The Full Story
She lies her way into a war. In 1854, at a candlelit London enrolment office, she tells the clerks she is 55. She is 65. The truth would mean instant rejection. She is going to that war.
She comes from a hill farm near Bala, in north Wales, one of 16 children of a farmer preacher. At 14 she runs away to Liverpool. By 31 she is a maid aboard a merchant ship, nursing whoever falls sick on board and delivering babies at sea, from the West Indies to Africa, South America and Australia. Her own book counts more than 20 offers of marriage, all refused. She may have polished a tale or two in the telling. What she does next needs no polish.
In her 60s she is nursing at Guy's Hospital in London when the reports come back from the Alma: wounded men, with no one to nurse them. She decides to go.
Britain has already sent its most famous nurse, Florence Nightingale. The Welshwoman has never met her and already does not like the name. She sails that December with the second party of nurses, and lands at Scutari, the great base hospital across the sea from the fighting. Nightingale had not asked for them. For 10 days she waits with nothing to do.
Then she stands before the most famous woman in Britain and asks for Balaclava. Nightingale warns her that beyond Scutari she cannot protect her.
She goes.
At the rough harbour hospital she takes to the wards, dressing wounds that have waited days for a hand. After 6 weeks they hand her the extra diet kitchen, feeding men too weak and torn to stomach army rations. She runs it almost alone, from 5 in the morning to midnight, 7 days a week, for more than 7 months. The men are fed. She is spent.
Dysentery breaks her, and in November 1855 she is shipped home. The 2 women never warm to each other, but Nightingale acknowledges what she has done.
Her health never returns. She dies in 1860 in her sister's house in London, and is buried in a shared pauper's grave. No stone. No name.
For a century and a half, that is that.
Then, in 2009, Wales forms its largest health organisation, and gives it the name of a nurse buried without one. Betsi Cadwaladr. Her name now stands over the care of the whole north of Wales. In 2012 her grave finally gets its stone, cut with words from the woman she served under at Balaclava: the faithfullest of Her Majesty's Nurses.
Why This Matters
Betsi Cadwaladr lied about her age to reach a war zone nobody was pushing her towards, worked herself past exhaustion feeding men the army had failed to feed, and was repaid with a shared pauper's grave and no name on the stone for a century and a half. She was a farmer preacher's daughter from a family of 16, not a lady of means, and the record of her life survives only because a historian took the trouble to write it down. Wales corrected the record in 2009 by naming its largest health board after her, and finished the job in 2012 by finally carving her name into stone. Britain owes ordinary people like her the same correction it gave her: credit for the work actually done, not just the fame that came easily to others.
Key Facts
- ✓Born 24 May 1789 at Penrhiw near Bala, Merioneth, one of 16 children of Dafydd Cadwaladr, a well-known Calvinistic Methodist farmer preacher (Dictionary of Welsh Biography)
- ✓Ran away to Liverpool at 14, then from 1820, aged 31, spent decades at sea as maid to merchant ship captains' wives, visiting the West Indies, southern Africa, South America and Australia among other places, nursing the sick and delivering babies (Dictionary of Welsh Biography)
- ✓In fact 65 years old, she gave her age as 55 on the Register of Nurses when she enrolled for the Crimea in autumn 1854, since her true age would have meant immediate rejection (Dictionary of Welsh Biography)
- ✓After 10 days waiting idle at Scutari and a heated confrontation with Florence Nightingale, she was posted to the British military hospital at Balaclava, where she then ran the extra diet kitchen almost alone, 5am to midnight, 7 days a week, for more than 7 months (Dictionary of Welsh Biography)
- ✓Invalided home in November 1855 with dysentery, she died in poverty on 17 July 1860 at her sister's house in London and was given a pauper's burial in a shared, unmarked grave at Abney Park Cemetery (Dictionary of Welsh Biography; Abney Park)
- ✓Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, established 1 October 2009, is the largest health organisation in Wales and serves the whole of north Wales; in 2012 the Royal College of Nursing Wales erected a memorial stone on her grave inscribed the faithfullest of Her Majesty's Nurses (BCUHB; Dictionary of Welsh Biography)