100 Great Black Britons is a poll that was first undertaken in 2003 to vote for and celebrate the greatest Black Britons of all time. It was created in a campaign initiated by Patrick Vernon in response to a BBC search for 100 Greatest Britons, together with a television series (2002), which featured no Black Britons in the published listing. The result of Vernon's campaign was that in February 2004 Mary Seacole was announced as having been voted the greatest Black Briton. Following the original poll, 100 Great Black Britons was re-launched in 2020 in an updated version based on public voting, together with a book of the same title.
British-Jamaican businesswoman and nurse
Founding Father of the New Testament Church of God England & Wales
Writer and enslaved woman
14th-century noblewoman and queen of England
Mary Jane Seacole was a British nurse and businesswoman.
Seacole, c. 1850
Seacole was bankrupt on her return to London. Queen Victoria's nephew Count Gleichen (above) had become a friend of Seacole's in Crimea. He supported fund-raising efforts on her behalf.
Mary Seacole, depicted as an admirer of Punch along with her British Crimean War patients in "Our Own Vivandière" (Punch, 30 May 1857).
One of two known photographs of Mary Seacole, taken for a carte de visite by Maull & Company in London (c. 1873)
