Mary Seacole

Mary Seacole Born in nineteenth-century Jamaica to a Black free woman and a Scottish army officer, Seacole enjoyed social status without basic civil rights. Yet remarkably she travelled more than most women
of her time. During the Crimean War (1853–56) she self - funded her trip to Balaclava, Ukraine, where she nursed beleaguered and wounded British soldiers. It was Seacole, not Florence Nightingale, who contemporary newspapers hailed as the mother of British soldiers. But after her death Seacole’s story fell into obscurity until the 1990s, when a campaign was launched to reinstate her remarkable history into the national consciousness.
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