Nursing Blues

We've clapped for the NHS. I wanted to do a bit more - so I cycled for the nurses. Not for today's heroines, but to where our female nursing pioneers once lived and worked. Identified by Blue Plaques. It was also an excuse to venture into central London - like a few Wayfarers, and to experience a City in lockdown, and before the return of a 'new normal'.

I use my Dawes Galaxy for these quests: a bar-bag is handy for lockdown provisions. TfL's route planner enables a cycle route between locations to be plotted sequentially, then uploaded to my Garmin, to provide a logical circuit. This is the route. https://www.strava.com/activities/3477499469

Cycle Super Highway, CS7, took me to the City over Southwark bridge, and onto Whitechapel. The new urban cycling etiquette is still evolving. Good spacing at the advanced stop-lines, no overtaking in the cycle lanes, and holding-back on narrow cycle paths. However this was outside the new cycle rush hour!

No cyclists on CS7, a deserted Southwark Bridge and the City.

The Bank's empty!

Five Blue Plaques to nurses were chosen, all women influencing professional nursing from the 1880's. First stop was the London Hospital, Whitechapel, where Edith Cavell, pioneer of modern nursing in Belgium, trained and worked for 5 years. She was executed by the Germans in 1915 for harbouring Allied soldiers in her hospital in Brussels during the first World War. Her Plaque was hidden behind hoardings but I visited her statue later in St. Martin's Place, Charing Cross Rd.

Rebuilding the London Hospital.

The statue to Edith Cavell.

There are also numerous memorials around the world to Cavell. (In the centenary of her death a 14 mile cycle trial was established linking her home village of Swardeston in Norfolk to her final resting place at Norwich Cathedral).

Edith Cavell, the year of her execution.

Next up was Marylebone, where Ethel Gordon Fenwick, Nursing Reformer, lived. She led the successful campaign for the training and state registration of nurses - becoming the first official State Registered Nurse.

Fenwick's house, 20 Upper Wimpole St.

The West End was eerily quiet, populated mainly by hard-hatted construction workers.

I'd hoped to pop into Selfridges - but stopped in empty bus lane!

I crossed a deserted Oxford St. to Mayfair to find the Plaque to Florence Nightingale - the best known nurse, social reformer and founder of modern nursing. Last week - on the 12th May, International Nurses Day was celebrated on her birthday. Thankfully, today's NHS Nightingale Hospitals, set-up to cope with the pandemic, have largely not been needed.

10 South St. Mayfair

Florence Nightingale, 1891.

The Plaque to Mary Seacole was located in Soho Square. She was of mixed Jamaican and Scottish ancestry, who'd nursed patients during cholera epidemics in Jamaica and Panama, before working in the Crimean war with Florence Nightingale. Her promotion of good hygiene strikes a chord today. In 2004 she was voted the greatest black Briton.

14 Soho Square.

Skirting St. James Park, and along a very quiet Kings Rd. to the posh Markham Sq., was where Dame Maud McCarthy lived for over 30 years. She was the most senior nurse on the Western Front during the First World War, in charge of 6,000 nurses. Little known, she was featured on Women's Hour in 2014. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p023b6sn

47 Markham Sq. - off the Kings Rd.

Dame Maud McCarthy.

It's all been rather different, often time consuming, but useful!, researching and solo cycling, but I'm more than ready for Wayfarers group riding once again.