had a firm undertaking that no more nurses would be sent to the East, without Nightingale’s prior approval, an agreement that had clearly been breached.[58] Her response was to fire off a long and angry letter to Herbert in which she offered her resignation.[59] As Goldie notes she ‘felt betrayed, and said so with all the passion of her impulsive nature’.[60] In her letter to Sidney Herbert, Nightingale pointed out, that there had only been a fortnight between him writing unequivocally, ‘no additional nurses will be sent out to her until she had written home from Scutari, and reported how far her labours have been successful, and what number and descriptions of persons, if any, she requires in addition’ and the despatch of the second group. [61] Nightingale’s response therefore does seem to have some justification. It may well be that this dissonance, between what Herbert wrote and then actually did, was the result of his misinterpreting a letter he received from Charles Bracebridge, at a time when he was under much pressure, as of course was Nightingale.[62] The consequences though were to be long lasting. In the meantime, this angry correspondence would continue for several days on Nightingale’s part, as she ‘heaped coals of fire’ on Sidney Herbert’s head.[63] In response, he and his wife sent emollient responses, offering to pay for the party to be sent back at their own expense.[64]
Meanwhile, Stanley’s party was left on their ship, Egyptus, once it had anchored off Constantinople (modern day Istanbul), unable to disembark and with no welcome, despite messages being sent to Scutari.[65] One of the Irish Nuns in the party, Sister Mary Aloysious Doyle, described their arrival in her memoirs succinctly as ‘Not wanted in Scutari’ and says that she and her fellow nuns were ‘astonished’ that they were not apparently needed.[66] That evening, Charles Bracebridge was dispatched by Nightingale to meet the party onboard ship and convey the message that effectively, ‘Mary Stanley, her ladies, her nurses and her nuns were superfluous’.[67] He wrote, ‘The 46 have fallen on us like a cloud of locusts. Where to house them, feed them is difficult, how to care for them not to be imagined.’[68] Dr Meyer and Mr Percy then went to see Nightingale but received the same response and ‘were sad and sore at their cold reception.’[69] The party was found temporary accommodation but could not be housed together. The two gentlemen went to a hotel in Pera, the nuns to the French sisters of Mercy at their convent at Galata, and the lay members of the party, led by Mary Stanley, were offered the use of the ambassadors’ summer residence, up the coast at Therapia, where they were conveyed along the Bosphorus by a small steamer the next day.[70] Betsi Cadwaladr later recalled this trip: ‘The scenery was ever changing and truly beautiful, but there was a damp on our spirits of not being set to work at once, knowing, as we did, that help was so much needed- some three thousand sick being at that time in the Scutari hospitals’.[71]
Work needed to be done at Therapia to make the house hospitable and according to Fanny Taylor, ‘Miss Stanley refused assistance from the English hotel in Therapia, thinking it best to employ the paid nurses in the household work which was to be performed.’ This was not well received and Taylor reported that ‘whispers were heard among them the first evening, that they had come out to nurse the soldiers, not to sweep, wash and cook.’[72] The ladies meanwhile, who were unpaid volunteers and used to having servants, were not expected to do this work, causing friction. In addition, a few of the nurses had been drinking since the party started out and upsetting the ladies by swearing and the whole group was unsettled by their enforced limbo. [73] In a letter to Liz Herbert, Stanley wrote of her charges, ‘They are very like troublesome children’.[74] The following morning she addressed her group after breakfast, exhorting them to be patient and to live in harmony with each other.
Four days after Stanley’s arrival she finally met with Nightingale at the latter’s invitation, on 21 December 1854, at the Barrack Hospital at Scutari, in the presence of Charles Bainbridge and Dr Cumming.[75]Accounts and Interpretations of this meeting differ. Stanley sent home a cheerful account of the day, written in Nightingale’s busy office, while she was observing all that was happening around her. This letter included her drawings of Scutari and the layout of Nightingale’s office.[76] Nevertheless, her cold reception by Nightingale is said to have upset Stanley, whom according to Bostridge, became flustered and burst into tears when Nightingale offered to resign so Stanley could take over from her.[77] Several commentators mentioned that the issue of money arose during the meeting as Stanley’s party had exhausted all the funds they had been given and it was not clear who would now fund them. Nightingale lent Stanley £90 from her own private funds but the question of who would pay their expenses continued to be an issue.[78] Stanley reputedly suggested that twenty of her party could work as ‘female Ecclesiastes’ to support the hospital chaplains, a strategy that may have been a pragmatic one to provide occupation to her unwanted party or an attempt to proselytize. Either way this was turned down by Nightingale.[79]
It is clear from an analysis of Nightingale’s correspondence that by this point, she had recognised that it would be rash to send the second party home, particularly the nuns who had left Ireland to great acclaim, and that she would have to find a way to accommodate them. ‘To send back the fifteen new nuns will be awful’ she wrote to Sidney Herbert ‘and I am going to incorporate what I can of the Sisters & Nurses’ but then goes on to outline the logical difficulties she was facing in where to send them.[80] Summers also comments that Nightingale’s original stance that she had no room nor work for them could not be maintained as, ‘the second party had arrived at the moment when army hospital provision was being expanded.’[81] Her first action was to send home some of her original staff in favour of the new-comers and so on the 23 December, ten of her original party had to return to England, including five Catholic nuns. This had the effect of reducing the overall number of Catholics amongst the two groups and meant she had fewer staff to find space for, but it was also controversial and caused some distress to those involved.[82]
Meanwhile back in Therapia, Mary Stanley wrote on Christmas Eve, ‘I have done my best to pacify our women’. Realising perhaps that news of their plight might inflame an already febrile press back in Britain, she continued,
To the nurses I have merely said there was no room owing to the influx of the sick, and I wrote this down as the statement they were to make in their letters home … To the ladies, who reason and answer questions, it is more difficult to give true answers, but I have strongly urged patience, and silence in their home letters.[83]
Christmas Day was ‘dreary’ according to Fanny Taylor, enlivened only by mince pies and plum pudding sent by Lady Stratford (de Redcliffe, the British Ambassador’s wife).[84] Nightingale continued to write to Herbert, stating that ‘such a tempest has been brewed in this little pint-pot as you could have no idea of’.[85] She was beset on all sides by a whole variety of issues that were affecting her mission including an antagonistic relationship with Mother Bridgeman, whom she had tellingly nicknamed ‘Brickbat’.[86] In a letter to Sidney Herbert on the 28 December 1854, she complained ‘The fifteen new nuns (in conjunction with Mary Stanley) are leading me a devil of a life’ and then in another letter to him a week later, with seeming exasperation, ‘The Therapians, after expressly setting me aside … are now throwing the whole responsibility upon me of refusing them & settling them (or not settling them) elsewhere’.[87]
Mary Stanley made frequent visits by boat along the Bosphorus, both to the British embassy at Pera and Scutari, to plead their cause. [88] Fanny Taylor said that ‘During Miss Stanley’s absence our anxiety to know our fate grew very intense, and we used to watch for the steamer by which we expected her return eagerly’.[89] ‘The nurses would … flock around her like a swarm of bees’, remembered Betsi Cadwaladr, who said ‘Miss Stanley bore it wonderfully. I honoured her for the patient, resolute way she suffered it all, and kept her own counsel without condescending to complain, or to tell us the trouble she was in.’[90] Some of the nurses and ladies began to occupy themselves by helping the naval hospital, mostly by washing and mending the linen, but according to Taylor ‘our life flowed on monotonously… How long the weeks seemed’.[91] It was also the height of winter, in a house only designed to be lived in through the summer months. Finally, it was decided that five of the nuns (including Sister Mary Aloysius Doyle), three lady volunteers and one nurse (Betsi Cadwaladr) from the Stanley party were to go to Scutari and the ten remaining nuns then left their lodgings at Galata and moved to a small house in the grounds at Therapia, near to the rest of the party. [92] On the 14 January 1855, Nightingale wrote to Herbert with an update of her progress with Stanley’s party, ‘In different ways, proper and improper, we hope to absorb them all, though these arrangements are by no means decided upon’.[93] The rest of the new contingent thus ‘cooled their heels’ at Therapia until late January 1855.[94] On 23 January 1855, the General Hospital at Balaklava re-opened and at the request of Dr John Hall, a female nursing party went there, the first to go and nurse in the Crimea itself, although this was not with Nightingale’s blessing. She wrote to Sidney Herbert on 22 January, ‘I have taken no responsibility with regard to Balaclava, which I consider an improper place for a woman.’[95] Their leader was Emma Langston, the Mother Eldress of an Anglican sisterhood, from the first group but also included some of the second group including two of Stanley’s ladies, Martha Clough and Jane Shaw Stewart, and five of her nurses, including Betsi Cadwaladr (who had asked to be moved from Scutari).[96]
A week later, Stanley, together with the remainder of her party, went to the newly extended hospital at Koulali, a converted barracks four miles up the coast from Scutari, on the edge of the Bosphorus. [97]Nightingale summarised her dispersal of what she termed ‘the new set’, i.e. Stanley’s party, in a letter to Sidney Herbert on 22January 1855: ‘Balaklava 7, Koulali 15, I take 21, Gone home 3. Total 46 (16 I have already taken some time)’.[98] Prior to the move to Koulali, Stanley wrote a long letter to Catherine Gladstone on 23 January, which is revealing about her state of mind at the time. She writes, ‘my position here is a wretched one, for I do not know who to trust.’ She tells her of her plans to go to Koulali and her earnest hope that she will be able to handover to one of her lady volunteers, Miss Anderson, ‘so as to allow me to come home. I do so long to do so and nothing keeps me here but a strong sense of duty and a wish to help my friends in this emergency and my country.’ Her disillusionment by this point with Nightingale is plain and she describes writing to Liz Herbert, stating that she hopes that she
will remember that I came out loving Florence as much as she did and that I was long and loth to believe she was not as great as I believed her to be…My whole judgement is against Florence’s view. For a long time I hoped to be convinced she was right, but that hope is now over.
She also told Gladstone of hearing ‘everyone complain about her’.[99] Meanwhile Nightingale was writing to her mother, Frances, that she was ‘perplexed’ by troubles on every side, ‘of which not the least (to me) is M. Stanley’s inexplicable conduct … she has intrigued with the embassy and set up an opposition … hospital at Koulali, of which I remain a nominal head’.[100] Clearly the friendship between the two women had been strained to breaking point. It was to prove beyond repair.
Stanley was appointed as Lady Superintendent of Koulali (although from 2 February, Mother Bridgeman was to take charge of the upper part of the hospital, when it was sub divided.)[101] Stanley’s ‘persistent snubbing’ by Nightingale was, according to Summers, ‘extremely counter-productive’, as Stanley was increasingly reliant on Lady Stratford, wife of the British ambassador to Constantinople, for help and support.[102] By the end of March, nurses were being sent directly to Koulali from London and Nightingale was planning to give up her responsibility for the hospital. Mary Stanley did not keep a journal or diary during the Crimean War, but she did later reflect on some of her nursing experiences in a magazine article when she returned to Turkey in 1861. It was at Koulali, she said, that she realised how protracted the results of war can be. ‘The battles were over. It was not the wounded we were called upon to tend, but those who were stricken down with fever, dysentery, and frost bites, from long exposure in the trenches’.[103]
The way that Stanley ran Koulali, and the input of the lady volunteers there, is contentious. For some commentators it was badly run and this, they argued, resulted in the highest mortality rates of any of the British run hospitals. Gill for example, describes it ‘a disaster for all concerned’.[104] For Nightingale this was a direct result of what she pejoratively termed the ‘Lady Plan’, and in letters to Sidney Herbert, ‘Her gift for the sharp phrase has fixed them in our vicarious memory as given to ‘spiritual flirtations’, ‘scampering about the wards’, and ‘wandering about with notebooks in their hands’ argues Summers.[105] However, she goes on to counter this by stating that most of the ladies were ‘seriously interested in nursing, and dedicated to the work as they perceived it’, giving Jane Shaw Stewart as an example.[106] Any debate about the standard of nursing at Koulali also needs to be examined within the context of the well documented issues about the hospital’s many structural deficiencies.[107] For example, Bostridge argues that ‘Despite widespread criticism of Koulali, not least for its defective ventilation and bad sanitation, its mortality rates to March 1855 were no worse than those for the General and Barrack Hospitals at Scutari.’[108] Work continues on a detailed analysis of the efficacy of the nursing work at Koulali, as part of this wider project, as well as examining underlying themes, including debates about what was nursing work and who should be doing it.[109]
For Stanley, whom as Tastard points out, had no hands-on nursing experience, the work proved both physically and emotionally draining and ‘the stress of this role quickly took this toll on her.’[110] It is telling that her mother, in a letter she wrote to Parthenope Nightingale before Stanley’s party set off, stated that ‘Mary has all the qualifications for this job- good traveller and voyager’ and felt that she would use her organisational skills to amalgamate and bring the party together, but she noted, ‘she has not (the qualifications) for the Hospital work.’[111] Sidney Herbert’s biographer, Lord Stanmore, also noted of Stanley,
Weakness resulting from ill-health rendered her incapable of much bodily exertion. Of this she was aware, lamenting her ability to carry a coal-shuttle or lift a pail of water, and it is with extreme reluctance that she found herself forced into a position she had not contemplated, and for which she was physically ill-fitted.[112]
Stanmore does not reference this but may well have been speaking from personal knowledge, as he and Stanley were near contemporaries. In a letter to her sister-in-law, Eliza, written on 25 March 1855, Stanley acknowledges this: ‘I feel so utterly worn out and unfit to bear the exertion … I have not power or strength to do the work’ but then goes on to say ‘I have shown what nurses can do … the very thought of it gives me strength to last these last days’.[113]
After just over two months at Koulali and after ongoing disputes with Nightingale over the funding for Stanley’s party, who had the ultimate authority for nursing there and then a final disagreement over who should be her successor, Mary Stanley left for England on 2 April 1855. Two days before, she had attended the funeral of one of her lady volunteers, Miss Smythe, who had died of ‘a malignant form of typhus fever’.[114] Stanley was, according to Bostridge, ‘worn down by worry and ill-health’.[115] Before she left the East, Stanley formally converted to the Roman Catholic church under the auspices of the Sisters of Mercy’s chaplain, Father Ronan, although it was to be sometime before her family became aware of this.
Post Crimea
Summers has stated that when Mary Stanley left for home, her relationship with Florence Nightingale ‘had been effectively severed … and the two friends never met or corresponded again’.[116] In fact, they did correspond over the next few months as primary sources reveal. Stanley became involved with the disaffected Charlotte Salisbury, who had been dismissed for dishonesty and sent home from the East by Nightingale in October 1855, having worked there since June of that year.[117] Although they had not worked together in the Crimea, Stanley supported her in her unsuccessful legal action against Nightingale and as Bostridge says, ‘unwisely became a focus for the disaffected’, including seemingly communicating with others disillusioned with Nightingale.[118] Nightingale wrote copiously in her letters about the Salisbury case, which she felt was unjust, took up too much of her valuable time and which O’Malley described as being, ‘endless and extremely painful’ for Nightingale.[119] It also followed a period of debilitating illness which Nightingale had experienced during her time on the Crimean Peninsula (and which was to have long term consequences for her health).[120] Yet despite her involvement in the Salisbury affair, Stanley seems to have tried to repair relations with Nightingale by writing her a series of long letters over the winter of 1855-6 and at one point even offered to return to the East.[121] Nightingale, perhaps not surprisingly, rebuffed her attempts at reconciliation, writing finally in January 1856,
I have nothing further to say…I have never known you…The pain you have given me has not been by differing not by anything for which forgiveness can be asked, but by not being yourself, or at least what I thought was yourself. You say I truly loved you. No-one would ever love you better.[122]
This seems to mark the end of their correspondence.
In the Summer of 1861, Stanley returned to the East and visited Constantinople, and what was left of Koulali. When she returned to England, her brother recorded that she ‘resumed her quiet course of usefulness’.[123] She never married. She continued to live with her mother, until Mrs Stanley died in 1862, and remained close to her brother, Arthur. He became Dean of Westminster in 1864, having married the month before, and after he was widowed in 1876, she often supported him at social events in the deanery at Westminster Abbey.[124] In London, she established a savings club, replicating her previous philanthropic activity in Norwich. A letter that she wrote to The Times in October 1870, illustrates this. She stated that the number of depositors in her savings club had risen from 600 to 900 and that their money ‘formerly spent in drinking is now laid down for rent, clothing and wholesome food’.[125] With the donations she had collected the previous year, ‘near 500 families were thus fed and watered weekly through the winter months’ and she appealed for more funds.[126] She bought a house in Westminster, in which she founded an industrial laundry and later a needlework society, which employed the wives of those men who had served in the Crimea, through a contract with the government to supply army clothing. She also helped the author, Mrs Gaskell, in Manchester and Preston during the cotton famine in the early 1860s, ‘in regulating and distributed the fund for the distressed weavers in the factories’.[127] Her brother also states that her ‘power of organisation’ enabled her to be active in the National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded in War (later to become the British Red Cross), particularly in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1.[128] She also used these organisational skills in establishing what she called a ‘Flower Mission’, establishing a network of donors who sent flowers from the countryside to be distributed to the sick and poor in London hospitals. [129]
[Figure 2] Mary Stanley’s headstone: photograph by the author
In 1873, she published a novel (under the pseudonym, ‘A Sketcher from Nature’), which she dedicated to her sister and which seems to have been based on her early life.[130] She also continued to travel, spending her summers in Switzerland.[131] In the autumn of 1879, she had visited the Italian Lakes and Venice with her widowed brother and then seems to have caught a chest infection, to which her brother says, ‘her fragile frame succumbed’.[132] She died at her home in London aged 65, on 28 November 1879, of ‘a sudden and severe inflammation of the lungs’.[133] At her request, after a requiem mass on 1 December in St Mary’s, the Roman Catholic church in Chelsea where she had worshipped, her body was brought back to Cheshire and was buried in the graveyard of St Mary’s Church, next to her birthplace and childhood home at Alderley, and with her mother.[134] The funeral in the churchyard was conducted by her brother, Arthur, the Dean of Westminster and her brother-in-law, the Dean of Llandaff (Charles Vaughan), together with the local rector, Reverend E. Bell. According to Arthur, ‘she was buried in the spot which she herself had chosen, under the mingled shade of the old yew tree and its mass of embracing ivy’.[135] In the inscription on the monumental tablets commemorating her family inside the church, it reads, ‘Mary Stanley…by patience continuance in well-doing endeared to many hearts old and young, she cheered the friendless, raised the poor, nursed the sick and the wounded, at Norwich, Westminster, and on the shores of the Bosphorus’.[136] Amongst her obituaries, one said that ‘She will be sorely missed and long remembered’ because of ‘her deep piety, her overflowing kindness, her unfailing sympathy and her large-minded tolerance.’[137]
Analysis
As this article already illustrates, commentators vary widely in their interpretations of Stanley’s character, behaviour and her impact, if any, on nursing. Hinton, speaking more widely about the Crimean War, cautions
There is probably no important event in the past of which the historiography is free from misinformation, misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or mistakes; and in this regard the Crimean War is no exception. Whether these misinterpretations are the result of inadequate research, a misunderstanding of the facts, or because misinformation has been deliberately disseminated to further a particular agenda or prejudice is not always obvious.[138]
This is certainly true of any discussion of nursing in this war, aspects of which remain extremely contentious, including the character, actions and role of Mary Stanley.
Some authors have been particularly hostile to Stanley. Examples include Catherine Gladstone’s biographer, Georgina Battiscombe, who described her as ‘an ambitious and unscrupulous woman who was secretly anxious to steal some of the limelight from “dear Flo”.’[139] Some Nightingale biographers follow suit. Smith said of Mary Stanley, that she was ‘a gawky, short-sighted woman, plodding through life aspiring to parish visiting and other good works, successfully attaching herself to more powerful personalities.’[140] Woodham-Smith was equally negative: ‘In the confused, unbalanced mind of Mary Stanley there was a mixture of religious fervour … and jealousy’,[141] perhaps building on O’Malley’s description of her twenty years earlier, ‘A strange, emotional creature, not much controlled by reason’.[142] Perhaps most damningly are Gill’s comments: ‘Mary Stanley was exactly the kind of woman – privileged, idle, self-absorbed, disorganized, untrained, undisciplined, demanding – that Florence Nightingale had been trying to get away from all her life’ and ‘Everyone at Scutari and Constantinople disliked Mary Stanley’.[143] It is often not clear which, if any, primary sources these authors are basing their assertions on. A contemporary of Stanley, the writer, Jane Welsh Carlyle, as previously noted, described her as ‘a very considerable of a goose’ and of being of ‘Crimean notoriety’, when she saw her socially in 1856.[144] This was only a year after Stanley’s return from the East and may relate to the failure of Charlotte Salisbury’s legal case against Nightingale, which Stanley had supported. It also has to be seen in the context of Jane Welsh Carlyle’s acerbic wit, for which she was noted, and during a time that biographers have called ‘her dark years’, when she was experiencing great unhappiness.[145]
More positive comments can be found amongst some of the nurses and ladies in her party. For example, Miss H. Tebbutt wrote of her, ‘Poor Miss Stanley it has been a troublesome undertaking for her and I shall be right glad to see her start for England although I shall be sorry on my own account. She has been most kind to all but she sometimes looks so tired.’[146] Another of the ladies, Fanny Taylor, said, ‘She was deservedly much beloved by all for her just government of the community, her uniform sweetness of temper and thoughtful kindness for all.’[147] The only nurse in the party to leave a record of her experiences was Betsi Cadwaladr who was unfailing in her praise of Stanley in her memoirs: ‘If anyone wants Miss Stanley’s character, the people from Koulali can give it: and she well deserves their praises’ (but it must be acknowledged that Cadwaladr was consistently hostile to Nightingale).[148] Stanmore, Sidney Herbert’s biographer, acknowledged that ‘Miss Stanley did not possess Miss Nightingale’s powers of organisation or her strength of will. But in tact and sympathy she equalled if she did not excel her.’[149] Thus, attitudes towards Stanley vary widely both in both the primary and secondary sources. This article has attempted to give a more even-handed treatment of Stanley by a detailed examination of the source material, because as Bostridge states, ‘In the subsequent, and often, partisan retellings of the unhappy demise of the Nightingale-Stanley relationship, the women have each found their adherents. However, the fault on both sides was more equally matched than has sometimes been admitted’.[150]
Conclusion
Mary Stanley’s name is now largely unknown. Even back in 1896, the editor of the Nursing Record remarked that while Florence Nightingale’s name would be long remembered, ‘the Nurses who accompanied her to the Crimea are already forgotten’ and argued that, ‘It does not detract from “the commanding genius” of Miss Nightingale to endeavour to give her fellow Crimean nurses their due and individual meed (sic) of praise.’[151] The journal therefore published an article about Mary Stanley, ‘with the object of redeeming from utter oblivion the life of a woman well worthy of the country’s gratitude’ but very little else has been written about her, except within the context of the Crimean altercations and some of it, as has been illustrated, has been in very negative terms. [152] For Monica Baly, ‘Mary Stanley personifies the fate of a number of earnest upper- class women who were seeking a mission in life when opportunities were few.’[153]
By the time of Stanley’s death, Bostridge asserts that ‘the power of the Nightingale icon had ensured that the figure of Mary Stanley had largely dissolved from the pages of nursing history.’[154] Reflecting on her life, her brother wrote of her, ‘The feeling that her public labours were for the most part unacknowledged and almost unknown … cast something of a shade over her life, but she toiled on with that indomitable purpose and quiet energy which were among her chief characteristics’.[155] This project aims to bring Mary Stanley out of the shade and into the light, where her contributions can be critically analysed and recognised and this work continues.
Endnotes
[1] Jane Carlyle, New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801-1866). https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/carlyle/newlam/nlm201.html accessed 7 September 2024
[2] Over 200 women from Britain and Ireland went to nurse in the Crimean War. Their names are listed inThe Register of Nurses Sent to the Military Hospitals in the East. Florence Nightingale Museum Collection, https://www.florence-nightingale.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/Register-of-Nurses.pdf accessed online 2 August 2024.
[3] Carol Helmstadter, Beyond Nightingale. Nursing on the Crimean War Battlefields (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020); Helen Rappaport, In Search of Mary Seacole (London: Simon and Schuster, 2022).
[4] Helmstadter, Beyond Nightingale.
[5] An overview of the Stanley family’s history and connections can be found in Nancy Mitford (ed.), The Ladies of Alderley: being the Letters between Maria Josepha, Lady Stanley of Alderley and her Daughter-in-Law, Henrietta Maria Stanley during the Years 1841-1850 (London: Chapman & Hall, 1938), xix-xxv.
[6] Arthur Stanley, Memoirs of Edward and Catherine Stanley (London: John Murray, 1880).
[7] The village is now known as Nether Alderley, which distinguishes it from Alderley Edge to the north. The latter was known as Chorley in the Stanleys’ time. This change in name was at the behest of the railway company (to prevent confusion with Chorley in Lancashire). Alderley Edge had seen considerable growth in its size after the railway opened in 1841. Robert Dore, Cheshire (London: BT Batsford Ltd, 1977), 74-5.
[8] Monica Baly, ‘Stanley, Mary (1813-1879)’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
[9] Kitty Stanley kept two diaries in which she recorded her children’s progress: Cheshire Record Office DSA/75 Catherine Stanley, Mother’s Journal of Four Children, 1812-1819 and DSA/195 transcript of Catherine Stanley, Mother’s Journal of Four Children, 1820-1830.
[10] John Witheridge, Excellent Dr Stanley. The Life of Dean Stanley of Westminster (Norwich: Michael Riley, 2013), 25.
[11] Stanley, Memoirs of Edward and Catherine Stanley, 351.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Letter from Mrs H.M. Stanley to Edward Stanley (her husband), 8 April 1846, cited in Mitford, The Ladies of Alderley, 129.
[14] Anonymous, ‘“Our Pioneers” Miss Mary Stanley, A Crimean Nurse.’ Nursing Record 21 March 1896, 238.
[15] Witheridge, Excellent Dr Stanley, 41.
[16] Lynn McDonald (ed.), Florence Nightingale’s European Travels. Collected Works of Florence Nightingale. Volume Seven. (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2004).
[17] David Newsome, ‘Henry Edward Manning (1808–1892’), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
[18] Colin Matthew, ‘Herbert, Sidney, first Baron Herbert of Lea (1810–1861)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Valerie Bonham, ‘Herbert, (Mary) Elizabeth, Lady Herbert of Lea (1822–1911)’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Manning had been at both Harrow School and then Oxford with Sidney Herbert.
[19] Wellcome Collection/Claydon Archives MS 9045 f19, letter from Serena Bracebridge to Parthenope Nightingale cited in Gillian Gill, Nightingales. The Story of Florence Nightingale and her Family (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2004), 216.
[20] Robert Dingwall, Anne Marie Rafferty and Charles Webster, An Introduction to the Social History of Nursing (London: Routledge, 1988), 39.
[21] Peter Hammond, Dean Stanley of Westminster. A Life (Worthing, Churchman Publishing, 1987). Stanley left Canterbury in 1858, to move back to Oxford to become the Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History and a Canon of Christchurch Cathedral. He remained in Oxford until offered the post of Dean of Westminster in 1863.
[22] Augustus Hare, Story of My Life (London: George Allen, 1896).
[23] Anonymous [Mary Stanley], Hospitals and Sisterhoods (London: John Murray, 1854).
[24] Francis Smith, Florence Nightingale, Reputation and Power. (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 27; Lynn McDonald (ed.), Florence Nightingale’s Spiritual Journey. Collected Works of Florence Nightingale. Volume Two (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2001).
[25] Baly, ‘Stanley, Mary’, 2.
[26] The Crimean War was not so called in this period; this is a more modern term that is now used to describe the conflict. At the time, it was more commonly known as the War in the East. Lynn McDonald (ed.), Florence Nightingale. The Crimean War. Collected Works of Florence Nightingale. Volume Fourteen (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2010), 7.
[27] James Barbary, The Crimean War (London: Victor Gollancz, 1972).
[28] Orlando Figes, Crimea. The Last Crusade (London: Allen Lane, 2010), xxii.
[29] Ian Fletcher and Natalia Ishchenko, The Crimean War. A Clash of Empires (Staplehurst: Spellmount Limited, 2004), 531-2.
[30] Roger Hudson (ed.), William Russell. Special Correspondent of the Times (London: The Folio Society, 1995), xviii. The Times newspaper was to the fore in reporting about the war, primarily by having its own war correspondent, William Howard Russell, reporting from the Crimea after having accompanied the British expeditionary force there; however, reports also came from Thomas Chenery, their correspondent in Constantinople.
[31] Anonymous, “Our Pioneers”, 238.
[32] Letter from Maria Josepha Lady Stanley to Lady (Henrietta Stanley) 20 October 1854 cited in Mitford, The Stanleys of Alderley, 108.
[33] Matthew, ‘Herbert, Sidney’; Mark Bostridge, Florence Nightingale (London: Penguin, 2008).
[34] Ibid. 208
[35] Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale. Vol 1. 1820-1861 (London: Macmillan and Co, 1913), 341.
[36] Ida O’Malley, Florence Nightingale, 1820-1856. A study of her life down to the end of the Crimean War (London: Thomas Butterworth, 1931), 250.
[37] Cited in Lord Stanmore, Sidney Herbert. Lord Herbert of Lea. A Memoir. Volume 1 (London: John Murray, 1906), 342.
[38] Gill, Nightingales, 318.
[39] Anne Summers, ‘Pride and Prejudice: Ladies and Nurses in the Crimean War’, History Workshop Journal 16/1 (1983), 33.
[40] Georgina Battiscombe, Mrs Gladstone. Portrait of a Marriage (London: Constable, 1956), 103; Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale (London: Constable & Co, 1950), 106.
[41] National Archives, WO 25/264 Nurses Testimonials c.1851-1856; Darcie Mawby, Nursing Lives in the Crimean War [online], University of Nottingham blog. Available at: accessed 20 August 2024.https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/florencenightingale/2020/05/07/nursing-lives-in-the-crimean-war/[accessed 20 August 2024].
[42] Deidre Beddoe, ‘Davis (nee Cadwaladr), Elizabeth (Betsy)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Jane Williams (ed.), Betsy Cadwaladyr: A Balaclava Nurse. An Autobiography of Elizabeth Davis (Dinna Powys; Honno, 2005), 241-242.
[43] A Lady Volunteer [Frances Taylor], Eastern Hospitals and English Nurses: The Narrative of Twelve Months’ Experience in the Hospitals of Koulali and Scutari (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1857), 7.
[44] Authors vary in the way that they have described the composition of Mary Stanley’s group. Some give the number of Ladies as nine and nurses as twenty two: see for example Terry Tastard Nightingale’s Nuns and the Crimean War (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2002), 16. Others give ten ladies and twenty one nurses: Dingwall et al, Introduction to the Social History of Nursing, 43.
[45] O’Malley, Florence Nightingale, 252; Letter from Elizabeth Herbert 9 September 1854 cited in Eliza Pollard, Florence Nightingale. The Wounded Soldier’s Friend (London: S.W. Partridge, 1911), 103.
[46] Taylor, Eastern Hospitals and English Nurses.
[47] Wellcome Collection/ Claydon Archives, MS9059/1 letter from Catherine Stanley to Parthenope Nightingale, 27 November 1854.
[48] Sue Goldie (ed.) “I have done my duty” Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War. 1854-56(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 67.
[49] Summers, Pride and Prejudice, 42.
[50] Cited in Pollard, Florence Nightingale, 103.
[51] A full list of their names and convents can be found in Shane Leslie, ‘Forgotten passages in the life of Florence Nightingale’ Dublin Review 161/323 (1917), 196-7; McDonald, The Crimean War, 76.
[52] Bostridge, Florence Nightingale, 239.
[53] M.S. [Mary Stanley], ‘Ten Days in the Crimea’ Macmillan’s Magazine 5 (1862), 301.
[54]This is the date given by Taylor, Eastern Hospitals and English Nurses, 30 and several other commentators. N.B Some authors have given the date of their arrival as 15 December 1854, for example Woodham-Smith Florence Nightingale, 144; Goldie, I have done my duty, 49; and Helen Rappaport, No Place for Ladies. The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War (London: Aurum Press, 2007), 121. Stanmore, Sidney Herbert, 356 gives 18 December.
[55] Rappaport, No Place for Ladies, 120.
[56] Tastard, Nightingale’s Nuns, 16.
[57] Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale, 245.
[58] McDonald, The Crimean War, 75.
[59] Letter from Florence Nightingale to Sidney Herbert, 15 December 1854, cited in Goldie, I have done my duty, 50-1.
[60] Goldie, I have done my duty, 4.
[61] Letter from Sidney Herbert to the Editor of the Morning Chronicle, 21 October 1845 cited in Goldie, I have done my duty, 49.
[62] Gill, Nightingales, 365.
[63] Goldie, I have done my duty, 28.
[64] McDonald, The Crimean War, 139.
[65] Bostridge, Florence Nightingale, 237.
[66] Sister Mary Aloysius (Doyle), A Sister of Mercy’s Memories of the Crimea (London: Burns and Oates, 1897), 28.
[67] Tastard, Nightingale’s Nuns, 32.
[68] Cited by Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale, 191.
[69] Ibid. 192.
[70] Taylor, Eastern Hospitals and English Nurses, 33-34.
[71] Williams, Betsy Cadwaladyr, 242.
[72] Taylor, Eastern Hospitals and English Nurses, 37.
[73] Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale, 145.
[74] Stanmore, Sidney Herbert, 373.
[75] Bostridge, Florence Nightingale.
[76] Wellcome Collection/ Claydon Archives, MS9059/2 account by Mary Stanley, 21 December 1854.
[77] Bostridge, Florence Nightingale, 240.
[78] Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale, 147.
[79] Letter from Florence Nightingale to Sidney Herbert, Christmas Day 1854, cited in Goldie, I have done my duty, 55.
[80] Ibid 56-7.
[81] Summers, Pride and Prejudice, 42.
[82] Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale, 149.
[83] Stanmore, Sidney Herbert, 376.
[84] Taylor, Eastern Hospitals and English Nurses, 41.
[85] Letter from Florence Nightingale to Sidney Herbert, Christmas Day 1854, cited in Goldie, I have done my duty, 55.
[86] Bostridge, Florence Nightingale, 242.
[87] McDonald, The Crimean War, 99; Goldie, I have done my duty, 62.
[88] The strait of water between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmora.
[89] Taylor, Eastern Hospitals and English Nurses, 55.
[90] Williams, Betsy Cadwaladyr, 252.
[91] Taylor, Eastern Hospitals and English Nurses, 45.
[92] Summers, Pride and Prejudice, 42.
[93] McDonald, The Crimean War, 20.
[94] Summers, Pride and Prejudice, 42.
[95] McDonald, The Crimean War, 123.
[96] Williams, Betsy Cadwaladyr, 256.
[97] A host of different spellings were used by Nightingale and other correspondents including Kulali, Kuleli, Kulleli, Kullali and Khoulali.
[98] Cited in McDonald, The Crimean War, 123.
[99] Gladstone Library Archives, MSS 802 letter from Mary Stanley to Catherine Gladstone, 23 January 1855.
[100] McDonald, The Crimean War, 131.
[101] Tastard, Nightingale’s Nuns, 72. N.B. Helmstadter, Beyond Nightingale, 108 describes this as the lower hospital but then amends this to the upper hospital on 116.
[102] Summers, Pride and Prejudice, 43.
[103] M.S. [Mary Stanley], ‘Ten Days in the Crimea’, Macmillan’s Magazine 5, (1862), 301-311.
[104] Gill, Nightingales, 66.
[105] Cited in Goldie, I have done my duty, 92; Anne Summers, Women as voluntary and professional military nurses in Great Britain, 1854-1914 (unpublished PhD thesis, The Open University, 1986), 41.
[106] Ibid.
[107] John Shepherd, The Crimean Doctors: A History of the British Medical Services in the Crimean War.Volume Two (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991), 351.
[108] Bostridge, Florence Nightingale, 243.
[109] Dingwall et al, Introduction to the Social History of Nursing, 43.
[110] Tastard, Nightingale’s Nuns, 72.
[111] Wellcome Collection/ Claydon Archives, MS9059/1 letter from Catherine Stanley to Parthenope Nightingale, 27 November 1854.
[112] Stanmore, Sidney Herbert, 377.
[113] Cheshire Record Office DSA/920 letters to Eliza Stanley, 1846-1891.
[114] Taylor, Eastern Hospitals and English Nurses, 140.
[115] Bostridge, Florence Nightingale, 244.
[116] Summers, Pride and Prejudice, 43.
[117] Helmstadter, Beyond Nightingale, 87.
[118] Bostridge, Florence Nightingale, 244
[119] O’Malley, Florence Nightingale, 346.
[120] Bostridge, Florence Nightingale, 278.
[121] O’Malley, Florence Nightingale, 353, 328.
[122] McDonald, The Crimean War, 355.
[123] Stanley, Memoirs of Edward and Catherine Stanley, 350.
[124] Witheridge, Excellent Dr Stanley. He married Lady Augusta Bruce, a lady in waiting to Queen Victoria.
[125] Mary Stanley, ‘An Appeal’, Chepstow Weekly Advertiser 22 October 1870, 3.
[126] Stanley, Memoirs of Edward and Catherine Stanley, 350.
[127] Ibid. 351.
[128] This society was formed in 1870 and became known as the British Red Cross Society from 1905. Mary Stanley was a member of the newly formed Ladies’ Committee from 1870. The Red Cross. Available at: https://www.redcross.org.uk/stories/our-movement/our-history/breaking-barriers—women-leaders-from-our-history [accessed 1 September 2024].
[129] Anonymous, ‘Flowers in Hospital’, The Times 15 June 1875, 5.
[130] Mary Stanley, True to Life: A Simple Story (London: Macmillan, 1873).
[131] Stanley, Memoirs of Edward and Catherine Stanley, 350.
[132] Rowland Prothero, The life and correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley DD Late Dean of Westminster volume II (London: John Murray, 1894), 545; Stanley, Memoirs of Edward and Catherine Stanley, 350.
[133] Anonymous, ‘Obituary’ The Times 28 November 1879, 8.
[134] Anonymous, ‘The Late Miss Stanley’ The Times, 1 December 1879, 9.
[135] Stanley, Memoirs of Edward and Catherine Stanley, 354.
[136] Author’s visit to the church June 2024.
[137] Anonymous, ‘The late Miss Stanley’ Dundee Evening Telegraph, 4 December 1879, 3.
[138] Mike Hinton, ‘Reporting the Crimean War: Misinformation and Misinterpretation’, Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 20 (2015).
[139] Battiscombe, Mrs Gladstone, 103.
[140] Smith, Florence Nightingale, Reputation and Power, 31.
[141] Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale, 143.
[142] O’Malley, Florence Nightingale, 135.
[143] Gill, Nightingales, 363, 367.
[144] Carlyle, New Letters, 117.
[145] Kenneth Fielding and David Sorensen, ‘Carlyle, Jane Baillie Welsh (1801–1866)’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
[146] Gladstone’s Library Archives, MSS 815 letter from H. Tebbutt to Catherine Gladstone, undated [1855].
[147] Taylor, Eastern Hospitals and English Nurses, 56.
[148] Williams, Betsy Cadwaladyr, 252.
[149] Stanmore, Sidney Herbert, 377.
[150] Bostridge, Florence Nightingale, 282.
[151] Anonymous, ‘“Our Pioneers”’, 238.
[152] Ibid.
[153] Baly, ‘Stanley, Mary’, 1.
[154] Bostridge, Florence Nightingale, 245.
[155] Stanley, Memoirs of Edward and Catherine Stanley, 350.
