"Florence Nightingale" by Cecil Woodham-Smith

 This is a biography of the woman who made nursing respectable, principally with her service in the Crimean War.

She was born into a wealthy family. Her mother was one of ten children of William Smith, a progressive MP, whose rich merchant father Samuel Smith "had come to the assistance of Flora Macdonald [the Jacobite who helped Bonnie Prince Charlie escape after being defeated at Culloden] when she was a penniless prisoner in the Tower [of London] ... To show his sympathy with the sturggle of the American colonists for freedom in the War of Independence he had relinquished his title to a large part of the city of Savannah." (C 1) Florence's mother's sisters included Anne who lived in "Waverley Abbey near Farnham, the house which gave Scott the title for the Waverley novels" (C 1) and Joanna who married into the Bonham Carter family which has long been important in British public life; the actress Helena Bonham Carter is a descendant.

Such a background gave Florence an entree in the British social scene and invaluable contacts with influential people. It was knowing Sidney Herbert, the Secretary at War in 1852, which got her the Crimea gig. As a teenager she knew Lord Palmerston. and his son-in-law Lord Ashley who, as Lord Shaftesbury became known for his philanthropy and was commemorated by the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus. At 22 she stayed at Chatsworth with the Duke of Devonshire; the entertainments being arranged by Joseph Paxton (the head gardener who later desinged the Crystal Palace and whose biography is reviewed here). At 24 she met Julia Ward Howe, author of the Battle Hymn of the American Republic. In 1852 (aged 32) she was friends with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot. (C 5) It was a turbulent time for foreign travel. In 1848 the Nightingale family had to leave Rome as Garibaldi was arriving to defend it against foreign troops. (C 4)

However, her family background proved a huge disadvantage in pursuing her nursing vocation. Nursing was immensely unrespectable. Hospitals were for the poor, were overcrowded, smelly and filthy and nurses were notoriously immoral: one head nurse told FN that "she had never known a nurse who was not drunken, and there was immoral conduct practised in the very wards", including prostitution. (C 4). Even fourteen of the nurses that FN would select to go to the Crimea were described as being "of no particular religion unless the worship of Bacchus should be revived." (C 7) Little wonder that there was family opposition to FN's choice of career.

But the opposition was intense. FN's sister Parthenope was immensely jealous of her. Florence was younger, prettier and more intelligent. Parthenope and their mother Fanny were manipulative and controlling, demanding FN stay with them, throwing hysterical fits which required FN to stay at home and look after them whenever FN tried to go somewhere to learn about nursing. At the age of 17, FN was called by God; at 25 she realised she was called to be a nurse but it was a further eight years before she finally left home to pursue her career. And FN was one of the strongest-minded women possible! She wrote "Women don't consider themselves as human beings at all. There is absolutely no God, no country, no duty to them at all, except family ... I know nothing like the petty grinding tyranny of a good English family." (C 5)

Her father wasn't much help to her. "As long as he had books and conversation he was indifferent to other pleasures" (C 1) although later in the family battle he sided with her and corresponded with her through his club so that her letters to him wouldn't have to be read out by his wife at the breakfast table.

She was a bit weird. "As a very young child she had an obsession that she was not like other people. She was a monster. That was her secret, which might at any moment be found out." (C 1)

She certainly ended up a monster. Her dysfunctional relationship with illness distorted her relationships. The examples of her mother and her sister, using illness to get their own way, was one she learned to follow. Because she was prepared to sacrifice herself, working long hours (such as 6AM to 11PM) she expected others to do the same and she was angrily intolerant of those who couldn't.  People died under her yoke because she drove them on, refusing to accept that they were really ill: "She regarded bad health as her personal monopoly." (C 16) "What she felt, what she endured, must be unique. No illness was to be compared with her illness, no self-sacrifice was to be compared to her self-sacrifice; no grief could rival her grief." (C 16)  Thus she told the mortally ill Sidney Herbert that his symptoms were "fancies" (C 13) By insisting he kept working she "forced him to sign his own death warrant." (C 16) When he finally resigned she was bitter and contemptuous and "cut herself off from him" (C 16). When Aunt Mai returned to her (ill) husband after looking after FN for three years, FN "did not forgive Aunt Mai for nearly twenty years." (C 16) Much later she realised; "she said she felt like a vampire who had sucked Sidney Herbert's ... blood." (C 19) But even in old age, when she went back to her family, she criticised her sister for making a song and dance about her health: "In fact her sister was suffering from the first symptoms of the arthritis which is  a few years turned her into a helpless cripple." (C 22) FN was not the world's most empathetic nurse!

Another aspect of this strange attitude towards illness was the way she felt it ennobled. "Suffering lifts its victim above normal values. While suffering endures, there is neither good nor bad, valuable nor invaluable, enemy nor friend." (C 20)

Part of the problem was that "she refused to consider what had been done, only what had not" (C 19); she was a perfectionist.

One of the ways she kept working despite ill-healthy was by the "new-fangled operation of putting opium under the skin which relieves one for twenty-four hours - but does not improve the vivacity or serenity of one's intellect". (C 19)

Was she a lesbian?(Does it matter?) When she was young she conceived a 'passion' for a friend; in order to keep close to the friend she encouraged the friend's brother to the point where he proposed and was rejected; the family were very angry. She enjoyed close relationships with other women but rejected all the proposals of marriage she had from men. At the end of the day she probably died a virgin. But was this because she was a lesbian or because she had a call from God?

The problems in the Crimea started with government cuts. "There were departments which during forty years of economy had been cut down nearer and still nearer the bone." The British Army Medical Service had 12 clerks in its office. (C 8) Another problem was the inflexible administration: nothing could be done without an order: "In January 1855, when the army before Sebastopol was being ravaged by scurvy, a shipload of cabbages was thrown into the harbour at Balaclava on the ground that it was not consigned to anyone." (C 9) "Even the horses which had taken part in the Charge of the Light Brigade had starved to death." (C 9)

A large part of the problem was the attitude of the senior officers (who were aristocrats and gentlemen) to the ordinary soldier (who were poor people). FN was firmly on the side of the ordinary soldier. "It has been said by officers," she pointed out, "that there are three causes which make a soldier enlist, viz. being out of work, in a state of intoxication, or, jilted by his sweetheart." Did this mean that they should therefore encourage "more poverty, more drink, more faithless sweethearts"?

• Money was not the motive for the common soldier. "The supreme loyalty which made a man give his life for his comrade, the courage which enabled him to advance steadily under fire, were displayed by men who were paid a shilling a day."(C 11)
• "She found that a great many of the men could neither read nor write, and she asked if she might engage a schoolmaster. This was absolutely refused. 'You are spoiling the brutes', Lord William Paulet told her." (C 11)

But in the end FN's work nursing did little to prevent the death rate in the hospitals rising. The most effective action was taken by a Sanitary Commission consisting of Dr John Sutherland, Sir Robert Rawlinson, a civil engineer, and Dr Milroy. They investigated the water supply and the sewers, limewashed the walls, killed vermin and destroyed the furniture that harboured rats (C 9). In the three months after their work the mortality rate fell from 14.5% to 5.2% (C 10) It had been 73% in six months at one stage. (C 12)

Once the Crimea was over FN worked tirelessly to improve public health, especially in the army and in India. She found that the death rates in barracks was greater than the neighbouring civilian district: five times as much in St Pancras and Knightsbridge; this despite the fact that the soldiers "were all young strong men who had been subjected to a medical examination to guarantee their physical fitness. ...soldiers are certainly killed by these neglects ... as if they were drawn up on Salisbury Plain and shot" (C 13)

Other fascinating moments:

• One of the nurses in the Crimea was Miss Polidori, sister to Byron's doctor John Polidori, who wrote The Vampyre, and aunt to the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. (C 8)
• One lady wrote to ask for a job: "I have had a passion for soldiers all my life and now wish to get my bread by it." (C 12)
• Sidney Herbert's motto was "It takes two to make a quarrel and I won't be one." (C 13)

A fascinating portrait of a monster. It has certainly changed my understanding of the 'lady with the lamp'. She may have achieved great things but the people around her suffered tremendously and she never really acknowledged the sacrifices of anyone but herself; she was monstrously egocentric.

November 2019; 435 pages

Biographies of other Victorians:

• A Thing in Disguise: by Kate Colquhon: Joseph Paxton, the gardener who designed the Crystal Palace
• Stanley: Henry Morton Stanley, the psychopath who discovered Dr Livingstone: if I thought Nightingale was an unpleasant woman Stanley was far, far more horrible (although he had the excuse of a terrible childhood); both these two shared the characteristic of never believing another person could be ill and always thinking others hypochondriacs.
• Dickens by Peter Ackroyd
• Wilkie Collins by Peter Ackroyd

"Marlborough" by Richard Holmes

A fascinating biography of the British general who betrayed his friend, his monarch and the father of his sister's children during the Glorious Revolution and went on to win battle after battle during the War of Spanish Succession.

Full of fascinating glimpses of a bygone age:

• “A guinea was worth thirty shillings prior to the recoinage in 1696 and twenty-one shillings thereafter.”
• “In 1703 five dragoon broadswords cost £24 Scots, but just £2 Sterling.”
• Louis XIV refused Prince Eugène a commission because “there were rumours that Eugène had been too fond of other pages at court; his mother, caught up in accusations of witchcraft, was someone the king now regarded with horror, and in any case the lad was shockingly ugly.”
• “High temper rarely makes a successful contribution to labour relations on a building site.”
• “‘Captain’ Peter Drake served in the Spanish, Dutch, English and hahaFrench armies, often joining one without having completed the tiresome formalities which might properly have accompanied his discharge from another.”
• As a young man M enjoyed the favours of the by then aging and experienced Barbara Castlemaine who had been (and potentially still was) one of the mistresses of Charles II. She gave him a handsome £5000 present (possibly because of his gallantry in leaving her bedroom via the window when the King came to call) and a daughter (who later became a nun who had a child by James Douglas, Earl of Arran). Her other lovers included the playwright William Wycherley, and property developer Henry Jermyn. (C 1)
• The mother of Sarah Jennings, who became the wife of Marlborough, was accused of witchcraft: “She was certainly evil-tempered, may actually have been unhinged, and some suggested that she dabbled in the black arts and the procurement of that commodity most sought after by the court, pretty girls.” (C 2)
• When Queen Mary reminded Catherine Sedley that she had been one of the mistresses of James II, Catherine replied: “If I broke one of the commandments with your father, you have broken another against him.” (C 2)
• “We may doubt whether a tiny village like Westonzoyland actually contained sufficient alcohol to induce widespread drunkenness, even if the royal army was unfamiliar with the foot-tangling attributes of the local cider.” (C 2)
• When Anne succeeded William III she immediately sacked William’s chief minister Lord Romsey “though the broad arrow from his coat of arms long survived as an emblem of government property.” (C 4)
• The military ‘tattoo’ was originally a drum-beat designed to call soldiers back to camp from the local villages “its name derived from the Dutch doe ten tap toe ... ‘turn off the tap’ of the wine or beer barrel.” (C 4)
• When captured French general Marshal Tallard was a prisoner in Nottingham he grew celery, introducing it to England. (C 5)
• Q Anne sat either on her throne in Parliament or, when it was cold, on a bench by the fire. (C 6)
• “There is a hoary old tale of a bear-keeper who, hoping to administer physic to the creature, placed the potion in a piece of rolled-up paper, inserted one end into the bear’s mouth and the other into his own, and prepared to blow. The bear, alas, blew first.” (C 6)
• Marlborough’s daughter Henrietta, who became 2nd Duchess after his death, probably had a child by poet William Congreve after visiting Bath whose waters had “a wonderful influence on barren ladies, who often prove with child, even in their husbands’ absence.” (C 8)

August 2017; 482 pages

Richard Holmes has also written:

• The Age of Wonder: a brilliant history of the inventions of the late 1700s and early 1800s
• Coleridge: Early Visions: an excellent biography of the poet.

Another book of military history set in the same era (and also including the Battle of Sedgemoor) is All the King's Men by Saul David.

"The History of the Peloponnesian War" by Thucydides

This translation by Sir Richard Livingstone was first published in 1943 and the author makes parallels with events leading up to the Second World War. The translation is selective of parts of the original, and orders those parts on a slightly different order from the original, but this mostly works. The flaw is that it includes very little of the eighth book which Thucydides left incomplete but of which Livingstone leaves merely a stump.

What is remarkable about the book is that it is so modern. The events recorded cover a period in which Athens, mostly from sheer hubris, went from Empire to defeat. As such there are interesting parallels with the present situation in which the oligarchical Brexiteers hark back to the days of the British Empire in order to persuade the citizens of Britain to take risks. Let us hope that the results are not as devastating for the British as they were for the Athenians.

Thucydides has a very modern point of view. He is realpolitikal:

• “Men secure peace by using their power justly but by making it clear that they will not allow others to wrong them.” (1.71)
• “It has always been a law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger” (1.76)
• “Where force can be used, law is not needed.” (1.77)
• “Bad laws which are never changed are better for a city than good ones that have no authority.” (3.37)
• “Ordinary men usually manage public affairs better than their more gifted fellows.” (3.37)
• “Three failings most fatal to empire - pity, sentiment, and indulgence.” (3.40)
• “The question of justice arises only between parties equal in strength ... the strong do what they can, and the weak submit.” (5.89)

But he is also good at the psychology behind democratic politics:

• “Men seem to resent injustice more than violence; the former is regarded as unfair advantage taken by an equal, the latter is compulsion applied by a superior.” (1.77)
• “It is a common mistake in going to war to begin at the wrong end, to act first, and wait for disaster to discuss the matter.” (1.78)
• “Zeal is always at its height at the commencement of an undertaking.” (book 2)
• “Villainy is sooner called clever than simplicity good, and men in general are proud of cleverness and ashamed of simplicity.” (3.82)
• “The secret of this was the general extraordinary success, which made them confuse their strength with their hopes.” (4.65)
• “It is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use reason arbitrarily to thrust aside what they do not fancy.” (4.108)

The battle tactics include a perceptive observation about:

• How men fight:because the shield was held on the left arm making the right side more vulnerable the hoplite armies tended to swerve towards the right; this, he suggests, was because the man on the extreme right tended to move right leaving his neighbour's right exposed so he moved right, and so on.
• Disinformation: “Fire-signals of an attack were also raised towards Thebes; but the Plataeans in the town at once displayed a number of others, prepared beforehand for this very purpose, in order to render the enemy’s signals unintelligible, and to prevent his friends getting a true idea of what was passing.” (3.22)
• Geophysics: “About the same time that these earthquakes were so common, the sea at Orobiae, in Euboea, retiring from the then line of coast, returned in a huge wave and invaded a great part of the town, and retreated some of it still under water, so that what was once land is now sea; the inhabitants who could not reach the higher ground in time were drowned.” (3.89)

Selected quotes:

• “My history has been composed to be an everlasting possession, not the show-piece of an hour.” (1.22)
• “They [Athenians] were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others.” (1.70)
• “We are wise because we are educated with too little learning to despise the laws, and with too severe a self-control to disobey them.” (1.84)

OK, it got a bit tedious when there was yet another battle in a place whose name I failed to recognise but this is a problem I have with all war histories. Otherwise it was surprisingly readable.

March 2019; I read it on holiday in Greece travelling from Athens to Delphi, Olympia, and Nafplion; it was a little disappointing to drive past Sparta but at least I was on the Peloponnese.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Other books about war reviewed in this blog can be found on this page.

"The Battle of Hastings 1066: the uncomfortable truth" by John Grehan and Martin Mace

Not that uncomfortable. These authors simply contend that the Battle was not fought on Battle Hill where Battle Abbey was built (allegedly with the High Altar being on the spot that King Harold died) but was instead fought on the far higher and steeper nearby Caldbec Hill. The argument convinced me in the first few chapters and I really did not need the authors to belabour it quite as much as they did.

Apart from being higher and steeper, Caldbec Hill was the meeting point of Harold's army. It was the point at which important roads intersected and where three hundreds met. The was a Hoar Apple tree to mark the spot of the assembly and one of the original sources states that this was where the battle was fought. In addition, it was near the forest and an early source tells of William seeing the Saxons coming out of the trees. It made no sense for King Harold to move from his highly defensible meeting place whilst he was still awaiting further reinforcements down hill to the much gentler Battle Hill where his men, who fought on foot, could easily have been mown down by the Norman cavalry. Furthermore many of the early sources agree that the battle, which unusually for mediaeval battles lasted all day, proved very hard for the Normans because they had to fight uphill. Finally, a significant moment in the battle came when some of the Norman cavalry rode into a ravine and were suffocated, one on top of the other. There is a likely river near Caldbec Hill where this might have happened but not near Battle Hill.

And there have been archaeologists digging on Battle Hill without turning up any significant evidence of the thousands of men who were killed in this battle. Perhaps they should be excavating on Caldbec Hill instead.

OK. I think these two historians have proved their point. Argument ( more or less) over. But this book could have been half the length and still convinced me.

February 2015; 154 pages

"All the king's men" by Saul David

This book chronicles "the British redcoat in the era of sword and musket" from the first standing army of Charles II in 1661 to the battle of Waterloo in 1815. It starts with a brilliant prologue describing the (closer than normally accepted) battle of Sedgemoor of 1685 when the irregular rebels of the Duke of Monmouth were defeated by a small royal army that contained the future Duke of Marlborough. It then proceeds through the Glorious Revolution, the anti-Jacobite wars of William of Orange and the War of Spanish Succession culminating in Marlborough's successes at Blenheim etc; the Seven Years War with the Canadian success of James Wolfe; the failures in the American War of Independence; and the triumphs of the Duke of Wellington both in India, the Peninsula, and at Waterloo.

This is an unashamedly 'great man' version of history although there are many moments when the ordinary private is squeezed into the story of the great generals. There are times when David seems uncritical: some of the old stories about Waterloo, for example, are repeated without comment: did Wellington really call Waterloo a 'close-run thing'? But by and large these tactics keep the narrative rattling along; it could easily have been very boring.

I am not really a fan of military histories. I find it incredibly difficult to picture a battlefield and the long descriptions of columns advancing and flanks and wheeling squares leave me hopelessly confused. The maps in this book help little. Some maps of inadequately labelled: I did not realise the idfference between cavalry and infantry on one map until I encountered a better-labelled map later in the book. And I found the campaign maps frustrating: some were on too small a scale so that places mentioned in the text were off the map and others were on too large a scale: one map, for example, showed the entirety of Wellington's Peninsular campaign even though he advanced and retreated over several years.

I always like to pick up trivia. It fascinates me that famous people are often woven in and out of narrative threads that are far apart. Thus the doomed Duke of Monmouth had earlier been exiled for his part in the Rye House plot which had been against his own father. James Wolfe drilled his men in using their bayonets held at the hip rather than the shoulder many years before his martyr's death. William Cobbett 'accidentally' enlisted as a soldier and had to flee England after bringing allegations of corruption against some of his senior officers. The grand old Duke of York who was not much cop as a field commander was a fantastic administrator of the army. And the Duke of Wellington allegedly came up with the name Thomas Atkins (a soldier who had died at Breda against the French in 1794) to go on the specimen page of the Army paybook, thus creating the immortal Tommy.

An enjoyable book with a careful mixture of great men and little. March 2013; 500 pages