SOCIETY
Rosamund Urwin
Jackpot How Gambling
Conquered Britain
by Rob Davies
Guardian Faber £14.99 pp376Jack Ritchie, a handsome and
gregarious 24-year-old, killed
himself in November 2017
after succumbing again to his
gambling addiction. Liam
McCarron, a Birmingham
businessman who was left
severely disabled after a
medical mistake, squandered
the financial compensation he
received from the NHS in his
local bookies, “helped along
the road to self-destruction by
staff who knew that he could
no longer work”. Martin
Paterson was left feeling like
a zombie — “there but not
there” — after getting hooked
on betting machines; heattempted suicide too, but
was saved when doggers
interrupted him.
Stories such as these pepper
Rob Davies’s methodical,
sensitive and occasionally
harrowing polemic about the
gambling industry. They are
tragedies in the Grecian vein,
with the victims playing a part
in their own destruction. But
Davies, an investigative
reporter who is king of the
“sins beat” (gambling, tobacco
and alcohol) at The Guardian,
makes a compelling case that
the blame for these tragedies
lies squarely at the door of
regulators, politicians and,
above all, the gambling
companies for failing to keep
punters safe.
The book has echoes of
Patrick Radden Keefe’s
award-winning Empire of Pain,
which explored the opioid
crisis and exposed the Sackler
dynasty, but the villains here
are the gambling bosses. It isThe myth of
Mother Seacole
The celebrated black nurse of the
Crimean War led an extraordinary life
BIOGRAPHY
Tomiwa Owolade
In Search of Mary Seacole
The Making of a Cultural Icon
by Helen Rappaport
Simon & Schuster £20 pp416
Mary Seacole was the most
famous black woman in
19th-century England. In a
2004 poll she was voted the
greatest ever black Briton.
Known by the British troops
in Crimea as “Mother
Seacole”, she was a nurse,
pharmacist, humanitarian,
businesswoman and patriot.
Her herbal remedies treated
“dysentery and cholera”.
She was skilful at stitching
a wound and bandaging
injuries. And her “wonderful
stews” and Christmas
puddings nourished soldiers
2,000 miles from home.
Yet, as Helen Rappaport
shows in this lively and
enlightening new biography,
there is much about Seacole’s
life that we don’t know,
including the identity of the
father of her child. And much
of what we think we do
know about her is wrong.
She wasn’t born in Kingston,
for instance, but in a small
town called Haughton. She
never ran a lodging house in
Jamaica. And she didn’t build
and run a hospital in Crimea.
Still, she lived an
extraordinary life. At a time
when women’s roles were
strictly fixed to domesticity
she travelled to Panama,
Britain and Crimea, each
place successively further
away from her native Jamaica.
And when she fell on hard
times in later life, as many as
40,000 people attended a
“Seacole Fund Grand Military
Festival” in support of her.
Seacole was born Mary
Grant in 1805 to a white
Scottish army officer called
John Grant and his mixed-race
Jamaican wife, Rebecca. For
someone canonised as a black
heroine, it is striking that she
never described herself as
black. She instead simply
called herself an “English
woman”. (As someone from
Jamaica, she was indeed a
subject of the British Empire.)
She also took great pride in
her “Scotch” ancestry.
She first visited Britain in
the 1820s, when she was a
teenager, and in 1836 married
an Essex man named Edwin
Horatio Seacole, a navy
merchant who was the godson
of Admiral Nelson. This was
not a “love match”, but a
purely “pragmatic business
arrangement”. With the
abolition of slavery only three
years old, it made sense for
a Jamaican woman wishing
to advance herself to marry
a white British man.
Mary’s early life is
shrouded in so much mystery
that Rappaport’s tone in the
first chapters is heavily
speculative; this makes it
slightly frustrating to read.
Things improve, though,
when we reach the Crimean
War of 1853-56, the conflict
that made Seacole a celebrity.
By this time a middle-aged
woman who had already
nursed British soldiers in
Panama, Seacole came toBritain in 1854, hoping to be
sponsored to go to Crimea.
When no support came, she
went out on her own to the
Black Sea to support the
British troops.
There she became a sutler
who provided food and
medicine to the soldiers. And
she became a much loved one
too. She was known for the
vivid colour of her clothes,
her convivial spirit and her
heartening meals: “good Irish
stews” and “capital meat
pies”. One person who
particularly admired her
was the Times war reporter
William Howard Russell, who
said of her that “a more tender
or skilful hand about a wound
or a broken limb could not
be found among our best
surgeons”. For her wartime
services Seacole was later
awarded the Turkish Order
of the Medjidie, the French
Legion of Honour and the
British Crimea Medal.
Queen Victoria donated
£50 to the Mary Seacole fund
when Seacole was struggling
financially. But the queen
never invited her to tea, and
this was probably because of
the most famous nurse of the
Crimean War: Florence
Nightingale. The prim
Nightingale disapproved of
Seacole, who sold alcohol in
Crimea and had, Nightingale
claimed, a daughter who was
illegitimate. Victoria’s
admiration for Nightingale,
Rappaport thinks, lay behind
her reluctance to be seen
with Seacole.
After the Crimean War
Seacole lived most of the
rest of her life in London in
semi-penury. Her memoir,
Wonderful Adventures of Mrs
Seacole in Many Lands, was
published in 1857 and widely
reviewed, but she vanished
from the British public
imagination after her death
in 1881, until her memoir was
republished in 1984.
Rappaport discovered
and bought a lost painting of
Seacole in January 2003. It is
now in the National Portrait
Gallery. In recent decades
Seacole has become such
an iconic figure that many
legends have grown up
around her, but Rappaport’s
book is a more valuable
monument to Seacole’s legacy
than that painting, or many
of the other books and poems
celebrating her life. Myth is
important; but not as
important as history. cNurse, businesswoman and
patriot Mary Seacole in 1869BOOKS
A nation hoo
It was under Blair that gambling became
just another leisure activity. This book
charts its ugly rise, and how we can stop it
KUMAR SRISKANDAN/ALAMYALAMY22 13 February 2022