VICTORIAN VANITY

22 VICTORIAN

ALL AT SEA NOVEMBER 2020 VANITY

Florence Nightingale fought tirelessly for better welfare for wounded soldiers, only for her campaign to get side-tracked by politics and professional vanities.

In terms of our history, the Crimean War gets little in the way of a mention, not just because it was nearly 170 years ago, but because it has been masked by the two great conflicts of the World Wars.

What memories that have existed through into modern times are probably centred on the Charge of the Light Brigade, that futile gallop on horseback into the heavily defended ‘valley of death’. The other great memory of the campaign still in our consciousness would be that of the ‘lady with the lamp’, Florence Nightingale, who dedicated her life to the dire need to improve the treatment of wounded soldiers.

Her concerns were well founded, as the expansion of the British Empire would see our troops fighting in small, regional conflicts around the globe, often with a disastrous toll in terms of deaths and serious injuries.

Warfare was becoming more mechanised, yet the treatment of the wounded had advanced little since the days of Waterloo, 35 years earlier. The figures for the Crimean conflict were far from unusual, with only 2,755 men killed in action, but a further 17,580 lost to disease.

The conditions for those injured were primitive, but through her efforts Florence Nightingale was able to mobilise popular support, forcing action from the UK government. Nightingale’s populist support became so engrained into our collective psyche that today, in yet another time of crisis, the hospitals focused on the treatment of Covid are designated as ‘Nightingale’ hospitals.

VANITY PROJECT Stung by the criticisms, the government committed to the building of a new military hospital, with two locations being considered at Haslar, at Gosport, just across from the harbour from Portsmouth and at Netley, a pleasing open location on the shores of Southampton Water.

Like so many ‘mega-projects’ the hospital would be late in delivery, over budget and would drive Nightingale to despair, for the lessons of treating large numbers of wounded men had clearly not been learnt.

Bungling and incompetence would be rife, such as the well intentioned plan to build a pier that would jut out into Southampton Water, so that hospital ships could unload the wounded straight into the hospital. However, at only 170m, the pierhead never reached the deep water channel, so that even at high tide there was insufficient depth to allow ocean going ships to come alongside.

Instead, the hospital ships would have to head to Southampton Docks and unload their cargo of wounded men there, which left them facing a bumpy ride back along the coast to Netley.

When they finally reached the hospital, they must have been amazed at the sight that would greet them, for the main building was huge and grandiose, looking more like a palace than a functional hospital.

Queen Victoria had laid the foundation

You could run out of superlatives. A quarter of a mile long, the world’s largest brick built building, but could you add ‘the world’s biggest white elephant’? Image: RVCP Netley

stone in May 1856, but what had followed would today be known as a ‘vanity project’. It was the world’s longest building, the world’s largest brick built building, yet the comment made just six months later highlighted that the comfort and recovery of the patients had been sacrificed to make a building that would cut a dash when looked at from Southampton Water.

DESIGN QUESTIONS With yachting growing in importance for the upper classes, with Cowes in particular now a popular fixture in the social ‘season’, plenty of the people who counted in Victorian Britain would be sailing past the building, which now dominated the eastern bank of Southampton Water.

It would have been very hard not to have been impressed, for the main façade was a quarter of a mile long, topped with turrets and spires, which were all dominated by the great, copper clad dome of the central chapel. However, the grandness of the front of the building, with its pillared entrances, may have been something of a mistake, as from the earliest days there was a suspicion that all was not as it should be.

The government plans called for two hospitals to be built, one at Netley, the other at Scutari, on the Crimean peninsula, but in what may have been a classic case of a ‘muddle’, parts of the plans may have been mixed up. Scutari ended up with the majority of the 130 or so wards facing south, making them unbearably hot in summer, whilst Netley had the wards orientated north, making them freezing in winter.

From the outset, the Royal Victoria Hospital became something of a community within a community, as the site would gain its own water supply from a reservoir that was constructed locally, then its own gas supply from a purpose built coking plant. Local firms supplied food and did maintenance on the site as the wards started to fill up, for at capacity Netley could hold more than 1,000 patients.

As was noted earlier, getting the wounded to the wards was, from the outset, problematic given the lack of depth at the pier head with transhipment to lighters being tried, only for it being easier to unload onto a quayside up in the docks. From there, for some it would be a charabanc ride directly to the hospital, whilst others were put on trains, taken to Netley station, to then get the charabanc transfer, with none of these being particularly helpful for badly wounded soldiers. Thankfully, a spur off the main railway line was added and a terminus station built behind the hospital, but even this had problems for the trains carrying the wounded.

WIDER UNDERSTANDING These were still the days of the Empire on which ‘the sun never set’ and those soldiers that were not injured in fighting in some far flung land were at risk of succumbing to one of the legion of local diseases and, as a consequence, Netley would become a centre for the understanding and treatment of tropical disease.

With teaching being conducted in this new branch of medicine, a number of rare specimens were on display in the foyer behind the main entrance – as a young local lad heading to sing in the choir in the chapel, these were either objects of wonder or of terror, depending on how rich your imagination was!

Netley would take on yet another new discipline as the terrible slaughter in the trenches sent a flood of seriously wounded soldiers back from France; however not all the injuries were of a physical nature.

The understanding of shell shock and PTSD was still in the early days of infancy, but Netley would take the mentally incapacitated soldiers and put them in a new, purpose built block that was hidden away behind a high and forbidding brick wall. Some of the early treatments for mental disorders would today be seen as barbaric and it is little wonder that the suicide rate was high, with watery swamps that formed the eastern side of the hospital site claiming a number of poor, demented souls. The name of the hospital even entered the soldiers slang vocabulary, with “he’s gone to Netley” being a reference to someone who it was considered had ‘gone mad’.

CHANGING TIMES After some of the great military disasters, such as the Somme, even a hospital as big as Netley was in danger of being swamped by the number of admissions. An extension to the main building was created, with dozens of wooden huts being erected to the rear of the main block, which more than doubled the capacity of the hospital so that at its peak, over 2,000 patients were being treated.

Despite the best efforts of the medical teams, not all would recover from their wounds, with the hospital developing a peaceful, beautifully situated cemetery in a banked, wooded area just a little way back from the main units. The cemetery remains today, carefully maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the last resting place for not only soldiers from across the nations of the Empire, but for the German prisoners who were given the same careful treatment.

Although the hospital shrank between the wars, it would expand again in 1939 and over the next six years would actually handle more patients than had been treated in the First World War.

The tower of the chapel made an excellent observation point during the blitz for the fire watchers, on their guard for incendiary bombs, and was also used to run exercises for the local Fire Brigade and Air Raid wardens; my mother would enjoy playing the part of someone injured who was then lashed to a stretcher and lowered from the dome to the ground – it certainly helped that she had a head for heights.

Part of the old railway track, as it curved in towards the platformcreated as part of the hospital, can still be seen today. It is reputed that at the height of the war, so many trains were coming in through Netley that it attracted the unenviable reputation of being the third busiest station in the UK

The dark and forbidding walls of ‘D’ Block, the British Army’s first purpose-built asylum. The gates of Hell bore the inscription ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’: the shell-shocked soldiers committed to D block at Netley had already been to hell and sadly for some things would not improve... suicide was not an uncommon end result

AMERICAN TAKEOVER With the whole area around the Solent being a major staging point in the run up to D-Day, the US Military would take over the site, which included their driving a jeep up and down the main corridor.

Once again, though, the return to peace would see the size of the hospital shrink, though the grounds would remain under military control, being something of a buffer between the two growing villages of Hamble and Netley. To get from one to the other meant a lengthy diversion, or taking the risk and sneaking through the grounds, but as it was still viewed as a military camp being caught meant being taken to the guard house, the local police being called and a ‘thick ear’ being administered (plus another one when you got home).

Despite the idealistic hopes for Netley when it had been first built, the standard of construction was not good, with the main block being increasingly difficult to maintain. The size of the UK’s armed forces were also shrinking and by the late 1950s the main building was closed, although the psychiatric unit would remain in operation for another 20 years. END OF AN ERA The end for this amazing building came in June 1963 when a fire ravaged much of the old building, which left little option but to demolish the rest. This provided much entertainment for the local youths, for the first wall that was knocked down included a number of the narrow, tall Victorian windows which still had all the glass intact. The windows shattered, with some workmen being cut by flying glass, so the word went out for the local boys to bring their catapults and break some windows. Pebbles were brought up from the beach in their bucketload and a fun time was had by all.

All that remains of the building today is the beautifully situated chapel, which looks out over the open spaces of what is now the Royal Victoria Country Park. Recently renovated into a well-stocked museum, the chapel has to be a ‘must see’ for any sailors visiting the area. The dome of the chapel can be seen whilst afloat in the Solent and instead of turning straight into the Hamble, a short diversion up Southampton Water provides that grand view that a rather vain architect had worked towards 165 years ago.

This article started with a reference to the Charge of the Light Brigade and it is therefore fitting that it should end with another. As he watched the senseless sacrifice of the Light Brigade, a French General uttered the immortal words “C’est magnifique mais ce n’est pas la guere, c’est de la folie” (it is magnificent, but it is not war, it is a folly). As the departing troops sailed down Southampton Water on their way to war, passing the imposing structure that would await them when they returned wounded, that sense of a magnificent folly must have been strong indeed.

Solent based dinghy sailor David Henshall is a wellknown writer and speaker on topics covering the rich heritage of all aspects of leisure boating.

“As the departing troops sailed down Southampton Water on their way to war, passing the imposing structure that would await them when they returned wounded, that sense of a magnificent folly must have been strong indeed.”