Monthly Meetings

We meet at 2 pm on the fourth Tuesday of the month at the Congregational Church, Kilwardby St, Ashby.
There is normally a guest speaker or, in December, musical entertainment.
This is followed by tea, coffee and biscuits and a chance to meet and talk with other members.

Tea Rota and Reporting Groups

28th May – ‘Florence Nightingale’ by Danny Wells

Danny Wells is a local historian and he gives talks on many famous people with a local connection. Florence Nightingale is one of the most famous names in history and during Victorian times was the second most famous woman after Queen Victoria herself.

She came from a privileged background, born in May 1820 into a wealthy British family in Florence after which she was named. Her older sister Parthenope was also named after her place of birth, a Greek settlement on the edge of Naples. The family returned to England in 1821 and settled at Lea Hurst, an estate in Derbyshire which her mother had inherited.

Much of what is known about Florence comes from a collection of 1600 letters which she left behind with the instructions to burn them after her death, Fortunately for historians the family kept them.

Her father made his money from lead mining in Matlock. Her mother thought that Lea Hurst was too small as a family home as it only had 15 bedrooms! so they moved to Embley Park in Hampshire. It was here that Florence claimed to have received a calling from God to devote herself to the service of others. In 1844 she announced that she would become a nurse. Nurses at the time were considered a very badly, often pictured as being slovenly, uneducated and drunk. However Florence wanted to change that image. She learnt basic nursing whilst staying at a Lutheran community in Germany.

She was courted by politician Richard Monckton Milnes for 9 years before she rejected him thinking he would interfere with her nursing career.

She is most famous for her role in the Crimean War after she heard about the horrific conditions for the wounded men in the hospital at Scutari. There was little medicine, poor hygiene and very few overworked staff. Mass infections were common, many of them fatal. She wrote to the Times asking the government to do something and they commissioned Brunel to design a prefabricated hospital to be sent out Turkey. It had a death rate one tenth that of Scutari. In her 1st winter at Scutari over 4000 soldiers died. 10 times more from illness than from battle wounds. It was here that her patrolling of the wards late at night earned her the nickname ‘Lady of the Lamp’

She introduced basic hygiene such as washing of hands, clean dressings and washing of floors whilst also pressing for better nutrition, medicines and more staff.

However the Crimea was only a small part of her work. She returned to London and set up the first nursing school at St Thomas’s Hospital in 1860. She wrote ‘Notes on Nursing’, the first of its kind explaining hygiene in simple words. She wrote endlessly to politicians and friends in high places, campaigning for better hospitals and better nursing. She was intermittently bedridden due to ‘Crimean Fever’ that she contracted whilst out there and also suffered from depression, but she continued to write from her bed.

She was awarded numerous medals and honours; among them were the first Royal Red Cross, the Order of Merit, The Order of St John and the Honorary Freedom of the City of London.

She never married, but had many long lasting friendships with men and women. She died on 13th August 1910 aged 90.

Trying to tell her story in one page of the newsletter is impossible, but Danny Wells did an excellent job of telling us all about her life and career in a 60 minute talk. She was a most inspiring person and so much more than the ‘Lady with the Lamp’