florence 2

I’ve no idea why I suddenly had to drop Nelson and concentrate on Florence Nightingale for a week. There doesn’t seem to be any particular connection to the date, apart from a letter she once wrote to the Aylesbury Dairy Company asking for some of their eggs, and that didn’t surface in public till 40 years after this was written. Whatever the reason, it certainly inspired me, this being only the first of two pieces I wrote about Florence that day. I’m guessing we had to do this as a class or year group rather than out of individual choice. The words I’ve copied are too much like a brief overview, the sort of thing you’d read on the back of a Weetabix card, though I can’t imagine they ever did a set of cards about heroes of the medical profession. So it’s not from one of our regular Ladybird books and might even have been copied from the blackboard. Who knows? One thing I do know is that the line attributed to Longfellow - “A lady with a lamp shall stand, in the great annals of the land,” is a misquote. Apparently an excerpt from Santa Filomena, the original substitutes ‘annals’ for ‘history,’ having used the word ‘annals’ in the previous stanza. I assume I copied the mistake from whatever Fact File we were told to copy, rather than magically making it up myself, and I assume they misquoted it because the misquote’s actually better. The picture at the bottom of the page is rubbish, of course, and I clearly abandoned it at the earliest opportunity so I could get on with something else, but it’s still without a doubt the single best picture of a woman I drew during my whole two and a half years in Fairburn. Oh, and: obscurantism? Seriously? Who makes an eight-year-old write the word obscurantism?

Florence Nightingale

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People in the Old Stone Age Guy Fawkes People in the Old Stone Age: 2 People in the Old Stone Age: 3 The New Stone Age People of the Bronze Age The Story of Nelson: 1 The Story of Nelson: 2 The Story of Nelson: 3 Florence Nightingale The Story of Nelson: 4 The Story of Nelson: 5 The Story of Nelson: 6 The Story of Nelson: 7 Christopher Columbus: 1 Christopher Columbus: 2 The Soldier Napoleon Bonaparte Napoleon’s Mother The Queen of Spain The French Revolution The Surrender of Toulon Upon Return From Italy The Armed Revolt Josephine de Beauharnais The Thin Young Man The Little Corporal The Most Famous Man in France A Proposal About Egypt Master of France Weary of War Hero of the People Emperor at 34 Danger Across the Sea Wherever Wood Can Float An Empire in Decline