ABSTRACT
On 21 October 1854 Florence Nightingale set off with the first official party of female military nurses for Scutari, the base hospital for the British troops engaged in hostilities against Russia in the Crimea. She had been assisted in the selection of the nurses by her close friends Mary Stanley, daughter of the Bishop of Norwich, and Elizabeth Herbert, wife of the Secretary of State at War. On leaving, she 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. By the beginning of December 1854 a second nursing party was ready to leave England. The women were assembled at the house of the Secretary of State at War to hear a solemn address on the dangers and difficulties of their undertaking. ‘If you behave yourselves well,’ Sidney Herbert warned them, ‘there will be a provision for you; if not, it will be the ruin of you.’ He went on to say ‘that we all went out on the same footing as hospital nurses, and that no one was to consider herself as in any way above her companions.’1 Herbert’s first warning was directed at the paid nurses in the party; the second was intended for the ‘lady volun teers’. In the circumstances of the time, it was a startling remark to address to a group composed of twenty-one working women with a variety of experience in paid nursing for the sick, fifteen Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy from Ireland, and ten ‘ladies’ without experience of paid employment or affiliation to any nursing institution.2 What kind of relationship could possibly exist between these women? The disputes and antagonisms which developed between them, and the manner in which they were resolved, form the subject of this paper. Although the story of the ladies and nurses is, on the surface, a petty and even farcical episode, it is none the less one which throws a very clear light on
both the organisation of civilian and military nursing in the 1850s, and the nature of class relationships between women in the nine teenth century.
