Thread by @alexdecampi

So I’m never drinking again but it’s time for #AlexDrunkHistory! We’re still on the Crimea but we’re also going to sideswipe the Irish Potato Famine and I’m going to introduce you to your next woman crush, the most badass gal in the Crimean War: MARY SEACOLE

sure, Florence Nightingale was there too

Pop quiz: guess what enemy killed the most British soldiers in the Crimean War?

❌ The Russians

✅ C H O L E R A

The Crimean War was a fucking logistical DISASTER. REMF* incompetence nearly lost the whole damn thing for the British.

*REMF is a technical term in the British Armed Forces referring to organizational and support personnel**

**haha no it’s not, it stands for Rear Echelon MotherFucker

The reasons why everything was so shit were hilarious and terrible at the same time. (Last #AlexDrunkHistory has causes etc of Crimean War. 1853-56).

Reason 1: The British hadn’t engaged in a war against another European power since Wellington dropped the mic at Waterloo in 1815

Sure, there had been lots of dust-ups vs brown people in colonial areas, and a TON of very field-experienced British officers in the Indian service, but ~they didn’t count~ because apparently only fighting other white people gets you promoted in the 1800s

So there are roughly two generations of officers whose only massed fire experience was at pals’ pheasant shoots in the Home Counties

These chuckefucks ship off to the Crimea without a recce

They literally just rolled up to the war like

They assumed because Russia was a European Power, that fighting in Russia would be like fighting against Napoleon in Spain, France and the Low Countries: there’d be roads and hospitals and infrastructure stuff the British could just... borrow

Now I’m not calling Russia / the Ukraine uncivilised, but Balaclava was the ASS END OF NOWHERE and... that has a special meaning in a country as vast as that

So the troops get there. The nearest hospital is back in Constantinople, the area around Balaclava is nothing but mud, the soldiers’ WINTER CLOTHES sink along with a shit-ton of other supplies during a bad storm in late autumn 1854.

The Crimea was not the first or last war where higher-echelon incompetence was the real enemy.

It was, however, the first European war reported in real time to the folks back home, thanks to recent (1837) invention, the telegraph, and Mr William Howard Russell:

Russell was telling readers of The Times the stories of misery and privation of the soldiers: the cholera epidemics, the lack of edible food, decent medical care, or appropriate clothes. Basically if you were wounded, you were going to die in hospital.

Mary Seacole, a Jamaican nurse who had *just* successfully treated a cholera epidemic in Panama, reads about all this too and decides to roll up at the War Office like, “Wh’appen, England? You look like you need some help, arright?”*

*(no disrespect meant to Jamaican accent / patois, I think it’s beautiful and hearing it always makes me happy)

Let’s refresh: a brown woman shows up and suggest to HM War Office they might not be managing their affairs as best they could

The same war office that looked down on white officers in the Indian service as second class because they were brown-adjacent

It goes as well as you could expect

But how could incompetence and institutional racism trump saving soldiers’ lives?

LET’S LOOK AT BRITISH GOVERNMENTAL INCOMPETENCE 1845-1855 SHALL WE?

The Irish Potato Famine, 1845-1849, was an ENTIRELY AVOIDABLE catastrophe that killed 1-1.5m of Ireland’s 8m population, mostly rural, and sent about 1m more to America...

...where occasionally now an Irish-American son of Ballygobackwards will claim his ancestors faced the same discrimination as The Blacks

STFU, loser, your family CHOSE to emigrate, you did not arrive IN CHAINS, and at no point were you someone else’s property.

*cough* where were we

oh yes: the great irony of the Irish Potato Famine.

the blight that caused the potato crop to fail ~came from America~

history: so fucked up, you couldn’t invent it

but surely the British government LEAPT to Ireland’s help?

welp

no

not really

The British had something called the Corn Laws from about 1815, which had nothing to do with American corn / maize fyi. “Corn” is an ancient British catchall term for cereal grains: wheat, barley, etc

The Corn Laws artificially protected & inflated prices of British grain

Most of Ireland’s farmland at that time was owned by absentee British landlords. They grew grain, because the Corn Laws made it stupidly profitable to do so

Their Irish labourers, who had only tiny plots of land to themselves, switched over to potatoes from 1700s...

...because you can grow twice as much potatoes as grain on a tiny plot, and they’re easy to grow and last a long time

This, also, is the origin of celiac disease, a genetic marker mostly appearing in Irish families BECAUSE THEY STOPPED EATING GRAIN, thanks to the Corn Laws

This is not to say labourers didn’t grow grain on their plots — they certainly did. But it was for sale, that provided the cash families needed for other goods and for the rents they paid their absentee British landlords

they ate potatoes

So the Irish are starving, BUT NOBODY IN BRITAIN BELIEVES IT

because Ireland is a net grain exporter

because of the corn laws

and landlords refused to renege on their profits to give grain to the Irish

c a p i t a l i s m is WILD

The British government refused to create a tax to fund Irish relief (because why should the English pay to bail out the Irish), and there was no way the Corn Laws were going to be repealed, those were a political sacred cow

much like America’s corn laws now

and people just straight up refused to believe it was happening

Ireland’s just over this wee little sea from Wales and nobody could get off their arse to check

not doing recces: it’s the British way

So you can see why these folks might not have been the best people to competently run a war on the way other side of Europe a few years later

especially when faced with a brown woman who wanted to help

(this happens all the time, by the way: mostly brown nations offering the US or UK help with our natural and/or self-created disasters, and we’re all like WHAT NO I’M FINE, I CAN STAND UP, WHERE’S MY DRINK)

Back to Mary Seacole. (Finally.)

She goes to the War Office EVERY DAMN DAY. She contacts everyone to ask for their help / intervention. But nah.

Florence Nightingale was a personal friend of the Sec. War, Sidney Herbert, btw. Her hospital in Scutari (suburban Constantinople aka Istanbul, far from the base at Balaclava) still had mortality of 50% and men lying naked on mattresses on the floor, covered by coats not sheets

~ obligatory thematically related song break ~

Mary Seacole ups and goes to the Crimea anyway, ON HER OWN DIME, and sets up what is called the British Hotel, near Balaclava. She SELLS decent hot meals, clothes, and medical care / rooms to the troops.

and she delivers

they love Mary, of course

nobody is angry that she’s selling things, they all understand she had to

and plus there’s fuckall else to spend your pay on in the ass end of the Ukraine

she probably saved thousands of lives over her year in the Crimea

And that, ladies and gentlefolk, is how one Jamaican woman with no financial backing out-organised the British war office and most of the Crimean staff officers to become the front-line saving grace of any number of British soldiers.

The Earl of Aberdeen’s government falls in early 1855 due to popular lack of confidence over the mismanagement of the Crimean war (again, the first time this had happened while a war@was ongoing, thanks to Russell and reporting via telegraph)

The Crimean War officially ended 30 March 1856

British KIA: 2,755

British died of disease: 17,580

Lord Peel moved to repeal the Corn Laws in 1846

His bill was only passed on the third reading thanks to Wellington going to bat for it

The Corn Law tariffs were tapered off into nonexistence by 1849

Lord Peel wasn’t Ireland’s friend, though. At the same time as repeal, he was trying to pass an Irish Coercion Bill (allowing Britain to use military vs any Irish who rose up because of, y’know, STARVING)

That bill failed, & brought down Peel’s government

karma, bitch

Thank you and goodnight.

tip your drunkstorian: ko-fi.com/alexdecampi or buy one of my books (eg BAD GIRLS, link below).

I write books with history!

BAD GIRLS: Havana, New Year’s Eve 1958/59, three girls, six million dollars, twelve hours to get out of Cuba with the mob on their heels as Batista’s government and everything else falls apart
amazon.com/Bad-Girls-Alex…

MAYDAY: California, 1971. A sunny place for shady people. Two young Soviet agents end up on the run in the middle of hippie, capitalist paradise as an op goes very, very wrong. amazon.com/Mayday-Alex-Ca…

Also! Mary Seacole herself wrote a book in 1857, detailing her life and adventures. You can read / download it here for free via Project Gutenberg: gutenberg.org/ebooks/23031