History is embroidered with many tales of great, passionate love affairs: Antony and Cleopatra, Napoleon and Josephine, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning.
There have also been legendary love stories that are just that – legends, with no basis in fact. For example, there is no factual support for the claim of Martha Jane Cannary, better known as Calamity Jane, that she was romantically involved with the famous gunfighter Wild Bill Hickok.
A love story that is part of the lore of Elora seems to belong to the second category. It involves two people who, at first glance, hardly appear to be likely players in a Romeo and Juliet scenario.
Central to the story is a silver communion set now owned by St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church in Elora.
Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) was an English social reformer who has been called the founder of modern nursing. During the Crimean War, she was appalled by the primitive sanitary conditions in British army camps and military hospitals, and the poor medical treatment provided for sick and wounded troops.
For soldiers of that time, army hospitals were deadlier than battlefields. More soldiers died from disease than battle wounds.
Nurse Nightingale revolutionized nursing. She would carry a lantern at night when she walked through the wards looking in on the convalescing men, and so
became known as The Lady with the Lamp.
Rev. John Smithurst (1807-1867) was born in Derbyshire, England and had a remarkable life before arriving in Elora. He was self-educated as a boy, and his theological training included courses in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy and English composition. After being ordained as an Anglican priest, Smithurst became interested in missionary work.
In 1839 he was sent to the Red River settlement in what is now Manitoba – a remote part of the Hudson’s Bay Company territory called Rupert’s Land. He served for 12 years and was the first Anglican missionary there to learn an Indigenous language.
He returned to England in 1851 because of health problems. However, England’s damp climate further aggravated his health issues, so the following year Smithurst sailed back to Canada as a missionary with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. He was stationed in Elora at the Church of St. John the Evangelist (not the present church).
Smithurst was the rector at St. John’s until 1857. After Sunday morning services in Elora, he would go to Fergus to preach in the Temperance Hall in the afternoon. He always had a strong interest in education and was one of the local grammar school trustees. He was instrumental in the building of a stone school-house as well as a public library.
Smithurst was also president of the Elora Horticultural Society.
In 1857 Smithurst retired from the ministry and established a farm near Clifford. He opened a post office and a country school, and still preached occasionally. He also wrote a history of Minto Township. By the summer of 1867 his health was failing so he moved back to Elora to live at the parsonage. He died there on Sept. 2 from what the local press called “dropsy of the heart.”
Smithurst, who never married, also had a lifelong affair of the heart – at least, according to local legend.
The story has it that Florence Nightingale and John Smithurst were teenage cousins who fell in love in England. However, the Victorian moral code of their day forbade romantic relationships between cousins, so their love affair had to be snuffed out before it could burst into flaming passion.
Florence’s parents decided that the kissin’ cousins would have to be separated, so they sent her to the European continent to study nursing. The broken-hearted young couple swore that if they could not have each other, they would have nobody. Each resolved never to marry.
Like Smithurst, Nightingale remained single all her life.
At Florence’s request, Smithurst became a missionary and went to the wilds of Canada to preach the gospel to the Indigenous peoples. When Smithurst returned to England, he tried unsuccessfully to convince Florence to marry him. Although she would not agree to be his wife, she gave him a silver communion set as a token of her undying love. He took it to Elora.
Today the set belongs to St. John’s.
There are problems with this charming story of unfulfilled love. There is no evidence Smithurst and Nightingale ever met, or even were related. Nightingale’s biographers make no mention of the romance.
The Nightingale family owned property in Derbyshire, but in social standing they ranked well above the Smithursts. Moreover, Smithurst was Nightingale’s elder by 13 years, so they could not have been romantically involved as teenagers. The Victorians had no taboos about marriage between cousins. Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert were first cousins.
The Smithurst/Nightingale love story didn’t even begin to circulate until years after Smithurst’s death. Even though it was written up in an allegedly “factual” account, the author provided no legitimate sources. But that silver communion set is there, as supposed “evidence” of the truth of the tale. Where did it come from?
The circumstances under which Smithurst received the set are uncertain. An inscription in Latin indicates that it was a gift from a man named Ebenezer Hall, founder of a silver-plating company in Sheffield, England. Florence Nightingale could have commissioned Hall to make the set, but there is no documentation to support that.
It might be that hidden away somewhere is indisputable provenance that would prove the veracity of the Smithhurst/Nightingale love story, although that doesn’t seem likely. A local historian, Rev. Eric Griffin, former rector of Grace Church in Arthur, looked for it back in the 1980s, but found nothing.
However, the silver set is nonetheless a connection to a remarkable man in a time long since passed. It can be seen in St. John’s, and Smithurst and Nightingale are memorialized there in stained glass.
Every year, in partnership with the Elora Festival, St. John’s presents the Florence Nightingale Community Service award to an individual in recognition of outstanding service. That will happen this year on July 9.
