Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/29

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Nightingale
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Nodal

East Wellow, Hampshire, on 20 August. Memorial services took place in St. Paul’s Cathedral, where the government was officially represented, at Liverpool Cathedral, and many other places of worship.

Miss Nightingale raised the art of nursing in this country from a menial employment to an honoured vocation; she taught nurses to be ladies, and she brought ladies out of the bondage of idleness to be nurses. This, which was the aim of her life, was no fruit of her Crimean experience, although that experience enabled her to give effect to her purpose more readily than were otherwise possible. Long before she went to the Crimea she felt deeply the ‘disgraceful antithesis’ between Mrs. Gamp and a sister of mercy. The picture of her at Scutari is of a strong-willed, strong-nerved energetic woman, gentle and pitiful to the wounded, but always masterful among those with whom she worked. After the war she worked with no less zeal or resolution, and realised many of her early dreams. She was not only the reformer of nursing but a leader of women.

After her death a memorial fund was instituted for the purpose of providing pensions for disabled or aged nurses and for erecting a statue in Waterloo Place. Memorial tablets have been fixed on her birthplace at Florence as well as in the cloisters of Santa Croce there.

A marble bust executed by Sir John Steell in 1862 and presented to Miss Nightingale by the non-commissioned officers and men of the British army was bequeathed by her to the Royal United Service Museum, together with her various presentation jewels and orders. A plaster statuette by Miss J. H. Bonham-Carter (c. 1856) (standing figure with lamp in right hand) is at Lea Hurst; of five replicas, one is at St. Thomas’s Hospital, another is at the Johns Hopkins Hospital School for Nurses, Baltimore, and the others belong to members of the family. Of two portraits in oils, one by Augustus Leopold Egg, R.A., executed about 1836, is in the National Portrait Gallery; another, by Sir William B. Richmond, R.A., dated about 1886, is at Claydon House. A chalk drawing by Countess Feodora Gleichen, made in 1908, is at Windsor Castle among portraits of members of the Order of Merit. Several water-colour and chalk drawings are either at Lea Hurst or at Claydon House: one (with Miss Nightingale’s mother and sister) by A. E. Chalon is dated about 1835; another is by Lady Eastlake; a third, dated about 1850, by her sister, Lady Verney, was lithographed. Others were executed by Miss F. A. de B. Footner in 1907. A picture of Miss Nightingale receiving the wounded at Scutari hospital in 1856 is by Jerry Barrett.

[M. A. Nutting and L. L. Dock’s History of Nursing (with bibliography of Miss Nightingale’s writings). New York, 1907, vol. ii., chaps. 3–6; The Times, 14–23 Aug. 1910; Burke’s Landed Gentry; Soyer’s Culinary Campaign, 1857; Lord Stanmore’s Lord Herbert of Lea, 1906; J. B. Atkins, Sir William Howard Russell, 1911; Martineau’s Sir Bartle Frere; Bosworth Smith’s Lord Lawrence, Trans. Seventh Intemat. Congress on Hygiene and Demography, 1887; Journal of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, 1889; private information.]

S. P.

NODAL, JOHN HOWARD (1831–1909), journalist and writer on dialect, was son of Aaron Nodal (1798–1855), of the Society of Friends, a grocer and member of the Manchester town council. Born in Downing Street, Ardwick, Manchester, on 19 Sept. 1831, he was educated at the Quaker school at Ackworth, Yorkshire (1841–5). At seventeen he became a clerk of the old Electric Telegraph Company, and rose to be manager of the news department in Manchester. From the age of nineteen he also acted as secretary of the Manchester Working Men’s College, which, formed on the lines of the similar institution in London, was subsequently absorbed in Owens College.

Nodal began early to contribute to the local press. During the volunteer movement of 1860–2 he edited the ‘Volunteer Journal,’ and in January 1864 he gave himself up to journalism on being appointed sub-editor of the ‘Manchester Courier’ on its first appearance as a daily paper. From 1867 to 1870 he was engaged on the ‘Manchester Examiner and Times.’ Meanwhile he edited the ‘Free Lance,’ an able literary and humorous weekly (1866–8), and a similar paper called the ‘Sphinx’ (1868–71). For thirty-three years (1871–1904) he was editor of the ‘Manchester City News.’ Under his control the ‘City News’ besides chronicling all local topics was the recognised organ of the literary and scientific societies of Lancashire. Many notable series of articles were reprinted from it in volume form. Two of these, ‘Manchester Notes and Queries’ (1878–89, 8 vols.) and ‘Country Notes: a Journal of Natural History and Out-Door Observation’ (1882–3, 2 vols.), developed into independent periodicals. Nodal was also a frequent contributor to ‘Notes and Queries,’ and from 1875 to 1885 was on the staff of the ‘Saturday Review.’

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