Nightingale Training School for Nurses

Florence Nightingale came home from the Crimean War a public heroine, and donations poured into a fund raised by public subscription in her honor. In 1859 she set up the Nightingale Fund Council to manage the money, which was meant to let her found a school for nurses. Her own training had been three months at a hospital and school in Düsseldorf, followed at 33 by a post as superintendent of a hospital for gentlewomen in Harley Street.

The school opened in 1860 at St Thomas' Hospital, then in Southwark, with a first intake of 15 probationers. The hospital's matrons oversaw it, and Mrs Wardroper, matron of St Thomas', wrote to the Fund Council about where the nurses trained there went next. The records kept at the London Metropolitan Archives include the regulations probationers had to follow, timetables and syllabuses from 1861, registers of admissions, ward diaries, and addresses Nightingale wrote to the probationers from 1872 to 1900.

Training spread through the people the school produced. Other voluntary hospitals and workhouse infirmaries opened schools of their own, many run by superintendents trained at St Thomas'. The Fund Council paid for a midwifery school at King's College Hospital from 1862 to 1867 and helped schools at the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary from 1864, Highgate Infirmary from 1871 and the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary from 1872.

Requests also came from abroad, and Nightingale nurses were asked to start schools in Australia, America and Africa. Her cousin Henry Bonham-Carter, secretary of the Fund Council from 1861 to 1914, handled the letters from hospitals asking for trained nurses.

In 1871 St Thomas' left Southwark for its present site in Lambeth. The Florence Nightingale Museum now stands in the hospital grounds on Lambeth Palace Road.