That other lady with the lamp

Have you ever seen the film Carry On Up The Khyber? I'd recommend it, if you wanted to get an accurate historical view of what life was like for the military top brass in any British occupied country in Victorian times. Except really...

We're not very good at wars, I don't think. We like to see ourselves as the peacemakers, or the people who are fighting "for the greater good" against "the bad guys". We're the paternal influence; the father who threatens his children mainly with words, unless they do something really bad and we have to step in and give them a brief, but painful thrashing with the back of our hand. Or I think that's how those Tories think, anyway. Fortunately for me, I will never be in a position to check if that's true, unless something truly awful happens to me and/or I meet Doctor Who and he takes me back in his TARDIS to the Tory heyday of the mid-Victorian Empire.

[Note that what I said above pertains only to actual wars and fighting, not how we treated the people in the Empire. They were not looked upon paternally; they were treated as the scum of the earth instead. Stupid, stupid Empire builders.]

Anyway, during the first half of the nineteenth century, Britain - or, indeed, Europe as a whole - didn't really have much military experience. Of course, there were the Napoleonic conflicts, earlier on, but the were all over by 1815 when the Duke of Wellington won the Eurovision Song Contest with 'Waterloo' defeated Napoleon in battle. After this point, there weren't really any major wars or conflicts which the European nations were overly concerned with - until the Crimean War of 1854-56.

The seige of Sebastopol began today in 1854, making up part of the war. I don't want to go into too much detail about the war itself, because it made up a slightly yawn enduing part of my A Level course, but I would like to say this: if you discount all the people being killed in the battles (I am terribly sorry for the callousness of that phrase), this war was pretty much the biggest farce ever. 

Many, many men were killed in the war, on both sides (Russia, fighting the British, French, Turkish and Austrian alliance), but barely any were killed on the battlefield - most died because of the unsanitary conditions they were living in, or the cold. The Charge of the Light Brigade left so many men dead because their commanders weren't quite sure which instructions to follow, and sent them down the wrong valley, where they were shot to pieces by the Russians. The most use the (newly invented) telegraph was put to, was when The Times' correspondent used it to send back newspaper reports to the people at home. In short, the war was as big of a farce as Carry On Up The Khyber is. 

Something else despicable about the Empire is the way the British people used to treat people of any race and/or colour other than their own. An example of this can be found here - Florence Nightingale, the Lady with the Lamp, went out to nurse and generally Do Good, and schoolkids all over the land learn about her in their History lessons in primary school. How lovely. And I guess it is, but this sadly means that Mary Seacole is overlooked. Seacole did exactly the same thing as Nightingale, but had to pay her own way over there due to not having as privileged a background, where she could rely on her parents to pay her way in life. The only reason she is not taught in schools to the extent Nightingale is, though, is because she's black.

And there was me hoping we might have moved on from that way of thinking... Mary Seacole can have pride of place as the illustration of the day, though, so here she is: