The Private Life of Florence Nightingale Read online

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  The Private Life of Florence Nightingale

  First published in 1978

  © Richard Gordon; House of Stratus 1978-2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Richard Gordon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2012 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  1842325124 9781842325124 Print

  0755130928 9780755130924 Kindle

  0755131231 9780755131235 Epub

  0755147154 9780755147151 Epdf

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  Richard Gordon, real name Dr. Gordon Stanley Ostlere, was born in England on 15 September 1921. He is best-known for his hilarious ‘Doctor’ books. Himself a qualified doctor, he worked as an anaesthetist at the famous St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (where he was also a medical student) and later as a ship’s surgeon, before leaving medical practice in 1952 to take up writing full time. Many of his books are based on his own true experiences in the medical profession and are all told with the wry wit and candid humour that have become his hallmark.

  In all, there are eighteen titles in the Doctor Series, with further comic writings in another seven volumes, including ‘Great Medical Disasters’ and ‘Great Medical Mysteries’, plus more serious works concerning the lives of medical practitioners.

  He has also published several technical books under his own name, mainly concerned with anaesthetics for both students and patients. Additionally, he has written on gardening, fishing and cricket and was also a regular contributor to Punch magazine. His ‘Private Lives’ series, taking in Dr. Crippen, Jack the Ripper and Florence Nightingale, has been widely acclaimed.

  The enormous success of Doctor in the House, first published in the 1950’s, startled its author. It was written whilst he was a surgeon aboard a cargo ship, prior to a spell as an academic anaesthetist at Oxford. His only previous literary experience had been confined to work as an assistant editor of the British Medical Journal. There was, perhaps, a foretaste of things to come whilst working on the Journal as the then editor, finding Gordon somewhat jokey, put him in charge of the obituaries!

  The film of Doctor in the House uniquely recovered its production costs whilst still showing at the cinema in London’s West End where it had been premiered. This endeared him to the powerful Rank Organisation who made eight films altogether of his works, which were followed by a then record-breaking TV series, and further stage productions.

  Richard Gordon’s books have been translated into twenty languages.

  He married a doctor and they had four children, two of whom became house surgeons. He now lives in London.

  Author’s Note

  1915 was like 1854 a year of killing. After Mons, the Marne and Ypres, Asquith’s Government judged it unfitting to unveil Florence Nightingale’s statue with ceremony. On the Wednesday of February 24, workmen folded the canvas and dismantled the scaffolding, one brushed the snow from the plinth, and they left her alone in Waterloo Place, in the middle of London’s gentlemen’s clubland.

  On the corner of Pall Mall opposite, through the windows of the Athenaeum Club, her father once wrote with his quill pen – he abhorred the new, gimcrack Birmingham steel nibs – his exasperated surrender of £500 a year and her independence. Behind her stand figures of guardsmen, cast from the metal of Russian cannon captured at Sebastopol. To her left, she is matched by the statue of Sidney Herbert, Secretary at War for the Crimean campaign. Sidney Herbert was the only man she loved. Though in the flash of Miss Nightingale’s mind, even love took an appearance as original as her theories on military sanitation.

  She was emotional, she was vain, she was complex, she was incomparable. She was a passionate cultivator of new ideas on the compost-heap of long rotted ones. She had a genius for rubbing noses into facts right in front of them. She had infinite capability and little tenderness. Her antiseptic ghost today haunts every sickbed in the world, to which she was Britain’s most valuable and useful gift.

  She shares a cell in our folk-memory with Nelson and Wellington, she is the girl on the £10 note. She has been trampled by the fastidious footsteps of lady biographers and stamped by the cloven hoof of Lytton Strachey. She is much misunderstood. Everyone knows what she offered humanity. Few know what she offered humans. Even the Aladdin’s lamp of her statue and popular imagination is not the sort which lit her fame in the wards of Scutari.

  What was she like to work alongside, argue against, chat to, laugh with? Which way swung the lodestone of her sex? The long letters of a long lifetime print her personality. She had fragments of Elizabeth Fry and Elizabeth I, history’s Joan and Shaw’s, Jane Austen and Gertrude Stein, Lady Hester Stanhope and Amy Johnson, and nothing at all of Emmeline Pankhurst or Mary Poppins.

  I have tried to introduce her by a novel in which most of the events happened, many of the characters lived and much of the dialogue is their own. The opinions of Tristram Darling are mine.

  1

  Towards noon on the last day of June 1854 – as thundery as any other that sultry summer – a young man bounded with enviable confidence up the front steps of the Reform Club in Pall Mall. His aggressive flourish swung open the pair of brassbound oak front doors, his four strides were enough for the eight inner ones which led from the porter’s booth with its massive brass cigar-lighter. He came to an abrupt, disconcerted halt in the club’s great saloon, breathless, with sweat dampening his upper lip, which distressed him. He had feared being late as much as disproving the axiom that a gentleman is never in a hurry.

  The young man was me – yet he was not me. Human personality is not etched in the cradle and shredded in the grave. It is more like a family portrait gallery. The sprig who went to the Crimean War claims only kinship with my portrait today in the library of my country house, rich, robed, ennobled, in this first year of the reign of King George V. I have sown the seed of charity and as assiduously reaped the honours. In 1854, I was chubby and chestnut-haired, the unmatured good looks which drew glances under the parasols at Lord’s or Henley, and I had only two sovereigns in the world. I had embarked upon, in Samuel Daniel’s line, The shipwreck of my ill-adventured youth.

  ‘Page –’ I stopped a pale elf in a cuirasse of brass buttons. ‘My name is Mr Tristram Darling. My compliments to Mr Wakley-Barlow, MP, and pray say that his guest has arrived.’

  The saloon, which no forthright Reformer would ever call the salon, was vast, colonnaded, galleried, lit by a vaulted skylight of flint glass and lined with portraits of dead Whigs. The men who had stormed the Parliamentary Reform Bill into law in 1832 had demanded of architect Sir Charles Barry a clubhouse to outblaze Brooks’ in St James’s, which steadily blackballed them as Radical freaks. Barry had responded joyfully by incorporating in his plan not one Ro
man palazzo but three. ‘A building worthy of Michelangelo!’ exclaimed Macaulay to Leigh Hunt. It still stands, a congenial monument to our early Victorian unquenchable vulgarity.

  The saloon comfortably held a dozen groups of comfortable men, in full-skirted coats, clasping their canes, wearing their top hats, in animated or grave conversation about the war. Great Britain had been fighting Russia three months. ‘Against unprovoked aggression,’ ran the Queen’s Declaration, ‘a just, necessary and honourable war.’ Whatever war was not? ‘The finest Army that has ever left these shores,’ according to The Times, had landed at desolate Gallipoli, sailed away in May to Varna on the Bulgarian coast and sat waiting to be attacked. Instead, the Russians had that June week abandoned the frontier town of Silistria and recrossed the Danube on their way home. It was unsatisfactory and unsporting.

  I waited, not daring to feel affronted, hardly to feel irritated, leaning on a silver-headed cane as shiny as my boots, which were a little too tight, or my hat, which was a little too tall, while members mounted the steps for their lunch like salmon up a fish-ladder. After half an hour, a beef-faced man some ten years my senior hastened from the front door with a club footman in blue dress coat and buff waistcoat, the old Whig colours. He shook hands briefly and damply, cursed the scarcity of cabs at the height of the London season and hurried me across the terrazzo floor into the long coffee-room, which was misty with cigar smoke, its mahogany tables polished like mirrors, alive with the chatter and clatter of men eating wearing their hats.

  ‘Well, Mr Darling, I can no longer offer you the artistry of our great chef, Monsieur Alexis Soyer,’ Wakley-Barlow said at once. ‘You’ve heard of him?’

  ‘Who has not? His Shilling Cookery embellishes every tradesman’s bookshelf, and his Sultana’s Sauce every tradesman’s mutton chop.’

  ‘He got too big for his boots, and had to go. It’s the same in the kitchen as the House of Commons. Devilishly full today.’ He scowled. ‘Some finishing their breakfasts, I suppose. We fine ’em if they linger past noon.’ We were wedged by a waiter at a table between pillar and corner. ‘So you’re a literary man, Mr Darling?’ Wakley-Barlow jerked his head across the coffee-room, towards a square-faced, grey-haired man with small round glasses in a bottle-green coat, leaning in lively argument. ‘Like Mr Thackeray?’

  ‘The profession of letters, sir, has its ranks like the profession of arms.’

  ‘That’s prettily put. And you yourself are a corporal?’

  ‘Might I remind you, sir, that I am only twenty-two?’

  ‘Oh, at that age Byron had started Childe Harold and Keats was already dying.’

  He laughed, showing a tongue which struck me as big enough for an ox. He spoke with a mixture of joviality and mockery, which I already found as sickening as did his political opponents forced to endure it for years.

  ‘Well, you’re a gentleman. Or enough of one for me to be seen with in the club. Your clothes ain’t too swell, and you’ve a neat watch – if there is one on the end of that gold chain.’

  I wore a silk-braided swallow-tailed coat with pepper-and-salt trousers adhering to my legs, my white silk stock as smooth as a hard-boiled egg, my neck entirely disappeared in a high starched collar. I proudly drew a watch as slim as a coin from my canary waistcoat. ‘My father’s, sir.’

  ‘I know your father died last summer in Spa. Not through disproving the curative powers of the waters, but through shooting himself over gaming debts. I also know that your charming mother enjoys life abroad, she having resided for some years in Geneva with Count Arezzo. Oh, the whole Town’s heard both scandals. So don’t sit there looking like a housemaid who first feels a footman’s hand up her skirts. We can talk better as one blunt Englishman to another. I know your line. You’re a gossip gatherer, a muckraker for the newspapers. What’s the point of disguising yourself as a man about Town?’

  ‘Raking at my level, sir, demands dressing to match the company which provides the muck.’

  ‘Are you sly? Avaricious?’

  ‘Neither, but I enjoy tasty food, smooth drink and lively women, to all three of which my pen is my doorkey. The verses in the Virgillian style which I composed at Rugby School and Cambridge did not strike me as commercially promising.’

  He seemed to respect this frankness from another blunt Englishman. ‘You deserve a whipping, but the press is becoming as sacred as the Church of England, and for the same sentimental reasons. Do you know a lady called Miss Florence Nightingale?’

  I shook my head. ‘It’s a pretty name.’

  ‘You think so? It could have been Miss Pisa Shore,’ he said mysteriously. ‘Her father left the font William Edward Shore, but when he came of age, which was the year we beat the French, he changed his colours. He inherited a fortune from his mother’s uncle, Peter Nightingale, a hard-drinking, hard-riding, hard-betting man, a mad Croesus known all over Derbyshire.’ He scowled. ‘Peter Nightingale was my own father’s great-uncle.’

  Wakley-Barlow spoke bitterly of bad blood in the family, of William Edward Shore, already itching with money like a tinker with lice, of a contested will, a disputed lead mine among the spiky hills of Derbyshire. His malicious strokes drew newly-dubbed William Nightingale as idle, sulky and snobbish, rubbing into his skinny body enough learning from the stones of Trinity College, Cambridge to face the sadness of a life empty of everything but pleasure.

  ‘Money married money. Gold’s a magnetic metal. WEN – that’s what everyone calls Nightingale – took unto himself Fanny Smith, daughter of old Will Smith, an MP for nigh on fifty years, who championed as many lost causes as your father backed rotten horses.’

  Wakley-Barlow was becoming roughly affable. We were eating côtelettes Reform, a creation of the incomparable, lost Soyer. Wine is an abrasive of the quarrelsome, but food an infallible poultice.

  ‘The Nightingales spread themselves across Hampshire at Embley House. They’re well connected, the Palmerstons, Bonham Carters, powerful families. They do the rounds of the country houses, the London season, half a floor at the Carlton Hotel in Regent Street, opera, concerts, daughters presented at Court, you know the style. It’s not mine. Always travelling abroad, in proper fashion, six servants and a carriage specially built. They winter in the Place Vendôme. How comfortable. How respectable. How deadly dull.’

  I perceived him pricked by the imp of jealousy. ‘But why a daughter named after the City of Flowers?’

  ‘I’ll tell you. After WEN married, he took his bride off to Italy, which was à la mode once we’d got Boney safely out of the way, for anyone who thought England not quite good enough for them. Fanny had a daughter in Naples, so they called the child Parthenope, which is Naples in Greek. Next year she had another in Florence. It could have been Venice. Or Leghorn. That daughter’s an odd fish. She has an unhealthy preoccupation with the sick.’

  ‘As many young ladies in society. It’s like a longing to wash Christ’s feet or lick a beggar’s sores.’

  ‘But Miss Nightingale’s near thirty-four, and should have grown out of such fancies. Marriage usually cures ’em, as it cures much else of female feebleness. Perhaps she’s inherited it from her grandfather, with his fondness for stroking the underdog. She’s not content with sick villagers. She tried to nurse the poor at Salisbury Infirmary, which caused a scandal in the county and almost killed her family. Now Miss Nightingale is superintendent of something called the Establishment for Gentlewomen during Illness, in Harley Street. Which is under the wing of Lady Canning. The Postmistress-General.’ He alluded with a wink to her husband’s official position. ‘I want the egregious place derided, disgraced, shut down, Miss Nightingale jeered back to the oblivion from which she poked her sharp nose.’

  Puzzled, I inquired why.

  It emerged that Wakley-Barlow had laid out a fortune with suppliers of the Army and Navy. One of his contractors also supplied the gentlewomen’s nursing home, and Miss Nightingale had set him about the ears. The woman was cracked, a fanatic, he declared.
But she was intimate with Lady Canning, with a husband in the Government, and there was no knowing where rumours might end.

  ‘I’m cautious. I saw enough men run down in the City by George Hudson’s railways. Well, Mr Darling. I only heard your name by chance. What newspaper do you scribble for?’

  He snorted when I said, ‘The Penny Pioneer.’ It was radical and crusading, popular among the poor for exposing among the rich the wickedness which its readers could not afford.

  ‘Dig me a scandal to start a public outcry. I’ve pulled the trick before,’ he reflected proudly. ‘When some Bedlamite doctor near-bankrupted the Soho Water Company, with his moonstruck notion that the cholera was spread from its public pumps.’

  His silk handkerchief was on the table. My fingers slipped three gold pieces from underneath. We were bound in a transaction as swift as an adder’s bite.

  2

  I was left on the Reform’s front steps, between its huge pair of gas globes, the smell of sour cooking rising from the area. I had nothing immediately to do. I tipped forward my hat, strolled past the next-door Travellers’ and Athenaeum Clubs, stopped a hansom at the bottom of Regent Street and gave an address in Brompton.

  In a short, uncobbled street off the Brompton Road, stood a house no bigger than a gamekeeper’s cottage, so new that its plastered white walls still seemed to gleam with wetness. There was a pretty front door with a transom, three windows up, two down, all opaque with lace. The snug garden, walled all round higher than a man, exuded the secretiveness of a coach with drawn blinds at night. A tall gate of black ironwork led to a well raked gravel path between newly planted laurels, berberis and box, the sombre shrubs beloved in my youth. Dog roses shone like pink stars upon pale latticework, fresh against the house front. I banged the knocker, sure of unseen eyes upon me.