THE row in London over the planned unveiling of a statue of Jamaican-born nurse Mary Seacole in the gardens of St Thomas’s Hospital in the English capital deepened this week with critics, mostly adherents of Florence Nightingale, arguing that the placement is undeserved because Seacole was not, in their estimation, a “real nurse”.

The statue is the work of Martin Jennings and is expected to be unveiled on June 30. It has a bronze finish, stands in front of a 4.5-metre-high disc cast from shell-blasted Crimean rock, and is lit in the front. It is intended to pay homage to the woman regarded as a heroine of the Crimean War (1854-1856) and is part of a push by the British Government to improve on the fact that only 15 per cent of monuments in the UK are to women. It is to be the first named memorial statue of a black woman in the UK.

As history tells it, Seacole, who was posthumously awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1991 and voted the greatest black Briton in 2004, catered to sick and wounded soldiers behind the lines during the Crimean War. She is often compared with Florence Nightingale, founder of the eponymous nursing school at St Thomas’, who administered nursing care in military hospitals during the same war. Nightingale is touted as a social reformer, statistician, and the founder of modern nursing.

There is a statue of Nightingale in Pall Mall.

Writing in The Guardian newspaper on Tuesday, Briton of Jamaican descent Patrick Vernon says “rubbishing Mary Seacole is another move to hide the contributions of black people”.

“To me, what’s happening seems clear, for this campaign of denigration is not happening in isolation. I see it as part of a wider tradition by an elite, particularly in academia and parts of the media, to suppress and hide the black contribution to Britain. That tendency was the reason I ran the 100 Great Black Britons initiative more than 13 years ago to highlight the contribution our pioneers have made to Britain over the last thousand years,” he says.

He quotes members of the Florence Nightingale Society who called Seacole’s legend a “history hoax”, and said “her battlefield excursions (three only – she missed the major ones) took place post-battle, after selling wine and sandwiches to spectators. Mrs Seacole was a kind and generous businesswoman, but was not a frequenter of the battlefield ‘under fire’ or a pioneer of nursing”.

They could support a Seacole statue, they say, but not at St Thomas’, “Nightingale’s hospital”.

“I am disappointed but not surprised, for we have been here before,” Vernon says in

TheGuardian. “In 2012, education secretary, Michael Gove tried to remove Seacole from the national curriculum but was headed off by a national campaign, with more than 40,000 people signing a change.org petition in just two weeks and a letter inThe Times signed by more than 100 politicians and celebrities including Zadie Smith, Doreen Lawrence, Diane Abbott and the Rev Jesse Jackson.”

Jennings said it took seven years to raise the money for the Seacole statue. The cause, he said, was hurt by a “small but vocal campaign against the project, by self-appointed protectors of Florence Nightingale’s legacy”.

Also according to The Guardian, Baroness Amos, director of the School of Oriental and African Studies and a member of the committee that selected Jennings, hailed Seacole as an unsung heroine.”

“[She was] 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,” Amos said.

Writing in

The Guardian, Lynn McDonald, the Canadian academic and former politician who co-founded The Nightingale Society, 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.

The Nightingale Society argues further, that Seacole has no place as a black icon because she was mixed race.

But Jennings asks: “Would there really be such energy behind their resistance if the person the statue honours was white-skinned?”