(Miss Nightingale to Dr. Farr.) Dec. 10. I have had the great joy of being in constant communication with Sir John Lawrence, and of receiving his commands to do what I had almost lost the hope of being allowed to do—viz. of sending out full statements and schemes of what we want the Presidency Commissions to do. I should be glad to submit to you copies of papers of mine which he desired me to write and which he took out with him, as to the constitution of the Presidency Commissions, if you care to see them. They are, of course, confidential. I have also seen Lord Stanley more than once during these busy days. And with Sir John Lawrence's command, we feel ourselves empowered to begin the Home Commission,[30] and to further our plans upon it. Sir John Lawrence, so far from considering our Report exaggerated, considers it under the mark.
Thus was preparation made for putting the Report into execution in India. During Lawrence's Viceroyalty, Sir Bartle Frere was governor of Bombay. “Men used to say,” he told Miss Nightingale, “that they always knew when the Viceroy had received a letter from Florence Nightingale: it was like the ringing of a bell to call for sanitary progress.”
III
Within a month of his arrival in India, Sir John Lawrence had set the Sanitary Commissions on foot, and nothing was wanting except hints and instructions from home:—
(Sir John Lawrence to Miss Nightingale.) Calcutta, Feb. 5 [1864]. I write a line to say that we have commenced work by establishing our Sanitary Committees for Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. They are composed of five members. A Civilian is at their head, and a Medical Officer as Secretary. I hope that you will expedite the transmission to India of the codes and rules and plans which have been approved of for home and the colonies. We shall then have an idea in a practical shape of the main features of the sanitary system, and can readily adapt it to the peculiar circumstances of the country. Without such a guide we shall often be perhaps working in direct opposition to your views. Where we differ, it will become our duty to set forth the grounds for so doing, in sending our plans and reports home. Pray excuse this hurried scrawl, and believe me, Sincerely yours, John Lawrence.
It was not Miss Nightingale's fault that this plea for expedition was necessary. In December 1863 Lord de Grey had again asked her to draft a letter to the India Office, as from the War Office, on the measures recommended by the Royal Commission, and she had done it. But days, weeks, months passed, and nothing happened. In January 1864 her “Suggestions in regard to Sanitary Works required for the Improvement of Indian Stations,”[31] written at the urgent request of the Governor-General, were ready, Dr. Sutherland, Dr. Farr, and Mr. Rawlinson collaborating with her. Again months passed and nothing happened. The Barrack and Hospital Improvement Committee had been officially informed in December of the appointment of the Indian members, and requested to report on any matters which might be referred to it by the Secretary for India or the Secretary for War; but as yet no Indian reference had been made. Miss Nightingale chafed sorely at the needless delay. The Governor-General wrote to her again and again pressing for the Suggestions. She had done her part long ago; the War Office had been in possession of her Draft for months. She tried plain pressure, and pressure barbed with sarcasm. “Poor man!” she wrote in forwarding to the War Office one of the Governor-General's letters (March 10); “he really expects despatch. He thinks we can write a letter in three months! He must be more fit for a Lunatic Asylum than for a Governor-Generalship.” Or, when the Government had been having a close division in the House,[32] she tried to play the India Office against the War Office. “You will all be ‘out’ this session,” she wrote to the War Office (March 7, 1864); “after which I shall be able to get what I like from Lord Stanley [I.O.], but you will not be able to get what you like from Gen. Peel [W.O.]. It is therefore very desirable that this letter should be written now at once while you are still ‘in.’” It turned out that the reason of the delay was this: the War Office had sent a preliminary letter to the India Office, and the India Office resented it. Sir Charles Wood, it was explained to Miss Nightingale, had “snubbed” Lord de Grey. The War Office was sulking in its tents accordingly. The India Office, on its part, was standing on its dignity, and was not going to place itself in the humiliating position of taking action proposed to it by the War Office. And this was the reason why Miss Nightingale's Suggestions, for which the Governor-General was asking, were still pigeon-holed. As for minor recommendations in the Royal Commission's Report, it was quite true that many of them could be carried out by administrative order, and some of them were; but the difficulty in the case of others was that it had hitherto passed the wit of man to discover with whom the power, or the responsibility, of making the order lay. Well may Miss Nightingale have written, as she did in more than one letter of this time (Jan. 1864): “No impression in all my life was ever ‘borne in upon me’ more strongly than this, that the Ministers have never considered the respective jurisdictions of the W.O. and the I.O., and that I.O., W.O., Horse Guards at home, Commander-in-Chief in India, Governor-General in India are as little defined as to the respective powers and duties as if India were the Sandwich Islands.”
On the major matter, the dispatch of sanitary suggestions to guide the Indian authorities, Miss Nightingale now resolved that the delay should come to an end. She had drafted an ultimatum to the War Office, threatening an attack in the House of Commons, when Lord Stanley, a prominent member of the Opposition, appeared on the scene. He had forewarned Miss Nightingale, as we have heard, that departmental jealousies would cause some delay; but seven months had now passed since the Report of his Commission had been issued, and he seems to have thought that this was time enough to allow for the two offices to let off steam between themselves. He wrote to Miss Nightingale suggesting that he should come to see her, and offering, if she approved, to put pressure either upon Lord de Grey or upon Sir Charles Wood. Miss Nightingale loyally gave her friends at the War Office a last chance, but they did not care to take it. Lord Stanley saw Sir Charles Wood accordingly, promised him parliamentary support in any action which he might take, and matters were at last arranged. Miss Nightingale's draft “Suggestions” were submitted to the Barrack and Hospital Improvement Commission, and with slight alterations were adopted by that body. It was a War Office Commission, but the dignity of the India Office was consulted by the statement on the title-page of the Blue-book, that the Suggestions had been prepared by the said Commission “in accordance with Letters from the Secretary of State for India in Council.” The fact was that they were prepared by Miss Nightingale in accordance with the wishes of Sir John Lawrence.
When once the “Suggestions” had been passed officially, it was within her power, by the simple expedient of laying in a stock of early copies, to prevent a moment's further delay. She used the power; and could not deny herself a few genial taunts at her official friends. “I beg to inform you,” she wrote to Captain Galton at the War Office (Aug. 8), “that by the first mail after signature I sent off by H.M.'s book-post, at an enormous expense (I have a good mind to charge it to you!), to Sir John Lawrence direct no end of copies of Suggestions (also to the Presidency Commissions); and that, as he is always more ready to hear than you are to pray (you sinners!), I have not the least doubt that they will have been put in execution long before the India Office has even begun to send them.”[33] She was not far wrong; six or seven weeks elapsed before the official copies were sent,[34] and meanwhile Miss Nightingale was able to get in another gibe. She heard from Sir John Lawrence that he had ordered the Suggestions to be reprinted in India. “It might be as well,” she wrote to the War Office, “to hurry your copies for the India Office, who will otherwise receive them first from India.”