This blog post accompanies a 10-minute talk which took place at the Museum in honour of International Women’s Day.

Anna Allnut, also known as Annie, was born in London on 7 October 1839, only daughter of a wealthy wine merchant. Her mother died when she was an infant, and she lived with her father at her grandfather’s estate in Clapham, where there were extensive grounds to run about in, and a huge library where she read voraciously, learned botany, and taught herself several languages. However, as a child, she faced serious health problems in a “weakness of the chest”, which was apparently a form of chronic bronchitis. As a young woman, she also suffered severe burns when she stood too close to a fireplace and her skirt caught fire, and it took six months for her to recover from them.

In 1860, she married Thomas Brassey, an incredibly wealthy Liberal party politician, with whom she had five children: Thomas, Mabelle, Muriel, Constance, and Marie. The family lived at Normanhurst Court, a mock French château near the village of Catsfield, south-west of Battle, in Sussex.

Sadly, the Brassey’s four-year-old daughter Constance died from scarlet fever in 1873.  Away from parliament, Thomas Brassey had always been keen on things nautical, and in 1872, he gained his master mariner’s certificate, becoming the first private yachtsman to earn it, and became a competent sea captain. Annie commissioned a 160-foot steam yacht called ‘Sunbeam’ for the family to sail in memory of Constance, and named after the little girl’s nickname. The yacht’s figurehead was a golden statue of Constance, and you can see the figurehead on display at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.

The Sunbeam was a wooden-hulled three-masted top-sail schooner measuring over 51 metres long, 8.5 metres wide and 4 metres deep, with sails of 7,600 square metres, equipped with a 2-cylinder coal-fired steam engine powering a single propeller. It was a large and luxurious yacht designed for long-distance ocean voyaging. The six members of the Brassey family were accompanied on they voyages by a physician, artist, secretary, and a crew of 27 attending to them.

In 1876, Annie and her family moved on board the Sunbeam, and set off on an 11-month voyage around the world. She became famous for her written account of their travels, called Voyage in the Sunbeam, which was, at the time, the equivalent of reality television for the Victorians. Annie had already been a successful writer of two books on previous sailing trips, but this latest one about her sailing travels on the Sunbeam was her most popular.

Annie was also a collector of natural specimens, souvenirs, handcrafted objects, and photographs from the modern and ancient worlds, including her own photographs. She was a keen photographer, one of the first female members of the Royal Photographic Society and exhibited her photographs at Society exhibitions. She held her own exhibitions on the Sunbeam of the artefacts and photographs brought back from her excursions and raised money for charitable causes.

Over time, the Brassey family set off on at least eight long trips, visiting the Mediterranean, Egypt, the West Indies, Bermuda, Jamaica, the Azores, Norway, and Scandinavia. Annie’s last voyage, starting in 1877, was a tour of India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Borneo, and Australia. In August of that year, Annie became ill with malaria which complicated the bronchitis that had plagued her throughout her life. The Australia trip was designed for Annie’s health, but unfortunately, she caught a cold in Australia which developed into bronchitis which she could not shake.

Ignoring the advice of the onboard physician, Annie continued her busy schedule, evidenced through her daily diary entries, until these entries stopped on 29 August. She died soon after and was buried at sea in the South Pacific somewhere between Christmas Island and the north-western coast of Australia. In his memoir, her husband wrote the following ‘We have seen how your mother used her opportunities to make the world a little better than she found it…’. After Annie’s death, her husband opened the Lady Brassey Museum at their shore-bound home in Park Lane. In 1919, the exhibition moved to the Hastings Museum.

Annie’s experiences with prolonged illness and severe burns in her youth piqued her interest in first aid and nursing and eventually led her to become connected with St John Ambulance and make it her cause. She had been one of the St John Ambulance Association’s early students, gaining her first aid certificate in 1877, the year that the Association was established, and undertook regular re-examinations. Annie also insisted that any servants in her household were trained in first aid, and she organised first aid classes in the villages surrounding her family home in Sussex.

Over her lifetime, she established the Branch system of the Association, whereby every large town that had an Association Centre could have Branches in the outlying districts, but with all correspondence and organisation happening within the main Centre. She established this system at the Battle Centre in Sussex, and the system was quickly taken up. Annie and her husband were Life Members of the Association and many Association Centres in England and across the world.

Like other women of her class, Annie Brassey did good works for various charities, and her primary focus was the St John Ambulance Association. Wherever she travelled on the Sunbeam, she was evangelical about the work of St John in teaching and promoting first aid and life-saving skills. She was influential in the establishment of the St John Ambulance Association in places like Singapore, Australia, and the Caribbean.

She would give public speeches in town halls on the subject of first aid, telling women in the middle classes that they would be ’angels of the house’ if they took up first aid training to support and tend to members of their family who might be sick and dying, violating a social norm for women by speaking publicly, and using her social standing and clout to break away from her gender role to effect change. It appears that Annie used the same speech at each city and ad-libbed anecdotes of instances where first aid prevailed. One such anecdote was this:

‘Only the other day on the yacht one of our stewards burst a soda-water bottle in his hand, cutting all the five arteries and blowing off the top of one finger. Blood was starting out in all directions, and if someone had not been on hand to bind a handkerchief around his wrist, he would probably have bled to death, or have been terribly weakened by loss of blood. The picking out of the broken bits of glass, tying up the arteries, and stitching up the gaping wounds, though most skilfully performed by the doctor, was, as you may imagine, a terrible business, with the poor boy in frightful pain, groaning at intervals. Many of the men were obliged to go away, turned fearfully sick, and I am quite certain if I had not gone through some previous ambulance training I could not have held through the trying operation, though I must honestly own that I felt very ill after it, in spite of all the previous training’.

In Madeira in 1883, Annie boarded an emigrant ship there which was bound for Australia, and, finding the passengers in a poor condition due to the onboard water going bad, she gave first aid hampers and pamphlets, and encouraged the onboard doctor to hold some first aid classes. Later, in Trinidad, Annie held a public meeting where she extolled the virtues of first aid, promoted establishing a Centre of the St John Ambulance Association, and presented a first aid hamper to the islanders.

In December 1883, the Brassey family ‘blew into Bermuda’s Hamilton Harbour in the Sunbeam ‘on the heels of a hurricane’. While there, Annie lobbied for a Centre of the St John Ambulance Association to be established in Bermuda, and many Bermudians agreed that it was needed, although some saw Annie as another interfering white outsider trying to change their way of life, and who was encouraged by a liking of alcohol. The island, at that time, had no formal medical facilities. There was no organised first aid, no infirmaries or dispensaries, no hospital beyond the British Army hospital establishment (which primarily served the needs of the military), and an imbalance of medical care where it could be arranged; those with money could organise for the scant medical care that was available, whereas those without money could not.

During her time in Bermuda, she appealed to the women of Bermuda, and the island’s few medical men to enable servants and women to be able to be relied upon in cases of difficulty and emergency where first aid would be helpful. After four months, the Sunbeam and the Brassey family sailed off back to England. Annie had made an impact, and a branch of the St John Ambulance Association, the Bermuda Centre, was soon initiated on the island. Princess Louise accepted its presidency, and Lord and Lady Brassey became Life Members of the Bermuda Centre.

St John Ambulance is still very much prevalent and active in Bermuda today. It is one of the island’s oldest charities, providing a volunteer-led ambulance service for public events, a patient transfer service, and first aid training and community services. I think Annie would be delighted to see what a lasting impact she has made on this island nation.

In 1887, the Sunbeam and the Brassey family spent four months in Australian waters, having arrived in Albany, Western Australia, in May of that year. In all of the places that were visited, Annie again promoted the value of the St John Ambulance Association, shone a light on first aid training, and encouraged Centres of the Association to be established, and she drew large crowds.

In Sydney, the Association had organised first aid courses as early as 1881, but it did not have an Association Centre. In July 1887, Annie called a public meeting in the town hall where, as you might have guessed, she promoted the work of the Association and encouraged a Centre to be opened. The Governor, Premier, Lord Mayor, and Chief Justice were all in attendance and voted to form a Centre, but when the Sunbeam left for Brisbane a few days later, it had not yet materialised. It was not for another 9 years that the Sydney Centre was established, after Annie passed away.

In Victoria, Annie created the ‘Lady Brassey Ambulance Corps’ at Williamstown, where the Sunbeam was moored for three weeks. The Corps recruited certificated pupils from the St John Ambulance Association classes, and was funded by Annie herself. The Corps was the only women’s first aid Corps in the area (there was already in existence two ambulance corps in the area unrelated to St John: one for men, and one just for railway employees). Lady Brassey’s Corps met weekly at sewing meetings (which doesn’t sound very first-aid’y). Later, when the Williamstown hospital was being built, the Corps undertook significant fundraising for the building works.

In Sydney and Brisbane, Annie’s enthusiasm and encouragement was the impetus for Association Centres to be established in these areas, and in Melbourne and Adelaide, she helped to develop their existing Centres by evangelising their work to the public. Like Bermuda, St John Ambulance is still thriving in Australia.

I think we can all agree that Annie sounds like a real go-getter; incredibly passionate about bringing first aid to everyone, and probably not taking no for an answer too often. Most people, it seems, really liked her, and valued her passion, but Annie did rub some people up the wrong way. Lady Loch, wife of the Governor of Australia in the late 1880s said that, of Annie,

‘I never saw anyone give themselves such airs as Lady B. & they certainly will not be loved in Australia – & I think they stir up my bile (especially Lady B.) more than anyone I have ever met in my life – there are 12 of their party daily here & they ask so many reporters & all sorts of hangers on to the House that our servants are really worked off their legs running after them.’

In the Order of St John’s annual report for 1888, Annie’s death was described as a ‘most serious loss’. In all of Annie’s voyages in the Sunbeam, she devoted all her practical attention on disseminating the knowledge of first aid. Lady Loch might have thought that Annie was ‘publicity-mad’, but really, after all we’ve heard, I don’t think that’s by any means a bad thing.

By garnering the attention of journalists and reporters, she ensured regular attendees to St John Ambulance Association first aid classes and helped people around the world to learn first aid and life-saving skills. She was quite a woman.