Museum Archive - The Lady who knew best - September 2016

During the 1850's she wrote letters to the Bishop of Chichester, to the Prime Minister, to the Lord Mayor and many others. She had them printed and, for good measure, addressed them to Queen Victoria with these words " . . . these Letters, Plans and Opinions are offered in deep humility to the notice of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen". However much one might doubt her "humility", she was certainly persistent. Her correspondents initially offered courteous replies but, as her letters kept coming, they became ever more terse in their acknowledgements. She could not understand their indifference.

Dr. Trew - who lived in Church Street - may, himself, have wanted to utter a terse comment at times when he was called out once again to treat Miss Bannister's gout. Whatever he prescribed she herself was in no doubt that it was turpentine lotion which was needed. This was made up of "Oil of Almonds, Spirit of Hartshorn and Spirit of Turpentine". In a letter to an eminent physician in London Miss Bannister described how she had recovered from what she identified as partial paralysis (maybe a slight stroke) by being bathed in her turpentine lotion. She tried to persuade him that this miraculous cure would also deal with small pox and cholera and she couldn't understand why the description of the treatment had not appeared in The Lancet. She believed that this omission would "deny immediate relief to The Queen's suffering people".

The Bishop of Chichester was subjected to a diatribe on how many "poor souls" attending St. Andrew's Church in Steyning had been driven from the nave to other parts of the Church where "they can neither see nor be seen by, nor hear their appointed pastor" and that he (the Bishop) should "rectify this unholy state". The Reverend Thomas Medland - and the bishops - got into more hot water by sanctioning the removal of the pulpit and the clerk's desk from the nave. Whether it helped her case to say "I implore you my Lord Bishop to throw aside the veil which is obscuring your benevolent mind" must be a little doubtful.

Miss Bannister was a farmer but her printed letters give no idea of how Lord Palmerston (Prime Minister at that time) responded to her insistence that a revised crop rotation system and the use of sewage on the land was a necessity. This she justified by saying that "our glorious soil has hitherto been sadly encumbered". She went on to provide plans for "A homestead in which to humanely fatten cattle". In this, less controversially, she attacked the "cramming of cattle to a preposterous obesity" and she spoke of the need to clear the land, to drain marshes and "to take charge of our glorious labourers - let them be well clothed, well fed, well housed and restored to their own place in the Church."

With her mind running on the use of sewage on the land Miss Bannister moved on to make very detailed proposals for the "Drainage of London". Not surprisingly her ideas for turning solid sewage into artificial stone for removal from every house daily by street railways seem to have fallen on deaf ears. This was a year before "The Great Stink" of 1858 when the Thames ran with sewage and alternative proposals, which form the basis of today's drainage system, were already on the table: hers were ignored - to her "great grief".

She did not stop there. Bee hives, chicken coops, the design of labourer's cottages capable of being moved on wheels (for which models were made), the layout of classrooms in which one teacher could teach 100 children - all received her attention. The detail of the curriculum proposed for these children makes interesting reading and the menu - which will be incorporated into the Museum's September "Food Month" exhibition - is distinctly unappetizing. But Miss Bannister knew best.

Steyning Museum

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