Douglas Strutt Galton - Career and Family

Career and Family

He became a captain in the Royal Engineers and Secretary to the Railway Department, Board of Trade. In 1866 he was a member of the Royal Commission on Railways. From 1869 to 1875 he was Directory of Public Works and Buildings.

At Farnham on 26 August 1851 he married Marianne Nicholson (sometimes seen as Mary Anne) of Waverley Abbey, who was Florence Nightingale's cousin. They had two daughters. The younger daughter Evelyne Isabella married Count Camillo Fenzi at Hadzor, Worcestershire on 21 July 1875 but he reportedly died as a result of a shooting accident aged only 30. In 1898 she remarried to Leonard D. Cunliffe, influential London financier, Governor of the Bank of England, President of the Hudson's Bay Company and one of the major investors in the Harrods department stores. The older daughter was Laura Gwendolyne (or Gwendolen) who was born around 1860 and died on July 10, 1949. She married Colonel Frederick Richard Trench Gascoigne in February 1892. Their home was at Lotherton, Leeds.

They had one son, born in 1861, named Herbert Nightingale Douglas, after Sidney Herbert and Florence Nightingale, who became his godmother. The infant died the following year. Sir Douglas Strutt Galton inherited Himbleton Manor, near Droitwich probably in the 1850s. The Galton family were evidently regular visitors to the nearby Hadzor House, near Droitwich, the seat of Theodore Howard Galton, Esq., M.A., J.P., D.L. Galton and Florence Nightingale worked together closely for many years on safer design for hospitals and barracks. She succeeded in getting him appointed assistant under secretary at the War Office, in 1862, after the death of Sidney Herbert, the reforming war secretary with whom they had both worked after the Crimean War, and whom he so greatly admired. He resigned from that position in 1868 to become director of Public Works and Buildings 1869-74. He was a member of the Cubic Space Committee established in 1866 to make recommendations to Parliament on workhouse infirmaries. He later was a member of the Metropolitan Asylums Board which administered the new hospitals set up to replace the old workhouse infirmaries. During the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War, he served on the National Aid Society, which sent out surgeons and relief supplies. In 1891 he chaired the organizing committee for the 7th International Congress of Hygiene and Demography, held in London, with the prince of Wales as chair. In 1895 he was elected president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Galton was a favourite Nightingale collaborator. She routinely sent him plans of hospitals and nurses’ homes she had been asked to criticize, and he deferred to her utterly on nursing matters, to facilitate more efficient nursing and better conditions for nurses. They were both committed to the then new “pavilion” mode of construction, which made Britain a world leader in hospital safety. She stressed the importance of the materials for hospital walls, floors, sinks, appliances and finishes to make them more impervious to disease, and he obliged by searching out the best examples to recommend. He designed the Herbert Hospital, Woolwich, which became the model military hospital for hospital safety, visited by architects, engineers and hospital reformers from around the world. It still stands, now with a historic designation, radically rebuilt as luxury apartments, the Royal Herbert Pavilions.

Eight volumes of correspondence between Galton and Nightingale are at the British Library.