“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits.”—Ps. ciii. 2.
BY F. PARTHENOPE VERNEY AND FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
After the death of her mother, Miss Nightingale still occasionally stayed at Lea Hurst and Embley, which had passed to her kinsman, Mr. William Shore Nightingale, and continued her old interest in the people of the district. In 1887 the members of a working men’s club in Derbyshire presented Miss Nightingale with a painting of Lea Hurst, a gift which she received with peculiar pleasure. It was about this time that she paid her last visit to the loved home of her childhood.
Miss Nightingale’s time was now passed between her London house, 10, South Street, Park Lane, and Claydon, the beautiful home near Winslow, Buckinghamshire, of her sister, who had in 1859 become the second wife of Sir Harry Verney. Sir Harry was the son of Sir Harry Calvert, Governor of Chelsea Hospital and Adjutant-General of the Forces. He had been a Major in the army, and in 1827 assumed the name of Verney. The family of Verney had been settled in Buckinghamshire since the fifteenth century. Sir Harry was at various times member of Parliament for Bedford and also Buckingham. He was deeply interested in all matters of army reform and in active sympathy with the schemes of his distinguished sister-in-law, and acted as Chairman of the Nightingale Fund.
At Claydon Miss Nightingale found a beautiful and congenial holiday retreat with Sir Harry Verney and her beloved sister, who was well known in literary and political circles; her books on social questions had the distinction of being quoted in the House of Commons. In the second year of her marriage (1861) Lady Verney had laid the foundation stone of the new Buckinghamshire Infirmary at Aylesbury, the construction of which Miss Nightingale watched with great interest during her visits to Claydon. Her bust adorns the entrance hall of the infirmary. During her summer visits to Claydon, Miss Nightingale frequently gave garden parties for the Sisters from St. Thomas’s Hospital.
Lady Verney died, after a long and painful illness, in 1890, sadly enough on May 12th, her sister’s birthday. Sir Harry Verney survived his wife barely four years, and at his death Claydon passed to Sir Edmund Hope Verney, the son of his first marriage with the daughter of Admiral Sir George Johnstone Hope.
Sir Edmund was a gallant sailor, who as a young lieutenant had served in the Crimean War and received a Crimean medal, Sebastopol clasp. He had again distinguished himself in the Indian Mutiny, was mentioned in dispatches, and received an Indian medal, Lucknow clasp. He was Liberal M.P. for North Bucks 1885–6 and 1889–91, and represented Brixton on the first London County Council. Sir Edmund married the eldest daughter of Sir John Hay-Williams and Lady Sarah, daughter of the first Earl Amherst, a lady who has taken an active part in the movement for higher education in Wales, and served for seven years on a Welsh School Board. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Welsh University. Sir Edmund has estates in Anglesey. Lady Verney is a member of the County Education Committee for Buckinghamshire. She is continuing her mother-in-law’s work of editing the “Verney Memoirs.” Sir Edmund takes great interest in education and rural questions. He is a member of the Bucks County Council and the Dairy Farmers’ Association, and has published articles on Agricultural Education and kindred subjects.
After her sister’s death Miss Nightingale continued to pass some of her time at Claydon until, in 1895, increasing infirmity made the journey impracticable, and she has continued to interest herself in the rural affairs of the district. The suite of apartments which Miss Nightingale occupied at Claydon are preserved by Sir Edmund and Lady Verney as when she occupied them, and are now styled “The Florence Nightingale Rooms.” They consist of a large, charmingly furnished sitting-room with a domed ceiling, situated at a corner of the mansion and so commanding a double view over the grounds, and a bedroom and ante-room. Miss Nightingale’s invalid couch still stands in her favourite corner of the sitting-room, and beside it is a large china bowl which loving hands once daily replenished with fresh flowers, such as our heroine loved to have about her when she occupied the room. In the adjoining apartment stands Miss Nightingale’s half-tester bedstead and old-fashioned carved wardrobe and chest of drawers. A large settee is at the foot of the bed, and was a favourite lounge with Miss Nightingale during the day. Pictures and family portraits hang on the various walls, and to these have been added by Sir Edmund Verney a series of interesting pictures culled from various sources to illustrate events in Miss Nightingale’s work in the East. The rooms will doubtless in time form an historic museum in Claydon House.
After her beloved sister’s death Miss Nightingale was sad and despondent, and one detects the note of weariness in a letter which she addressed in 1890 to the Manchester Police Court Mission for Lads. She was anxious that more should be done to reclaim first offenders and save them from the contaminating influences of prison life. “I have no power of following up this subject,” she wrote, “though it has interested me all my life. For the last (nearly) forty years I have been immersed in two objects, and undertaken what might well occupy twenty vigorous young people, and I am an old and overworked invalid.”
Happily Miss Nightingale’s work was not done yet. Two years later (1892) found her at the age of seventy-two starting a vigorous health crusade in Buckinghamshire in particular, and in the rural districts generally. The 1890 Act for the Better Housing of the Working Classes specially roused her attention in a subject in which she had always been interested. She had little faith in Acts of Parliament reforming the habits of the people. “On paper,” she writes, “there could not be a more perfect Health Directory [than the Act] for making our sanitary authorities and districts worthy of the name they bear. We have powers and definitions. Everything is provided except the two most necessary: the money to pay for and the will to carry out the reforms.” If the new Act were enforced, Miss Nightingale was of opinion that three-fourths of the rural districts in England would be depopulated and “we should have hundreds and thousands of poor upon our hands, owing to the large proportion of houses unfit for habitation in the rural districts.”