The Young Florence Nightingale - Part 1

Florence was born on 12th May 1820, during her parents' honeymoon. This wasn't the momentous early 19th century scandal it would seem, as the marriage was in 1818 and the honeymoon, tracing the European Continental Grand Tour, lasted three years.

Obviously, since there was no provision for special backpacker rates at the time, a jaunt of this length automatically cost a huge sum of money. And Florence's parents were extremely rich. Her father, William, came from the highly respected Shore family, with a pedigree extending back through several centuries and which at the time included the ex-governor general of India, Baron Teignmouth. William came into a fortune, and a moderate-sized bite of Derbyshire, in his own right as the nearest surviving male relative of his mother's uncle, Peter Nightingale. Self-made men at the start of the 18th century, the Nightingales had made their money in lead mining. It was a condition of the inheritance that William change his name from Shore to Nightingale when coming of age, and getting his hands on the money, in 1815. Well, wouldn't you?

In 1817 he met and became engaged to Fanny Smith, an Essex girl from Parndon, and daughter of the colourful MP for Norwich, William Smith, a staunch Unitarian. Unitarians denied the concept of the Trinity, which was central to Church of England doctrine. One needed to be exceptionally strong-minded to challenge the established Church in 1813, when William Smith championed the Bill through Parliament that made it legal to be Unitarian - previously it was a criminal offence. His daughter also held strong Unitarian beliefs. In 1817 she was on the rebound from a short romance with a Captain Sinclair; short that is, when the family found out he had barely enough income to pay his mess bills. At the age of 29 she had no time to lose and was more than happy when the juicy plum that was William Nightingale, six years her junior, dropped into her lap.

The Continental Grand Tour was a must for any male who laid claim to a position in high society. It had its heighday in the second half of the 18th century, and the object was to become educated in the Arts in the main cultural centres - apart from Paris, these were mostly in Italy. Greece was normally combined with Egypt as a separate tour. Although the cultural stops were leisurely paced and predictable, the journeys in between were anything but. As always the tourist was regarded as an easy mark. If you didn't insist to your boat captain at Dover that he land you in Calais harbour, you would like as not find yourself dumped on the beach there with all your baggage, so that he could avoid port landing fees. You could take your own coach, but not horses - the logistics were impossible, even if you could afford the huge cost. So horses had to be hired stage by stage. Your own servants didn't speak the language, so either you had to involve yourself in all the sordid and undignified bargaining, or hire a local, who would be in league with innkeepers all along the way to overcharge you for sub-standard meals and accommodation. There were interminable delays at customs posts both within and on the borders of the several different sovereign states which then existed along the route, each with different currencies. There was the danger of accidents - axle trees frequently failed on rough roads - and wild west type hold-ups in remote areas. And above all there was the sheer discomfort of being shaken about for long periods. Two hundred years on, it is difficult for us to visualise. Today the TGV express train runs from Paris to Lyons in just two hours, and it's a comfortable four and a quarter hours drive on the autoroute. Back then it took forty eight hours by coach, spread over four days.

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