Who was Mary Seacole?
| Mary Seacole’s impact | Black British Contribution | Forgotten People of Colour Who was Mary Seacole? Mary Seacole is one of Britain’s neglected heroines yet she was a bona fide celebrity famed for her heroic behaviour during the bloody Crimean War. Seacole was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1805, then the largest and most affluent town in the Caribbean. She was the only child of a liaison between her black mother, a healer, and a Scottish soldier stationed on the island. She learned about healing by following her mother around the family’s lodging house, assembling, drying and preparing the herbs that were used to treat patients. By the time she was an adult Seacole was as adept a healer as her mother, and was using these skills to earn a living. Always ‘inclined to rove’, she visited England twice and spent a number of years in Panama. When she returned to Jamaica, she married an Englishman, Edwin Horatio Hamilton Seacole, in November 1836. But Edwin was sickly and Mary spent much o
