Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Florence Nightingale : 1820-1910. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material is part of the Elmer Belt Florence Nightingale collection. The original may be consulted at University of California Libraries.
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![by Miss Nightingale and Douglas Galton on a model barrack plan. She was aware from the beginning that no single standard plan could be laid down and applied throughout India. Her object was to define the es- sential features which every barrack must possess and to leave the local authorities to adapt them to local conditions. The scheme was approved by the Government of India and the War Office, and in 1865 she wrote that she had got a grant of seven millions for my Indian barracks. Work began at once, and the plans were passed to the Royal Engineers. Presently disturbing news reached her. The Royal Engineers were acting in a high handed manner. They were determined to erect barracks for the army without civilian interference or advice. By the end of 1869 it was evident that the scheme had gone fatally wrong. On December 4 Miss Nightingale wrote to Sir Bartle Frere: We begged and prayed to be allowed to put up in Poona and the Deccan where the winds are terrific and the ground rocky, one storied barracks—we were ordered to wait. Sir Robert Napier [Lord Napier of Magdala, the Commander-in-Chief] was ordered to wait until a 3rd class engineer colonel, an ordinary man such as you can find anywhere, sent us 'standard plans,' which we were to use and no other and which were extravagantly expensive. She was in despair. Not a single one of the new barracks, she wrote to Sir John McNeill in 1869, was erected in accordance with the recom- mendations. Everything had been sacrificed for the sake of an imposing fagade of European design totally unsuited to the climate. Good water, drainage, shade, space, all had been neglected. The troops moved in, and disaster followed. Cholera broke out at several stations, and early in 1870 there was an outcry in The Times against the senseless extravagance of erecting palatial buildings in which the troops died. The cause of sanitary reform had received a serious set-back. The money had been forthcoming, the work had been promptly done, and the result was complete failure. That the reformers were in no way responsible, that what had been done was a complete contradiction of every essential laid down, was impossible to explain. MiUtary secrecy, military etiquette veiled the issue in hopeless obscurity, and not only the public but officials within the War Office who had been in favor of sanitary improvements now associated them with sentimental extrava- gance. She was losing ground on all sides. She was already shut out of the War Office and the Poor Law Board, and in India the barrack failure must weaken her hold on Lord Mayo. Yet she hardly rebelled. In the last](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b20452329_0338.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
