Changing Faces of St Marylebone

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.