Rubbishing Mary Seacole is another move to hide the contributions of black people | Patrick Vernon Read more

Everything in Martin Jennings’ Oxfordshire studio is just so. From the wall of industrial shelving – housing neat rows of hammers, chisels, gloves and goggles – to the way its west flank opens up, allowing tall statues out and the summer daylight in. Tea is made in mugs commemorating his most high-profile works, which include Charles Dickens, John Betjeman, Philip Larkin and Ronnie Barker. His next commission is George Orwell, who will be standing guard outside Broadcasting House. White men, the lot of them.

Until recently, Jennings had made only one full-size female memorial statue, a US admiral called Grace Murray Hopper. But this month, he’ll be unveiling two monuments to women: the wartime Sheffield steel workers, and the woman whose face is gracing my mug today: Crimean war heroine Mary Seacole. This last will be the first named memorial statue of a black woman in the UK.

From the end of June, Seacole will be outside St Thomas’s Hospital in London, striding purposefully towards the Houses of Parliament across the river, cape billowing behind. The ground behind will be inscribed with an 1857 quote from Sir William Howard Russell, then war correspondent of the Times: “I trust that England will not forget one who nursed the sick, who sought out her wounded to aid and succour them, and who performed the last offices for some of her illustrious dead.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The term “the black Florence Nightingale” seems to me to be demeaning’ … sculptor Martin Jennings. Photograph: Peter Searle

One would usually expect a statue like this, says Jennings, “to have its funds raised within two years”. But it has been a seven-year slog. Her cause was not helped by a small but vocal campaign against the project, by self-appointed protectors of Florence Nightingale’s legacy. Meanwhile, Michael Gove fuelled further doubt about Seacole’s place in history, when he attempted to remove her from the national curriculum in 2013. Some quarters of the media egged him on, calling her presence in history books political correctness gone mad. In the end, Gove relented, reportedly after pressure from Nick Clegg, and a petition with 35,000 names.

“Mary Seacole is an unsung heroine,” says Baroness Amos, director of the School of Oriental and African Studies and a member of the committee that selected Jennings. “A Jamaican businesswoman, traveller and healer who wanted to go to Crimea to help treat the wounded and save lives, but was refused by the authorities. Rather than accept defeat, she went independently using her own money.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest How the statue of Mary Seacole will look in situ

The statue’s arch-enemy is Lynn McDonald, the Canadian academic and former politician who co-founded The Nightingale Society with the express purpose of derailing the project. Writing in the Guardian, McDonald has stated that she is not against Seacole having a statue per se, but that it should not be at the hospital where Nightingale set up her nursing school. Jennings points out that there’s a statue of Nightingale – albeit a shorter one – at nearby Waterloo Place, and a museum dedicated to her inside.

The Nightingale Society argues that Seacole has no place as a black icon because she was mixed race and did not identify herself as black. “It’s something people like to do – whip up this binary thing about black and white people,” says Jennings. “The Nightingale Society has published some pretty dubious letters. They suggest, for example, that because the statue celebrates diversity – a word they put in inverted commas, as though it isn’t real – it will be covered in graffiti in no time at all.”

In response to a new letter published in the Times this week, he says: “The Nightingale Society has gone to great lengths over many years to belittle Seacole’s achievements, while contradictorily declaring that it would support a Seacole statue on another site. The subtext to this convoluted thinking seems pretty clear to me, and it’s not a pleasant one. Would there really be such energy behind their resistance if the person the statue honours was white-skinned?”

The doubters also dispute that Seacole should be called a nurse at all, but the statue has the backing of nursing colleges, unions and other prominent figures in the field. Cecilia Anim, president of the Royal College of Nursing, is a patron of the appeal. As the jazz musician and ambassador for the statue appeal Courtney Pine says, “If you look at the nursing establishment from the Windrush era and before, many came from Africa and Asia to tend to people. That’s Mary Seacole’s legacy and everybody needs to know that. My auntie was a nurse. A lot of Caribbean families have somebody who is a part of the medical profession. So telling the Mary Seacole story is something that makes us proud.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Seacole as depicted in Punch in 1857. Photograph: Alamy

Jennings feels that Nightingale and Seacole needn’t be in competition. “The term ‘the black Florence Nightingale’ – often used to describe Seacole – seems to me to be demeaning and make no sense,” he says. His understanding is that Seacole was a battlefield nurse, whereas Nightingale “was primarily a genius in the field of medical statistics rather than a hands-on nurse. They performed very different roles and the achievements of both can happily sit alongside each other.”

Jennings’ new statues come during a push to improve on the fact that only 15% of monuments in the UK are to women. There are campaigns for suffragette statues in Parliament Square in London and Manchester. But some people are wondering if heroic monuments in general might be anachronistic. “We do not live in the Victorian age,” wrote Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones recently. “There was this thing called modernism that started in the 1880s and shoved statues off their plinths.” Meanwhile, historian and broadcaster David Olusoga fears that reducing black history to a series of two-dimensional heroes puts them at risk of “becoming cardboard cut-out versions of individuals who were, in reality, far more complex, conflicted and interesting.”

However, Jennings firmly believes his is “an art form that has every possibility of being made relevant to our time”. There is still a high demand for his statues. “The question is: can we make them in such a way that they are illuminated by our current understanding, rather than the way things were understood a century ago, when statue-making was at its zenith in this country?”

So many causes, so many heroes – why defame them with a statue? Read more

Seacole’s statue stands in front of a 4.5 metre-high disc, cast from shell-blasted Crimean rock. “There’s a kind of anomaly to a sculptor in the early 21st century making a monument to a great figure of the mid-19th. You need to acknowledge the historical gap, and a good way of doing that was to locate her in her time and place.” Jennings sees her as a figure against a battlefield, of the Crimean war, but also of gender and race. “Not only that,” he says, “there’s this patch of wartorn land, directly facing Parliament, as if to say, ‘Was it just to win dusty scraps of earth like this that these great imperialist wars were fought?’”

He has also sought to address “what it means to put up a heroic monument in an age in which we no longer quite believe in heroism in the same way as the Victorians”. Seacole’s statue is lit from the front, casting her shadow on to the disc, signifying fallibility, humanity and mortality.

When Courtney Pine was at school in the 1970s, he wasn’t taught about Seacole. Almost half a century on, he says, you still get historians “who support this process of retaining white supremacy. But on the other side, there are many – and they’re not just black – who will tell the truth.”