People of St Marylebone

The following are significant people shown through interpretations in our Volunteer Room and celebrated every day.

 

 

Margherita, Baroness Howard de Walden

1890-1974

 

Margherita van Raalte married the 8th Baron Howard de Walden, Thomas Scott-Ellis, in St Marylebone in 1912. He was then rumoured to be the richest man in England. They divided their time between Chirk Castle in Wales and Seaford House in Belgrave Square, which Thomas had decorated with friezes, panelling and a staircase of green onyx specially imported from South America.

 

When the couple became engaged on 29 December 2011 their engagement was front-page news and their wedding in February 2012 attracted extraordinary public attention.

 

When the First World War broke out Thomas joined the Army and Margherita wanted to serve as a nurse. She defied the Director General of Army Services who refused to give her permission to take on a Matron and eleven private nurses and establish a convalescent hospital in Egypt. It became the Convalescent Hospital No. 6 in Alexandria.

 

Margherita was also a talented soprano with a passion for music and opera. She had trained as an opera singer in Paris and shared Thomas’s love of Wagner, joining his friends at the opera festival at Bayreuth, Germany. On one memorable occasion she dressed up as Brunhilda to sing on the moonlit shores of Brownsea Island. Somehow, she also found the time to have six children.

 

 

Joseph, Baron Lister

1827-1912

 

Lister, who lived in Harley Street and Park Crescent in Marylebone, invented Listerine, which was originally a surgical antiseptic. But behind this attention-grabbing fact lies Lister’s extraordinary work as a pioneer of antiseptic surgery and preventative medicine.

 

Lister had always believed that infection came from germs rather than miasma – or bad air – as was the current orthodoxy. The work of Louis Pasteur confirmed this theory. Lister put Pasteur’s theory into practice and found that washing hands, clothes and bedding and wounds with antiseptic solution reduced infection dramatically.

 

Lister also changed surgical procedures for ever when he advocated practising sterile surgery, ie cleaning instruments, the patient’s skin and the surgeon’s hands with phenol. Lister revolutionised surgery and as a result the health of patients. Let’s raise a glass of mouthwash to him in thanks!

 

 

Florence Nightingale

1820 – 1910

 

Nightingale will forever be known as “The Lady with the Lamp” and is best known for her work in the Crimean War, where she cut the hospital death rate by enforcing handwashing and cleanliness.

 

There are however more facets to Florence Nightingale. She was also a pioneer in the discipline of statistics, presenting her analysis of data in the form of graphs and diagrams to make it easier to draw conclusions. She is most famous for her use of the polar area diagram (a highly sophisticated pie chart), also called the Nightingale rose diagram.

 

Nightingale can also be truly called the founder of professional nursing; in 1860 she established a nursing school at St Thomas’ Hospital in London, the first secular nursing school in the world, now part of King’s College London. New nurses still take the Nightingale Pledge and the Florence Nightingale medal is the highest international award for a nurse. International Nurses Day is celebrated on 12 May, her birthday.

 

 

Mary Seacole
1805-1881

 

Mary Seacole was born in Jamaica, the daughter of a Scottish soldier and a Jamaican mother. Seacole’s mother was a healer who used traditional Caribbean and African herbal medicines and was nicknamed “The Doctress”. At this time Jamaican doctresses combined folk medicine, the use of herbs and a knowledge of tropical diseases with a general practitioner’s skill in treating minor ailments and injuries which they had developed from looking after fellow slaves on sugar plantations.

 

Seacole had learned all these skills, and how to be a nurse, at her mother’s Jamaican boarding house and convalescent home. On arriving in England in the early 1850s she was keen to join the other nurses going to the Crimean War but was denied permission. She finally arrived and opened the convalescent British Hotel for soldiers. She also walked the battlefields tending to the sick – the soldiers called her “Mother Seacole.” In 1857, there was a four-day fundraising gala in London to honour Seacole, attended by 40,000 people.

 

Seacole ended her days in Marylebone, living at 40 Upper Berkeley Street, 147 George Street and 3 Cambridge Square.

 

 

Frederick Denison Maurice
1805–1872

 

Maurice, who lived at 2 Brunswick Place, is now little known, but left a lasting legacy in the field of education.

 

Maurice’s deeply held Christian beliefs informed his life. He saw a need for a moral and social regeneration of society, and this led him to Christian socialism. He was the leader of the Christian Socialist Movement from 1848 until it folded in 1854, insisting that “”Christianity is the only foundation of Socialism, and that a true Socialism is the necessary result of a sound Christianity.”

 

Maurice, along with many other liberal thinkers of the day, was distressed by the living conditions of the poor and believed that education was the right of all and the only way to help the poor escape their desperate situation. He founded Queen’s College in Harley Street, the world’s first institution to award young women an academic qualification. In 1854, he founded the Working Men’s College in Camden.

 

In July 1860, in spite of controversy, Maurice was appointed to the benefice of the chapel of St. Peter’s, Vere Street.

 

 

Emily Davies
1830 – 1921

 

Davies, who lived in Marylebone, is famous as a suffragist and co-founder of Girton College, Cambridge. Originally however she was interested in becoming a doctor and wrote several articles on women doctors for the feminist English Woman’s Journal. She then moved to London to edit the magazine and became part of a circle of women who included Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, another Marylebone resident and the first woman in the United Kingdom to become a medical doctor.

 

Davies was heavily involved in the suffrage movement; suffragists believed that women should have the right to vote. In 1906 she headed a delegation to Parliament. She opposed the militant and violent approach of the Suffragette branch of the suffrage movement.

 

Davies began to campaign for women’s rights to further education, degrees and teaching qualifications. It was partly due to her that girls were allowed access to official secondary school examinations. Davies also believed that women should be admitted to the universities of London, Oxford and Cambridge and in 1869 led the campaign to found Britain’s first women’s college which became Girton College. It was first located in Hitchin but moved to Cambridge in 1873.

 

Davies didn’t live to see Girton College become part of the University of Cambridge in 1948, but she was one of the few original suffragists alive to cast her vote in the first election where women were allowed to do so – the general election of 1918.

 

 

Ada, Countess of Lovelace

1815 – 1852

 

Augustus Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (née Byron), lived in St Marylebone and her father, Lord Byron, was baptised in the third parish church building. Before becoming a resident Ada was a frequent visitor to the homes of Charles Babbage at 5 Devonshire Street and 1 Dorset Street.

 

Lovelace was unusually well-educated for a girl of her time, particularly in science and mathematics. Her passion and aptitude for maths led to her work on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, now recognised as an early model for a computer. She was the first person to recognise that the machine could be used for more than pure calculation. The algorithm she wrote for it may be the world’s first computer programme.

 

Lovelace was clearly a woman of great passions. Apart from her life’s work of science she was fascinated by betting on horses and formed a syndicate with male friends. She used her mathematical skills to create a model for successful large bids. Unfortunately it didn’t work and she incurred £3,000 of debt, a huge amount in the 1840s. Lovelace died aged only 36, of uterine cancer.

 

 

Henry Sylvester Williams

1867 – 1911

 

Williams was a lawyer, born in Trinidad and educated in the United States and Canada before moving to Britain. In 1897, he founded the African Association to “promote and protect the interests of all subjects claiming African descent, wholly or in part, in British colonies and other place, especially Africa, by circulating accurate information on all subjects affecting their rights and privileges as subjects of the British Empire, by direct appeals to the Imperial and local Governments.”

 

In 1900, Williams organised the first Pan-African Conference in Britain. He then went to Southern Africa to practise as a barrister, becoming the first black man to be called to the bar in the Cape Colony.

 

On returning to London, feeling that there should be an African spokesman in Parliament, Williams decided to run. He wasn’t successful but instead became involved in municipal politics and was elected as a Progressive (a party aligned to the Liberals) on Marylebone Borough Council in 1906.

 

Williams was a trail-blazer: he was the first person of African descent to speak in the House of Commons, the first black councillor on St Marylebone Borough Council and one of the first black councillors in the whole of London.