Qualla: Statue of Mary Seacole https://qualla.com/statue-of-mary-seacole en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:14 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/u/statue-of-mary-seacole-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Statue of Mary Seacole https://qualla.com/statue-of-mary-seacole Statue of Mary Seacole: Introduction https://qualla.com/statue-of-mary-seacole/ Photo credit Ethan Doyle White, CC BY-SA 4.0. She is mid-stride, leaning into the wind. The bronze figure outside St Thomas' Hospital walks defiantly forward, hands clenched, gaze fixed across the Thames at the Palace of Westminster, as if marching directly at the institutions that had spent decades arguing about whether she deserved to be there. Mary Seacole, born 1805 in Jamaica to a Scottish soldier father and a Jamaican mother who practised herbal medicine, sailed to the Crimean War in 1855 at her own expense because the official British nursing contingent led by Florence Nightingale had refused her four times. The statue by Martin Jennings was unveiled on 30 June 2016 - twelve years after the campaign for it began, and 135 years after Seacole's death. It is generally considered the first statue in Britain to honour a named Black woman.

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Image: Ethan Doyle White | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/u/statue-of-mary-seacole-wp/gcpu-statue-of-mary-seacole-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Statue of Mary Seacole: Doctress https://qualla.com/statue-of-mary-seacole/ Photo credit Ввласенко, CC BY-SA 3.0. Mary Grant, as she was born, learned medicine from her mother, who ran a boarding house in Kingston for sick British soldiers and sailors and treated them with the Caribbean herbal pharmacy she had inherited from her own forebears. Mary travelled to Panama in the 1840s, where she...

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Image: Ввласенко | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/u/statue-of-mary-seacole-wp/gcpu-statue-of-mary-seacole-doctress.mp3 0:06 2 full Statue of Mary Seacole: The British Hotel https://qualla.com/statue-of-mary-seacole/ Photo credit JRennocks, CC BY-SA 4.0. She went anyway. Borrowing money and finding a business partner, she sailed to Balaklava on the Crimean coast and built what she called the British Hotel - a wooden structure on the road to the British camp, two miles from the front. It served hot meals, sold supplies, treated th...

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Image: JRennocks | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/u/statue-of-mary-seacole-wp/gcpu-statue-of-mary-seacole-the-british-hotel.mp3 0:06 3 full Statue of Mary Seacole: Twelve Years of Fundraising https://qualla.com/statue-of-mary-seacole/ Photo credit Sumit Surai, CC BY-SA 4.0. Seacole died in 1881 and was largely forgotten for a century. Her grave at St Mary's Catholic Cemetery in Kensal Green became overgrown. In the 1980s a group of Black women in west London, members of the Women's Royal Voluntary Service, asked their MP Clive Soley to help find and...

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Image: Sumit Surai | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/u/statue-of-mary-seacole-wp/gcpu-statue-of-mary-seacole-twelve-years-of-fundraising.mp3 0:06 4 full Statue of Mary Seacole: What She Looks Like https://qualla.com/statue-of-mary-seacole/ Photo credit OwenBlacker, CC0. Jennings cast Seacole in bronze, mid-stride, leaning forward as though against gale-force resistance. Behind her stands a bronze disc with a lighter patina, etched with the landscape of the Crimean peninsula where her British Hotel stood - a literal map and a symbolic obstacle. T...

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Image: OwenBlacker | CC0

]]> Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/u/statue-of-mary-seacole-wp/gcpu-statue-of-mary-seacole-what-she-looks-like.mp3 0:06 5 full