Born in Llanycil, near Bala, Gwynedd in 1789, Betsi Cadwaladr was one of 16 children. Christened Elizabeth, she was also known as Beti Cadwaladr or Betsi Davis. According to Betsi, she changed her surname when living with English people, as they struggled to pronounce it. She adopted Davis as it was her father’s first name (Dafydd), in line with Welsh patronymic systems. Her father was a Methodist preacher; her mother died when she was five.
She initially took employment as a maid at her father’s landlord’s home. Working at Plas yn Dre allowed her to learn English, the triple harp, and the skills for a life in service. She was dissatisfied with her choice, but unable to simply walk away from her job as we might nowadays. So Betsi resorted to tying bedsheets together and escaped Plas yn Dre by climbing out her bedroom window.
Following her escape, Betsi Cadwaladr travelled to Liverpool, where she again found work as a domestic servant. This employer gave her the opportunity to travel to parts of the world most in her position would never see. Betsi was in France in 1815, and visited the battlefield in the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo. She also seems to have developed a keen interest in the theatre and acting. She visited Edinburgh to watch a fellow Welsh woman, Sarah Siddons, performing on stage.
Travelling, fleeing, travelling
It was during these years that Betsi made probably her only honest commitment to marriage. She had met, through the many Welsh residents of Liverpool, a merchant ship captain from Solfach named Thomas Harris. Sadly, two days before their wedding, Thomas drowned when his ship was wrecked near Liverpool.
According to her autobiography, Betsi received a further 20 proposals from various suitors. These included a Portuguese merchant known as Barbosa, who she claimed followed her around the world, attempting to kidnap and force her into marriage. Some proposals were more successful than others, for her suitors anyway. Yet on every occasion she broke off her commitment including, two days before marriage to a painter from Chester, fleeing to London.
In 1820, aged 31, Betsi returned to the Bala area. But she once again found herself bored by a quiet life. She became a maid to a ship captain’s wife, and travelled as far as Africa, Australia, and South America. She gained a rudimentary knowledge of nursing on that ship through, for example, participating in the delivery of babies.
As Betsi Cadwaladr grew older she spent more time back in Britain, re-entering land-based servitude. But her experience of medicine onboard ships led her to nursing for a year at Guy’s Hospital, London. She then worked in a private nursing home. She was 65 when she completed basic nursing studies. Then, despite the protestations of her sister Bridget, she enrolled in military nursing. Her intention was to work in the Crimea, having seen newspaper reports of battles and casualties.
The Russian and Ottoman empires had been at war since 1853. British and French troops arrived in the Crimean region of Russia in 1854, fearing collapse of the Ottoman war effort and Russian domination of Eastern Europe. The Crimean conflict is notable for the fact that death by diseases exceeded the deaths of those wounded or killed in action.
Betsi Cadwaladr and Florence Nightingale
Betsi’s military nursing superintendent was the illustrious Florence Nightingale. The two did not see eye to eye, due to different social backgrounds and the generational gap between them. They also had differing attitudes to their roles. Nightingale preferred rules, some of which she established, and the use of statistics. Cadwaladr, on the other hand, took a more pragmatic approach, being prepared to bypass regulations for the benefit of her patients. She was noted for improving the hygiene conditions of the hospitals and camps where she was stationed. This was eventually acknowledged even by Nightingale.
This did little to create any détente between the two. But Betsi was successful in being transferred from a British hospital to the front lines at Balaclava, a conflict immortalised in the Tennyson poem The Charge of the Light Brigade.
Yet again Betsi subverted the bureaucracy and regulations of the British Army in order to bring supplies and relief to wounded soldiers. This would only last six weeks, before she was sidelined to the kitchens, where she made food for those too ill or weak to subsist on rations. It’s claimed she worked alone, from five in the morning until midnight, for over seven months.
By 1855, Betsi had fallen victim to the same diseases suffered by the soldiers she had treated. Cholera and dysentery forced her return home, one year before the conflict in Crimea ended. Her feud with Nightingale did not end with her departure from Russia, as she disagreed with her superintendent over the money she was owed.
Several times in Betsi’s life she seems to have been deprived of the means for a comfortable living. In her own words, she lost her savings following her sailings around the world. Then later, in the mid-1840s, she lost money left to her by an employer through what was described as “legal chicanery”.
A nursing pioneer
Betsi Cadwaladr passed away in 1860. She spent the last five years of her life with her sister, living in poverty in London. During this period she wrote The Autobiography of Elizabeth Davis a Balaclava Nurse Daughter of Dafydd Cadwaladyr. The reliability of the information in the book is questionable, and some details were filled in by its editor Jane Williams.
Betsi was buried humbly in the pauper’s section of Abney Park Cemetery. It wasn’t until 2012 that her grave received a more fitting headstone. It reads: ‘Y ffyddlonaf o nyrsys Ei Mawrhydi / The faithfullest of Her Majesty’s nurses’.
The real key to this story, for me anyway, is how Betsi’s achievements have remained so unknown over the years, while those of Florence Nightingale are celebrated. Both were pioneers in their industry, fighting to improve the conditions and prospects of those injured in duty. It was no mean feat to struggle against the bureaucracy and entrenched attitudes of the British army, especially as a woman in her 60s.
Betsi was a victim of the social prejudices of the time. She lived in an era when the simple fact of being Welsh could be enough to put you at a disadvantage compared to those born on the other side of the border. This is to say nothing about the rigid class structures of Victorian society, which for the most part discriminated based not on nationality but rather money and power.
I have no intention of disparaging Nightingale or pitting the two nurses against each other. Each made her own progress and successes in their shared field. As a historian, I am acutely aware that history is rarely black and white. It would also be naïve not to acknowledge that much of what we know of Betsi’s life comes from her, which presents its own challenges.
Rather, my aim is to ensure that the story of Betsi Cadwaladr stands squarely alongside that of her contemporaries. To those of us in Cymru, Betsi’s legacy is embodied in the oft-failing health board that shares her name. With the best of intentions, I would argue that she deserves more.
We need your help!
We are a not-for-profit citizen journalism publication, but we still have considerable costs.
If you believe in what we do, please consider subscribing to our digital Bylines Gazette from as little as £2 a month 🙏
