Mary Seacole

Mary Jane Seacole (née Grant; 23 November 1805 – 14 May 1881) was a Jamaican nurse and businesswoman. She was famous for her nursing work during the Crimean War and for publishing the first autobiography written by a woman of African descent in Britain.

Seacole was born in Kingston, Jamaica, to a Creole mother who ran a boarding house and had herbalist skills as a "doctress". In 1990, Seacole was (posthumously) awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit. In 2004, she was voted the greatest Black Briton in a survey conducted in 2003 by the black heritage website Every Generation.

Seacole went to the Crimean War in 1855 with the plan of setting up the "British Hotel", as "a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers". However, chef Alexis Soyer told her that officers did not need overnight accommodation, so she instead made it into a restaurant/bar/catering service. It proved to be very popular and she and her business partner, a relative of her late husband, did well on it until the end of the war. Her 1857 memoir, Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, includes three chapters of the food she served and the encounters she had with officers, some of them high-ranking, and including the commander of the Turkish forces.

Mrs Seacole missed the first three major battles of the war, as she was busy in London attending to her gold investments—she had arrived from Panama, where she had provided services for prospectors going overland to and from the California Gold Rush. She gave assistance at the battlefield on three later battles, going out to attend to the fallen after serving wine and sandwiches to spectators.