Cecil Woodham-Smith

British · 1896 to 1977

Cecil Woodham-Smith was born Cecil Blanche Fitzgerald in Tenby, Wales, in 1896, the daughter of an army officer who had served in India during the Sepoy Mutiny and a descendant of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the aristocrat who died in a Dublin prison for his part in the Irish Rebellion of 1798. She was expelled from the Royal School for Officers' Daughters in Bath for slipping away without permission to see the paintings at the National Gallery, and finished her schooling at a French convent before going up to St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she took a second-class degree in English in 1917. For some years afterward she wrote potboiler novels under the pseudonym Janet Gordon, work she never claimed once her real career began. In 1928 she married George Ivon Woodham-Smith, a London solicitor, and settled into a domestic life that gave little sign of what was to come. Then, given access to family papers that had been withheld from Florence Nightingale's first biographer, she spent nine years reconstructing a woman far more formidable and far stranger than the legend of the Lady with the Lamp. Florence Nightingale, published in 1950, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and made her reputation overnight. She followed it with The Reason Why in 1953, an account of the aristocratic blundering behind the Charge of the Light Brigade, and in 1962 with The Great Hunger, the first major popular history of the Irish famine, written with the same patient excavation of documents that had built her name. She was appointed CBE in 1960 and received honorary doctorates from the National University of Ireland and the University of St Andrews. In her last years she turned to Queen Victoria, but completed only the first volume before her death in London on 16 March 1977, at the age of eighty.