welcome home the troops, who arrived at Woolwich looking ‘very sunburnt’, according to the Queen. Watching several boatloads of soldiers disembark on 13 March, she thought they were ‘the picture of
But if there were no joyous celebrations, there were memorials – literally hundreds of commemorative plaques and monuments, paid for in the main by groups of private individuals and erected in memory of lost and fallen soldiers in church graveyards, regimental barracks, hospitals and schools, city halls and museums, on town squares and village greens across the land. Of the 98,000 British soldiers and sailors sent to the Crimea, more than one in five did not return: 20,813 men died in the campaign, 80 per cent of them from sickness or disease.2
Reflecting this public sense of loss and admiration for the suffering troops, the government commissioned a Guards Memorial to commemorate the heroes of the Crimean War. John Bell’s massive ensemble – three bronze Guardsmen (Coldstream, Fusilier and Grenadier) cast from captured Russian cannon and standing guard beneath the classical figure of Honour – was unveiled on Waterloo Place at the intersection of Lower Regent Street and Pall Mall in London in 1861. Opinion was divided on the monument’s artistic qualities. Londoners referred to the figure of Honour as the ‘quoits player’ because the oak-leaf coronels in her outstretched arms resembled the rings used in that game. Many thought the monument lacked the grace and beauty needed for a site of such significance (Count Gleichen later said that it looked best in the fog). But its symbolic impact was unprecedented. It was the first war memorial in Britain to raise to hero-status the ordinary troops.3
The Crimean War brought about a sea change in Britain’s attitudes towards its fighting men. It laid the basis of the modern national myth built on the idea of the soldier defending the nation’s honour, right and liberty. Before the war the idea of military honour was defined by aristocracy. Gallantry and valour were attained by high-born martial leaders like the Duke of York, the son of George III and commander of the British army against Napoleon, whose column was erected in 1833, five years after the Duke’s death, from the funds raised by deducting one day’s pay from every soldier in the army. Military paintings featured the heroic exploits of dashing noble officers. But the common soldier was ignored. Placing the Guards Memorial opposite the Duke of York’s column was symbolic of a fundamental shift in Victorian values. It represented a challenge to the leadership of the aristocracy, which had been so discredited by the military blunders in the Crimea. If the British military hero had previously been a gentleman all ‘plumed and laced’, now he was a trooper, the ‘Private Smith’ or ‘Tommy’ (‘Tommy Atkins’) of folklore, who fought courageously and won Britain’s wars in spite of the blunders of his generals. Here was a narrative that ran through British history from the Crimean to the First and Second World Wars (and beyond, to the wars of recent times). As Private Smith of the Black Watch wrote in 1899, after a defeat for the British army in the Boer War,
Such was the day for our regiment,
Dread the revenge we will take.
Dearly we paid for the blunder
A drawing-room General’s mistake.
Why weren’t we told of the trenches?
Why weren’t we told of the wire?
Why were we marched up in column,
May Tommy Atkins enquire …4
As the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his
The war’s mismanagement also triggered a new assertiveness in the middle classes, which rallied round the principles of professional competence, industry, meritocracy and self-reliance in opposition to the privilege of birth. The Crimean War had furnished them with plenty of examples of professional initiatives having come to the rescue of the badly managed military campaign – the nursing work of Florence Nightingale, the culinary expertise of Alexis Soyer, Samuel Peto’s Balaklava railway, or Joseph Paxton’s navvies, who were sent to build the wooden huts that sheltered British soldiers from a second winter on the Sevastopol Heights. Thanks to the press, to which they wrote with their practical advice and opinions, the middle classes became actively involved in the daily running of the war. Politically, they were the real victors, since by its end the war was being run on professional principles. It was a sign of their triumph that in the decades afterwards, Whig, Conservative and Liberal governments alike all passed reforms promoting middle-class ideals: the extension of the franchise to the professional and artisan classes, freedom of the press, greater openness and accountability in government, meritocracy, religious toleration, public education, and a more caring attitude towards the labouring classes and ‘deserving poor’ which had its origin in, among other things, a concern for the suffering of the soldiers during the Crimean War. (That concern was the impetus for a series of army reforms brought in by Lord Cardwell, Gladstone’s War Minister, between 1868 and 1871. The purchase of commissions was replaced by a merit-based system of promotions; the period of enlistment for privates was drastically reduced; pay and conditions were improved; and flogging was abolished in peacetime.)
The new-found confidence of the British middle classes was epitomized by Florence Nightingale. She returned from the Crimea as a national heroine, and her image was sold widely on commemorative postcards, figurines and medallions to the public.
The floating froth of public praise
blown lightly by each random gust,
Settles on trophies, bright for days, to
lapse in centuries of rust.
The public heart, that will be fed, but has
no art its food to choose,
Grasps what comes readiest, stones for
bread, rather than fast, will not refuse.
Hence hero-worship’s hungry haste takes
meanest idols, tawdriest shrines,
Where CARDIGAN struts, plumed and laced,
or HUDSON in brass lacquer shines.
Yet when on top of common breaths a
truly glorious name is flung,
Scorn not because so many wreaths
before unworthiest shrines are hung.
The people, howe’er wild or weak, have
noble instincts still to guide:
Oft find false gods, when true they seek;
but true, once found, have ne’er denied.
And now, for all that’s ill-bestowed or
rash in popular applause,
Deep and true England’s heart has
glow’d in this great woman’s holy cause.6
In popular plays and drawing-room ballads, Nightingale’s patriotic dedication and professionalism served to compensate for the damage done to national pride by the recognition that stupidity and mismanagement had caused greater suffering to the soldiers than anything inflicted by the enemy. In one play,
The legend of the Lady with the Lamp became part of Britain’s national myth, retold in countless histories, schoolbooks and biographies of Florence Nightingale. It contained the basic elements of the middle-class Victorian ideal: a Christian narrative about womanly care, good works and self-sacrifice; a moral one of self-improvement and the salvation of the deserving poor; a domestic tale of cleanliness, good housekeeping and the improvement of the home; a story about individual determination and the assertion of the will that appealed to professional aspirations; and a public narrative of sanitary and hospital reform, to which Nightingale would dedicate herself for the rest of her long life after her return from the Crimea.
In 1915, when Britain was at war again, this time with Russia on its side, a statue of the Lady with the Lamp was added to the Crimean War Memorial, which was moved back towards Regent Street to accommodate the new figure. The statue of Nightingale was joined by one brought in from the War Office of a thoughtful Sidney Herbert,
