Robert Peel Research Paper

Those who made a change

There are many people that have contributed to the improvements to our country to turn it to the country it is now.
The nominations for the award of the greatest contribution to History are....
Robert Peel....
Robert was born in the year of 1788 in Bury, Lancashire. He was a student at Oxford University studying Classics and Mathematics. His father was very wealthy textile manufacturer and was and Member of Parliament. As a result of his father’s influence and political connections, Robert became an MP at the age of 21. In 1829, Robert Peel set up the Metropolititan Police based at Scotland Yard. Employing 1000 police constables and they became known as ‘Bobbies’ or ‘Peelers’. The ‘Bobbies’ were unpopular at first,
but they did succeed in reducing crime. Robert became the British Prime Minister from 1834 to 1835 then from 1841 to 1846 again. During his time as Prime Minister, Robert reintroduced income tax in order to reduce taxes on goods. 1844, he also introduced the Factory Act, limiting the number of hours that women and children were permitted to work in factories. 1850, he was an MP for Tamworth from 1830 to his death in 1850 after a riding accident.
Elizabeth Fry...
Elizabeth Fry was born in 1780 and died in 1845. Elizabeth and her family were Quakers and believed in charity and helping others. Quakers are ‘friends’ or members of family of religious movements collectively known as the Religious Society Of Friends. Her mother was from a family of bankers and her father was a banker and owned a factory. When she was 18 she was inspired by a speech read by American Quaker, William Savery. Elizabeth started helping poor and sick people and visiting prisoners. She believed that everyone deserved kindness. She visited many prisons and was shocked by how dirty and overcrowded they were. In some places prisoners slept on the floors. Elizabeth brought clean clothes for prisoners and eventually started a school for the children who were in prison with their parents. Elizabeth Fry really wanted to make prison conditions better, she campaigned to change the way prisoners were treated. Queen Victoria liked Elizabeth Fry and even met with her a few times to talk about the issues in prisons. Elizabeth was very important because she was one of the first women to speak to Parliament about important issues. She wrote a book about the changes in prisons and thanks to her prisons are much better places now.
Joseph Bazelgette...
He had an incredible moustache/beard which covered the whole of his face below the nose except for one tiny egg shape on his chin! Sir Bazelgette invented the underground sewage works for London saving many areas of the massive city from the smell of waste. Earlier in his career Bazalgette actually worked on railway projects. However, he had a nervous breakdown and that put a stop to that. Bazalgette was knighted in 1875, and elected President of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1883. Bazalgette was born on the 28th March 1819 and died 13 days before his 72nd birthday on the 15th March 1891.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel...
Isambard Kingdom Brunel was born on 9th April 1806 in Portsmouth, England. Brunel was the son of a French engineer, Marc Isambard Brunel, and he showed great skill at drawing and geometry from a very early age. Brunel studied in France (in both Normandy and Paris). He was an apprentice of a master clockmaker called Abraham-Louis Breguet. Brunel worked with his father on a project to create a tunnel under the River Thames. He was badly injured in 1828 when the tunnel became flooded. In 1830, Brunel won a competition to design a bridge to span the River Avon. Work started on his Clifton Suspension Bridge, but it wasn’t completed until 1864 (after Brunel’s death). In 1833 Isambard Kingdom Brunel was given the job of chief engineer of the Great Western Railway. His main job was to build a railway that ran between London and Bristol. Brunel surveyed the whole of the route between London and Bristol himself. He decided to use a broad gauge for the track. This was a daring decision as all of the railways up to this point in England had used standard gauge. Brunel believed that the broader gauge track would allow for larger carriages and higher speeds. The Great Western Railway was highly praised in Victorian England and it was certainly an impressive engineering feat, with viaducts, specially designed stations and large tunnels. Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed Paddington Station and it opened in 1854. Brunel wanted passengers of Great Western to be able to travel from London to Bristol and then from Bristol to New York. To this end, he became interested in steamship design. In 1838, Brunel’s steamship, the Great Western, set off on her first voyage. It was one of the first steamships to cross the Atlantic Ocean by steam power alone, and it was, at the time, the longest ship in the world (about 70m in length). In response to a letter from Florence Nightingale (published in The Times newspaper) about conditions facing men injured in the Crimean War, Brunel assembled a team to design, make and transport pre-fabricated wood and canvas buildings that could be used as temporary hospital wards. In 1830, Brunel was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. He married Mary Elizabeth Horsely in 1836. They had three children. Brunel built many bridges, mostly as part of his railway projects, including: the Royal Albert Bridge (over the River Tamar), the Somerset Bridge, the Windsor Railway Bridge, the Maidenhead Railway Bridge (over the Thames), the Hungerford Bridge (a footbridge over the Thames) and the Royal Albert Bridge. Brunel University in Uxbridge, London, established in 1966, is named after Brunel.
John Snow….
Dr John Snow (1813-1858) was a famous physician, widely recognised as a leading pioneer in the development of anaesthesia in Britain, as well as one of the founding fathers of epidemiology. John Snow was born in York on 15 March 1813, the eldest son of a farmer. He died in London on 16 June 1858, aged 45. His first piece of scientific work was on the use of Arsenic in the preservation of bodies (this work was abandoned due to the toxic effects on the medical students). From his studies in toxicology, John Snow developed an interest in anaesthesia and cholera (hence his theory on the transmission of the cholera 'poison' in water supplies). John Snow was a vegetarian and a teetotaller who campaigned for temperance societies (though he drank a little wine in later life). He first encountered a cholera epidemic in Newcastle in 1831-32 when he was sent there by the surgeon to whom he was apprenticed at the time. On 16 October 1841 John Snow presented his first paper entitled Asphyxia and the resuscitation of new-born children. In 1846, John Snow heard about the use of anaesthesia in the USA. It was not well-received in the UK initially, due to the mode of administration but John Snow spotted how to improve this. In 1849, John Snow published the first edition of his best-known work On the mode of communication of cholera. On 7 April 1853, John Snow administered obstetric anaesthesia to Queen Victoria on the birth of Prince Leopold, and again on the birth of Princess Beatrice (14 April 1857). John Snow beat William Budd to the water theory of transmission of cholera by only 10 days. However, although Budd's thesis was based on more thorough surveys of rural outbreaks, he made the mistake of proposing a fungal cause. John Snow's views were still not accepted in Germany at the time of the Gelsenkirche Typhoid Epidemic, in 1901.
James Watt...
He was born on 19 January 1736 in Greenock, Renfrewshire, Scotland. An inventor and mechanical engineer he is famous for his improvements to the Newcomen steam engine. He developed the concept of horsepower and SI unit of power the watt was named in his honour. With Matthew Boulton he founded the firm of Boulton and Watt which was to make him a wealthy man. He died on 25 August 1819 in Handsworth, Birmingham, England.
Matthew Boulton...
Born September 3, 1728, Birmingham, Warwickshire and died August 17 1809, Birmingham. British manufacturer and engineer. With James Watt and William Murdock (1754-1839), he established the steam-engine industry by installing pumping engines to drain the Cornish tin mines. Foreseeing great industrial demand for steam power, he urged Watt to make various design improvements. Applying steam power to coining machinery, he made large quantities of coins for the British East India Co. and also supplied machinery to the Royal Mint. By 1800, almost 500 steam engines had been installed in the British Isles and abroad. James Watt designed the Boulton & Watt Steam Engine whilst Matthew Boulton manufactured it. He is famous for his partnership with James Watt.

But the Award goes to....
Florence Nightingale...
Florence Nightingale was born in Florence (Italy) on 12th May 1820.
On 7th February 1837, when she was 16 years, old Florence was convinced that she had heard the voice of God calling to her. She believed that God wanted her to carry out some special work. When she was in her twenties Florence began to take an interest in how the sick people in the villages around her home (in Romsey, Hampshire) were taken care of. She started to believe that God wanted her to be a nurse. Her parents were both shocked and angry when she told them that she wanted to learn more about nursing at a Salisbury hospital. At the time nearly all nurses came from poor families. Florence and some of her friends visited Kaiserwerth (in what is now Germany). The town was home to a hospital famous for training nurses. One year later, in 1851, Florence Nightingale received three months training at the hospital in Kaiserwerth. Florence returned home as a trained nurse. She put these skills to good use as from 1851 – 1853 she cared for her mother, father and sister who had all become ill.In 1853, when she was 33, she took a job running a small private hospital in London’s Harley Street. Her father realised that Florence was really serious about helping the sick and injured and promised to pay her £500 a year. This was a massive sum of money in Victorian times. In 1854 Florence helped to tend people suffering from cholera. Sidney Herbert, a friend of Florence’s and the member of the government in charge of the military, wrote to her and asked her to organise a group of nurses and head for the Crimea (in Turkey). On 4th November 1854 Florence Nightingale and 38 other nurses arrived at Scutari, an area of the city of Constantinople. The main British hospital was located there and Florence was not impressed by the conditions. The hospital was dirty, the drains were blocked, rats and fleas were everywhere. At first the doctors did not want the help of Florence Nightingale and her nurses, but they soon
changed their minds when the number of wounded soldiers continued to grow. Florence made lots of improvements to the hospital in Scutari. She had the drains cleaned, sorted out a supply of drinking water, filled the hospital stores with clean sheets and bandages, set up a nursing timetable and made sure that the soldiers were well fed and cared for. Florence became very popular. The soldiers used to call her the ‘Lady with the Lamp’ because she used to walk the hospital wards at night to check on her patients. The Crimean War ended in 1856 and Florence returned to England. She was a national heroine and many Victorians bought ornaments of Florence Nightingale to display in their homes. Florence also received thousands of letters from the public thanking her for the work she had performed during the war. Queen Victoria invited Florence to meet with her in Balmoral, Scotland. They discussed Florence’s experiences and how military hospitals could be improved. In 1859 Florence Nightingale wrote a book about caring for the sick called “Notes on Nursin”. Florence Nightingale was convinced that all nurses should be properly trained, and in 1860 she set up the Nightingale Training School (for nurses) at St Thomas’s Hospital, London. The nurses who completed the training were known as Nightingale Nurses. Florence carried on writing letters and reports about ways to improve health care. Her work became known in other countries and the Nightingale Nurses often went to work abroad, sharing Florence’s methods and ideas.
Florence deserves this award she improved the health conditions that where faced by the soldiers, and since she wrote a book she was able to share all the problems and the solutions she found, which helped us now with the NHS system.
And Elizabeth Garrett Anderson…
Elizabeth Garrett was born in Whitechapel, east London on 1836 and died on 1917. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson is known as the first English woman doctor (that is not counting women who practiced in the days when it wasn't necessary to go to university in order to be a doctor, there were women doctors in medieval England for instance). She began as a nurse in order to gain access to dissections and operations at the Middlesex Hospital, London, but after a year's training in 1860 she was refused admission to medical schools, as were all women at that time. She studied at the London Hospital and St Andrew's, where she had to dissect cadavers in her own bedroom when denied access to dissecting rooms. She passed the apothecaries examination so that she could be listed in the medical register as LSA. In 1866 she opened St Mary's Dispensary for Women, which later became the New Hospital for Women and Children, and after her death was named the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital. While actively supporting the admission of women to the University of Edinburgh in 1870 she achieved full professional respectability for herself in the form of an MD from the University of Paris. While on a school board she met and married J.G.S. Anderson; they had three children. Her daughter Louisa eventually became Chief Surgeon of Endwell Street Military Hospital during World War I. Elizabeth became a lecturer, and then Dean and President, at the London School of Medicine for Women. She had intended becoming a great physician to help women, and was also a pioneer in opening the medical profession to women. She was the first and only woman member of the British Medical Association from 1873 to 1892. She was linked with the women's suffrage movement through her sister Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and when elected Mayor of Aldeburgh in 1908 she became the first woman mayor in England. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson only treated women and children, and in reply to a gentleman who wrote to her asking if 'gout was in her line' she wrote "Dear Sir, gout is very much in my line, gentlemen are not."
Comparison…
Both remarkable Victorian pioneers. One set out to compete in a man's world (Anderson) to become a doctor. The other revolutionised nursing a traditionally female role and made it respectable. Florence Nightingale also was the first person to use statistics in healthcare - a benefit and curse which still informs decisions about the modern health service and got involved in the planning of hospitals.

Both went on to train other women in their fields. Both could be described as feminists, although Nightingale supposedly had little time for the suffragette movement. Anderson married and had children. Nightingale didn't - whether by inclination or circumstance is unclear.

Plenty on-line about the lives of both - Anderson also involved in School Boards with the revolution in education brought about by the Education Act.