A Boer War Florence Nightingale

Another woman who was also described as a "Florence Nightingale" (of South Africa and/or the Anglo-Boer War) is something of an enigma and considered to be a borderline "adventuress" which, in the parlance of the times in which she lived, meant that either her morality or social status was questionable and certainly the latter in the case of Melina Rorke.

She was born Melina da Fonesca in South Africa c. 1873. During that era, the colonising British were notoriously snobby and racist towards anyone with Portuguese ancestry so she would have already been marked as something "other" with her mother being a descendant of the famous 1820 Settlers who had unfortunately made the social faux pas of marrying a man who was at one time the Portuguese Consul to what is now Mozambique.

In 1887, Melina married an accountant, Frederick Niland Rorke, in Kimberley. According to the Western Cape Archives, the groom was 23 and she was 19, but Melina states in her memoirs that she was much younger, only 15, and admits to lying about her age to the Registrar. And that's not the only time she was guilty of doing so. She became a mother within a year and also alleges she was promptly a widow, which was total fiction. In fact, she, her husband and her brother, Sebastian, were among the early pioneers to Rhodesia in 1894, where they pegged gold-mining claims. It seems she then went to London in 1896 to complete a nursing qualification but that Frederick "shot through" to Western Australia in her absence. She later obtained a divorce in 1899 on account of his desertion. It is no wonder this is not mentioned in her memoirs as to be a divorced woman as well as of Portuguese extraction wouldn't have enhanced her reputation. 

Her 1938 memoir was originally published in New York by Greystone Press as The Story of Melina Rorke R.R.C. [Royal Red Cross] The Florence Nightingale of South Africa. In it, she tells us about her pioneering life, the Matabele Rebellion and Boer War, and name-drops many famous figures in Southern African history such as Cecil Rhodes, Dr Jameson, Barney Barnato and Robert Baden-Powell.
But Melina was unable to shake off a sceptical reception in Rhodesia where the book was declared to be full of historical inaccuracies and her own wild imaginings, with possibly even some plagiarised sections. However, on the plus side, it remains one of the few first-hand accounts written by a woman who lived in that region of Africa and witnessed important events during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries and it is still worth reading today for that background - albeit with the proverbial pinch of salt.
The book was republished as part of the Rhodesiana Reprint Library in 1971 with an even more florid title of Melina Rorke. Her Amazing Adventures in the Stormy Nineties of South Africa's History. Told by Herself. 
Melina is reputed to have left Africa for the United States around 1908, where it is alleged she became an "actress" - not a choice career move for anyone wanting to avoid the dreaded "adventuress" tag. Her son Edgar was supposedly involved in the insurance industry, but what she was really doing those thirty years until she published her memoirs remains a mystery. This closing reference from the dust jacket of the 1971 edition:

"Melina carried on a correspondence with various members of her family in Rhodesia and South Africa until 1940 when a letter was returned marked "deceased". Her husband [Frederic Rorke] who went to Australia is said to have died there in the early 1920s.

During 1950 and 1960 a number of Rhodesians who visited Rhodesia House in London met a Mrs Margaret Meredith who claimed she was Melina Rorke and that she had remarried twice. She died in March 1964, aged 98. Available evidence does not support her claim which serves only to heighten the mystery surrounding Melina Rorke after her departure from Rhodesia."

Romantic, poetic or fabricated memoirs aside, there is no doubt that Melina Rorke was involved in nursing men under awful and challenging conditions during the Boer War, as the Royal Red Cross is not an award given without due merit, its first recipient being, of course, the real Florence Nightingale. (Image http://www.redcross.org.uk/ )
If Melina had to embroider or juicy up the facts of her life in order to sell a book at a profit many years later, she would only be doing what many people have resorted to since autobiography began.

Images are from Rhodesia Reprint edition (copyright Books of Rhodesia Publishing Co. (Pvt.) Ltd., Bulawayo.) The first shows Melina wearing her medal, with the caption, "As the author appeared in 1902 after receiving her decoration from Edward VII". The second is a Testimonial dated 17 May 1900 acknowledging her nursing efforts at both base and field hospitals at Mochudi, Gaberones, Lobatsi and Mafeking. Two of the regiments bearing signatures are British South Africa Police and Southern Rhodesia Volunteers. There are no signatures under the heading of Rhodesia Regiment, and again Melinda's veracity is drawn into question as although her caption informs us that "Not a single man was left alive in the Rhodesia Regiment to sign it," subsequent historians have debunked this as in fact the Regiment had been disbanded and all the men gone their separate ways by the time the Testimonial was prepared.

The Path of Good Intentions

On behalf of the Australian Government and people, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has recently given a public apology to all those children who, over many decades of the 20th Century, were removed from their parents in Britain and sent out to her Dominions and Colonies beyond the seas, ostensibly to be made into good citizens of the Empire; to grow up strong and healthy and to have opportunities that would be denied them if they remained behind in the slums of the old country.
Although for the lucky few this rosy-tinted dream might have come true, for the majority it was little short of a nightmare: of loneliness, emotional abandonment, mental and physical abuse. It took one of their successful own, David Hill, to bring much of this story to light in his book "Forgotten Children". ABC Television has also screened a documentary "The Long Journey Home" based on its findings. Some of it was disturbing and shocking, but there was also a sense of the resilience of children, of the camaraderie and even humour that all human beings manage to find in even the most difficult of conditions. It is also a perfect example of the old quote about where good intentions so often lead.
Many politicians, philanthropists and do-gooders who flowered during the Victorian and Edwardian age were imbued with such acute moral consciences and the belief that, being of good British stock, they had been born to make decisions on behalf of the world's masses that they would never have imagined a day when what they believed in would be decried as unjust, cruel or inhuman.
Kingsley Fairbridge is a name well-known to those who were born and raised in what was once Rhodesia. He was a man of his time and place and should not be judged from the perspective of 21st Century politics and moral standards.

A statue well-known to all Rhodesians and celebrating him once stood at Christmas Pass overlooking Umtali (Mutare). It is of a youthful Fairbridge, his African companion, Jack, and his dog, Vic, and was unveiled by the Queen Mother in 1953. It bore the quote "I looked and beheld a country well fit for the birth of a Nation". That nation would later became Zimbabwe and Kingsley Fairbridge and those like him would never have imagined that horror scenario either although, perhaps, he may have had an inkling of what was to come for his country as might be seen in his poem "Fear" written in 1907.

"No sleep for you, dark ranges, nor for me;
No rest, O valleys, for your teeming heart;
From out tumultuous dreamings do we start
Fear-grasping to the coldness of the night;
(We are as one) - waiting for What Will Be . . .
We are as one in terror; while the bright
White stars stare mocking, though they cannot light
The vast unknowledge of Eternity."

More poems by Fairbridge