Volume 1

The life of Florence Nightingale. Vol. II (1862-1910) / Sir Edward Cook.

  • Cook, Sir Edward Tyas, 1857-1919.
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The life of Florence Nightingale. Vol. II (1862-1910) / Sir Edward Cook. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    SOLDIERS' WIVES sailors, and a woman's sympathetic insight appears in this letter :— (Miss Nightingale to Captain Galton.) Sept. 21 [1863]. People are complaining that when a Regiment sails, many of their wives and children are left behind, and the soldiers are unable to make any provision for their support until they have reached their destination, say China or Calcutta (after a four months' voyage round the Cape), and have been able to send money through their Captains to their families at home. Mean- while the families have gone through five or six months of distress. For sailors leaving a port in England or Ireland, the Admiralty provides power to leave a standing order that a certain amount of pay is to be sent regularly to their families. The W.O. objects that a similar arrangement would involve a change in their book-keeping. It would involve no change. It would involve a small addition. I am willing to go the length of 6d. to furnish an account-book to the W.O., which would enable them to keep these additional accounts. The W.O. also objects that it would deprive the Captain of the chance of fining the soldiers for any military offence. But they can learn the Admiralty system ; and whilst there are other ways of doing the soldiers, their pay is the only means of providing bread for their families starving (or doing worse) at home. Surely the soldiers might be allowed to leave, for the probable duration of their voyage, and for a month or two beyond it, a sum to be paid weekly to their representatives at home. Sir E. Lugard has been tried and failed. Pray set this right. But the W.O. would not be the W.O., if such things as these were not. And when they have ceased to be, the War Office will have ceased to be. Satire was not the only weapon which Miss Nightingale employed in order to get things done. Sometimes she appealed to the motive of rivalry. Was the Minister hanging back ? Well, all she could say was that Sidney Herbert would have done the thing in a moment. There were diffi- culties in the way, were there ? The subordinate officials were piling up what they were pleased to call reasons to the contrary, were they ? Well, on this day many years ago, she wrote (June 18, 1862), the French guns kept coming up again and again to get us out of the yard at Hougomont, and we answered in strong language, often repeated, till we kept the ground that we had won. I never heard the French guns called reasons. And I advise you
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