FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20799, 19 August 1929, Page 11

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.

■. T . MR REGINALD BERKELEY'S PLAY.' HISTORICAL ACCURACY CHALLENGED. '; (From Our Own Cobeespondehi l .) LONDON, July 12. Mr Reginald .Berkeley’s play, “The Lady with a Lamp,” rdn for several months and • achieved considerable success. Relatives of the late Miss Florence Nightingale and descendants of Sidney Herbert, however, challenged the historical accuracy of Mr Berkeley’s story, and they have voiced their grievances in a letter to, the Morning Post, The signatures are A. H. Clough, L. H. Shore Nightingale, the Earl of Pembroke, and Dorothea Ponsonby. Two of these are the executors and-r nearest surviving relatives of Miss Nightingale, and two are the grandchildren of Sidney - Herbert, “The one connecting.-thread in the play, the story of which Vo vers some 60 or 70 years,” they write, “is that Mrs (afterwards Lady) Herbert was jealous of Miss Nightingale’s influence over her husband, and that Miss Nightingale suspected Lady Herbert of intriguing to hinder-her work. /‘This is the reverse of the truth. When ; Miss Nightingale first met Mrs Herbert she wrote of ‘the great kindness, the desire of love, the magnanimous generosity * that characterised her. Sir Edward Cook writes that Mim» Nightingale was * as dear to the wife as she was helpful to the husband,’ a fact that is fully borne out by her existing correspondence. “ It is within our personal knowledge that the affectionate friendship that existed before the limits of our recollection continued until Miss Nightingale died in 1910—a year before Lady Herbert s death,, in 1911, The play shows Lady Herbert’s jealousy as existing from the beginning of their acquaintance. The particular instance given of Mies Nightingale’s suspicion is that she suspected Mrs Herbert of taking part in an intrigue to send out additional nurses to Scutari in order to damage her position. On the recorded facts the origin of this scheme is obscure, but it is certain that Mrs Herbert did not arrange it and did not take any part in it in hostility to Mifia Nightingale; LORD HERBERT’S OVERWORK. “ The programme of the play contains a statement that Miss Nightingale ‘drove’ Lord Herbert ‘through; successive stages of ill-health and overwork to an early death.’ This is not true, and rests on no authority at all, as may be seen by a reference to Lord Stanmore’s Life of Lord Herbert and such other records as there are of his career. “Lord Herbert was never a strong man, and his health was eventually destroyed by his devotion to public duty in tha important positions which his natural abilities opened to him. After he had accepted a peerage he refused to give up his work, partly in compliance with the urgent requests of his colleagues, and though the disease of which he died may have been caused and was no doubt aggravated by overwork, that overwork was due to events with which Miss Nightingale had no connection. “ The_ last act of the play has no foundation in fact. /Miss Nightingale waa_ never the physical and mental wreck depicted on the stage; and she was never approached by any official person when the Order of Merit and the Freedom of the City were presented to her.”