Charlotte Wilsdon - Crimea nurse

In June to August 1854 20% of the British Expeditionary Force in the Crimea fell sick with cholera, diarrhoea and dysentery. Almost 1,000 men died before a shot was fired in what was then called the Russian War.

On September 30, 1854 The Times correspondent in Constantinople reported that there were not enough surgeons and nurses; not enough linen for bandages; that wounded soldiers often waited a week before being seen by a doctor on board ship from Balaclava to Constantinople.

It was news reports such as these that galvanised Florence Nightingale into applying her nursing skills where they were so desperately needed. 

Together with a group of 38 women volunteers Florence left London Bridge Station early on October 23, 1854. From Folkestone the women boarded the Boulogne packet; then they travelled via Paris and Lyons to Marseilles where they took the mail steamer Vectis to Scutari. The journey lasted 13 days.

Among these women was Charlotte Wilsdon, a woman born in Abingdon, who would end her days living in Spring Gardens, Swindon.

At the outbreak of war in 1854 Charlotte was living in Oxford with her two young daughters. She had been married and widowed twice and was then working as a tailoress, taking in lodgers to make ends meet. In October of that year Charlotte responded to Florence Nightingale’s appeal for nursing volunteers. Charlotte was recommended by Dr Henry Wentworth Acland, and it is likely she gained her nursing experience during the cholera epidemic that had swept through Oxford earlier that year.

Florence Nightingale and her corps of nurses arrived in Turkey on November 4, on the eve of a major Russian attack at Inkerman.

Following the battle the Rev Sidney Godolphin Osborne described conditions at Scutari, a former military building where those wounded at Inkerman were brought, as being totally unfit to serve as a hospital. Patients were lined up along the corridors, their beds mere thin stuffed sacking mattresses and rotten wooden divans. There was a shortage of medicines and food. Charlotte and the other newly arrived nurses began work immediately, attending to hundreds of casualties where deaths numbered 20-30 a day.

Florence Nightingale’s nurses were paid 12–14 shillings (60-70p) a week, which included their keep and a uniform, rising to 18-20 shillings (90p-£1) following a year’s good conduct. Drunkenness proved a big problem among the unqualified women and several were dismissed. However, it was with regret that Florence had to send the invalided Charlotte back to England. 

In a letter to Lady Cranworth, a member of the management committee, dated June 7, 1856 she writes:

‘Charlotte Wilsdon, I regret to say, I was obliged to invalid home 23 May by the advice of the medical officers. She is a kind, active and useful nurse, a strictly sober woman. And, I consider, well entitled to the gratuity of the month’s wages, promised by the War Office, and which I venture to solicit you grant her. I have directed her to apply to you.’

After more than a year of working in such dangerous and challenging conditions, her health compromised, Charlotte returned home to Abingdon. 

In 1859 she married again. Her third husband was engine driver William Andrews, a widower with three young children. In 1862 Charlotte’s daughter Harriet married Thomas Brown, also an engine driver employed by the GWR, and in the 1880s the family moved to Swindon where their three sons were all employed in the railway works.

Widowed for the third time in 1869, Charlotte lived independently for many years until old age and infirmity caught up with her. Sometime during the early 1890s she moved to Swindon to live with her daughter. She died on March 22, 1896 at her daughter’s home, 3 Spring Gardens, Swindon.

So let's stand awhile at Charlotte's grave, and whilst we remember her let's remember also our dedicated NHS nurses and doctors, exceptional people in exceptional circumstances.