LONDON WALK NO 93 – GROUP 3 – FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE MUSEUM ORGANISED BY JEAN DYER & MARION CLARKE – Thursday 20th October 2016

20 of us made it on to the 9.32 train to Charing Cross from various areas and settled down for the normal noisy catchup. En route the train stopped at the new London Bridge station, something I had not yet experienced. Coffee beckoned at The Crypt at St. Martin’s, but service seemed exceptionally slow on this occasion. We came out into a pleasant day, and crossed Trafalgar Square which was alive with Yodas ! I found them quite intimidating and later research revealed that they are in fact just that! According to the Daily Mail “War has broken out between mainly Romanian street performers all dressed as Star Wars character Yoda who regularly fight over prime spots in central London. 'Aggressive' and 'territorial' eastern Europeans wearing green masks and Jedi robes battle daily on

Trafalgar Square to be 'standing statues' in areas where they can earn £20 per day from tourists. The head of the National Gallery has said he would like to see street performers like the "levitating Yodas" “feel the force” and be removed from the North Terrace of Trafalgar Square. Covent Garden etc. have a form of voluntary licencing in place but nothing had yet been agreed for Trafalgar Square by Westminster City Council as of early 2016. A man dancing with a woman fooled Marion, as she was not real!

Jean led us past the latest Fourth Plinth statue. Mayor Sadiq Khan unveiled David Shrigley's sculpture - a 23 ft-high hand with an elongated long thumb - Called 'Really Good', the bronze sculpture represents 'the best of us' and positivity. However Londoners have mixed feelings on the statue - with some criticising it as being just a 'phallic thumb'.

Walking through Spring Gardens, we arrived at one of the main statues displayed to advertise an exhibition of Hamish Mackie bronzes, entitled “Life in Bronze”. We decided to take our group photo here. Making our way onto the Mall and into the Mall Galleries, we were greeted with 40 new works by Hamish Mackie, born out of his extensive wildlife research in Australia, Asia and Africa, and his ongoing study of the UK’s wild and domestic animals. His works

are a beguiling mix of anatomical accuracy with an expressive interpretation of the animal’s individual essence. We were entranced – from the tiny dung beetle to the enormous camel. With the exhibition

ending that day, the artist himself told us he was going home to spend another umpteen years producing work for his next exhibition!

Also on display in smaller rooms were miniature paintings and sculptures, and ’70 Painting Years’ work from two artists, Trevor Chamberlain and Bert Wright. We crossed over the Mall, and walked down through St James’s Park alongside the Lake and past Duck Island Cottage. Plenty of tourists and an assortment of birds, but no pelicans today. The last of some huge crocuses shone out on the grass verge, and apparently people had been seen lying in amongst them taking photos. Across Birdcage Walk, and down towards Parliament Square, Jean told us the various places we could go for lunch, Central Hall Café, Westminster Arms etc. A lot of us piled in to the pub, some upstairs and some downstairs. Service was not brilliant, and there was some joking between Marion’s table and mine over who got served first. We met up outside the Central Hall, and made our way over Westminster Bridge towards the Florence Nightingale Museum. Jean had told us that she had researched some places for us to visit in Old

Westminster, but because of the time we spent in the Mall Galleries and the Park, we had not got time. Perhaps they could do this on another walk next year, in view of Jean’s hard work. En route, we saw several blue plaques in Queen Anne’s Street.

Reaching the gardens opposite St. Thomas’s Hospital, some of the group stopped to look at the huge circle statue in the gardens. This is the statue to Mary Seacole, a Jamaican “doctress” born in 1805. Her mother was of African heritage

and her father was a Scottish army officer. Seacole learned to be a doctress from her mother. She gave no specifics of the instruction, but that it was traditional Creole medicine, meaning herbal preparations. As a “doctress” Seacole made the diagnosis, planned, prepared and administered the treatment herself, unlike hospital nurses who act on the instructions of doctors and surgeons. The statue location caused considerable objection from the supporters of Florence Nightingale, who considered this an attempt to denegrate her work in the Crimea. Seacole was a businesswoman, but there are many factual errors on the internet regarding her nursing in the Crimea. A book on Nightingale’s nursing adds misinformation on Seacole, that she not only herself nursed “on the battlefields” but had a staff of nurses with her, proving that “Florence Nightingale was not the only nurse capable of organizing hospitals in the Crimea,” and that “many nurses worked with Mary Seacole on the battlefields of the Crimea” (Kay Barnham, Florence Nightingale: The Lady of the Lamp 24). However, Seacole’s memoir reports no hiring of nurses, but only servants to run her business. When she went to the battlefield she took with her her “steadiest lad” to look after the mule loads of supplies, no nurses. Entering the small reception area of the Florence Nightingale Museum, we were given a short introduction to the Museum and Florence Nightingale herself. We then went our separate ways to explore. A well organised and documented area led us through a collection made up of almost 3000 artefacts relating to the life, work and legacy of Florence Nightingale. Most artefacts were acquired by Dame Alicia Lloyd-Still during her time as Matron of St Thomas’ Hospital in 1913-1937. This collection was held by the Nightingale Training School at St Thomas’ and was known as the ‘Nightingalia’. The collection was first publicly displayed for the centenary of the Crimean War in 1954 at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, then again on the centenary of the Nightingale Training School for Nurses in 1960, and the 150th anniversary of Florence’s birth in 1970. The collection was transferred into the care of the newly created Florence Nightingale Museum Trust in 1983, who then went on to open the museum on the site of the original Nightingale Training School in 1989.

Since the museum opened, a number of important objects have been added to the collection, including Athena, Florence Nightingale’s beloved pet owl in 2004 and a set of ten oil paintings by French artist Victor Tardieu, which depict a field hospital during the First World War.

Smaller temporary exhibitions form part of the medical association, and we were lucky enough to catch the end of the Peter Pan display. Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children has been closely associated with Peter Pan since Barrie gifted the copyright to the hospital in 1929. Since then, the timeless story continues to help make the hospital the incredible centre of hope it is today.

Gathering together outside the Museum, we said goodbye to Jan who was going back to Charing Cross, and we walked through to Waterloo – some of us darting off ahead, going the wrong way, and having to come back to the group walking through the tunnel to the station entrance. There was some debate about people wanting to stop for a drink, but when we got off the train at Tonbridge, most of us seem to have called it a day. Thank you to Marion and Jean for another interesting walk.