Читать книгу Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital - Philip Hoare, Philip Hoare - Страница 14

You might as well take 1,100 men every year out upon Salisbury Plain and shoot them.

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

On 19 May 1856, Queen Victoria sailed across the Solent from her island retreat at Osborne in the Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert, accompanied by a grand flotilla of a frigate and twelve gun boats. She had come to lay the hospital’s foundation stone, her first public engagement since the end of the folly and bravado that had been the Crimean War. The time was right for a new symbol of national pride. With the country’s focus on Netley, the local press was particularly excited about the event and the building it was to bring to the county’s shore: ‘It will be one of the greatest national schemes which, of the kind, has been yet undertaken’, declared the Hampshire Independent, ‘and will, we think, completely eclipse the asylum at Chelsea, both in extent and beauty.’

A 300 foot jetty stretching out into Southampton Water had been constructed for the occasion, and was decorated by an archway of evergreens surmounted by a crown, its length covered with scarlet cloth to await the Queen’s arrival. It was said that she could have landed perfectly easily at Southampton but had conceived a dislike for the town, having been heard to say that it had ‘snubbed’ her on a previous occasion. Perhaps Southampton and its climate decided to ruffle her feathers again, for the day was windy and the sea too rough for the Queen, who took refuge below deck during the crossing. Meanwhile, local shipping had been warned to keep clear of the area, ‘to prevent any confusion or accident which might otherwise be occasioned’ – a warning which proved all too prescient.

That day 11,000 people and 400 vehicles crossed by the Itchen Floating Bridge, and Netley Abbey was packed with picnickers. In the evening it was proposed to ‘light up the Ruins … with variegated lamps at the rate of eight pounds per thousand for no less than six thousand lamps’, and the daytrippers were looking forward to a grand fireworks display. Down at Netley Hard, crowds eagerly awaited their monarch and her consort. These were glorious times, and it seemed the whole country was en fête. Basking in the mid-century glow of empire, England was the cynosure of the civilised world, its imperial progress epitomised by the recent success of the Great Exhibition, with its myriad of souvenirs decorated with the images of the glamorous young Queen and Prince.

Some of that glamour was about to arrive on Netley’s shore. The royal party included the young Prince of Wales and Princess Royal, and all the men of the entourage were in uniform, a panoply of gold braid, silk and cockades. It was a state occasion by any other name, and the party was to be met at the pierhead by Lord Panmure, the Secretary of State for War, ‘Lord Winchester (Ld. Lieut of Hampshire), the Admiral, General, & the authorities &c.’, as Victoria noted in her journal. But when the Royal Yacht arrived, the waves were washing over the jetty and Fairy, its tender, had to be unceremoniously beached on the shingle. ‘A considerable and rather amusing confusion was caused by this sudden change in the Royal movements’, noted the Hampshire Independent:

There was, of course, no scarlet cloth laid on the beach, and though it was torn up piecemeal from the jetty the moment Her Majesty’s intention was perceived, yet she landed before it could be transferred. Then a rush was made to the obstructive hoarding which excluded Her Majesty from the presence of the corporate and other officials assembled on the platform to receive her, and, amid the hearty laughter of the Queen, the planks were torn away, and Her Majesty was admitted within the enclosure, having in the interim been kept back among the crowds at this part of the shore, who never anticipated so good a view of the Royal party.

After this hilarious and somewhat embarrassing scene of flummoxed dignitaries, Victoria replied to a welcoming address from Southampton’s Deputy Mayor – his superior having been taken ill at the last moment. ‘We then walked a short way up to where the ceremony was to take place … troops lining the way’. Arriving at a large marquee, she examined the plans of the hospital. Then, in a copper casket, the Queen placed coins of her realm, a Crimean Medal and an early Victoria Cross, made from Russian guns captured at Sebastopol (although it was later discovered that the Russians had actually captured them from the Chinese), along with documents signed by herself and Albert.

This Victorian time capsule was then sealed and set in a trench, there to remain for the marvel of some future generation. Six hundred years after Henry III’s name had appeared on the foundation stone of the abbey, his successor watched as, with due ceremony, the two-and-a-half-ton Welsh granite foundation stone of the hospital was lowered by pulleys on to the prepared mortar bed. Dwarfed by the great system of wooden block-and-tackle which loomed above her as though it were about to lower the royal visitor into the earth’s core, the Queen ‘tried the stone with the plummet and level, and tapped it in the usual form, taking counsel with Lord Panmure as to the correct and truly masonic method of doing so’. The Secretary of State then declared, ‘I am directed by Her Majesty that the first stone of the Military Hospital has been laid, and that Her Majesty has been pleased to sanction its being called the Royal Victoria Hospital.’

At that moment, the gunboats assembled out on Southampton Water fired a salute in the Queen’s honour. But on one of the boats, the Hardy, she was told of ‘a gun exploding & 2 poor men being blown to pieces. So sad, & so grievous, just on such an occasion!’ In fact the Hardy’s gun had gone off prematurely, casting into eternity the mortal remains of Ordinary Seaman Michael Deran and AB Cornelius Flannigan, and wounding several other sailors. Meanwhile, on Netley’s shore, oblivious of the carnage precipitated by the thunder of the guns, the Bishop of Winchester offered a blessing and the choir sang Psalm One Hundred: ‘Enter his gates with thanksgiving,/ And his courts with praise!’

‘… After which we went into a large tent, specially prepared for us, where we conversed with the different Gentlemen there’, wrote the Queen. The man from the Hampshire Independent rivalled his metropolitan peers with his description of the scene, ‘one of the most imposing and exhilarating character’.

The long ‘red lines’ of the troops, bending out into a spacious circle, contrasting with the black robes of the Corporation, the black gowns of the Clergy present, the white scarfs [sic] of the Cathedral choir, and the many-coloured hues of the gay dresses in which the ladies, who graced the stand, were arrayed – the masses of people and carriages assembled all around – flags floating in all directions – the water in the river dancing and sparkling in the sunbeams, and covered with the various vessels and gunboats, all dressed in colours, and jetting forth their white curls of smoke as the salutes were fired – the whole, combined, made up as pretty a picture as can well be imagined, whilst the ear was gratified by the performance of the National Anthem by the military bands.

Among all this uproarious splendour processed their Sovereign, the centre of attention, and of the civilised world. Having seen ‘the soldiers at their dinner’ – where the reporter noted that when the men were ordered to continue with their meal, ‘Her Majesty smilingly observed the zest with which they appeared to obey’ – the party ‘returned at once on board the Royal yacht, and immediately left for Osborne’. It was another rough crossing, and Victoria was glad to be back on dry land in time for lunch and an afternoon drive, as ‘nightingales sing charmingly in the woods’.

From her newly-built seaside villa – a Victorian version of the Brighton Pavilion, designed by Prince Albert, painted bright yellow and set like a great stately ship on the verdant slopes of the Isle of Wight – the Queen had made plain her concern for her troops serving in the Crimean War – a war in which for every one of the 1,700 who died of their wounds, another nine would die of disease.

The previous year Victoria had twice visited the wounded and afflicted at the General Hospital at Fort Pitt, Chatham, a former Napoleonic fortification. With straw mattresses, no toilets, no exercise space and the kind of ‘malodorous sewers’ which had created the diseases of the barrack hospital at Scutari, conditions at Fort Pitt were cold, damp and unhealthy. On the Queen’s second visit, in June 1855, she declared the facilities wanting, according to a reported conversation which had the air of a caption to an engraving in a Victorian history book: ‘Are these really the barrack rooms of these invalids?’ asked the Queen, to which her Consort replied, ‘Well, it seems very extraordinary that there should be no difficulty in obtaining money to erect a magnificent building like that for convicts, and that it should be impossible to find the means for building a commonly comfortable building for our convalescent soldiers.’*

A society which appeared to treat its convicts better than its soldiers was a source of concern for Victoria. On 5 March 1855 Lord Panmure, her Secretary of State for War, received a letter bearing the royal crest:

The Queen is very anxious to bring before Lord Panmure the subjects which she mentioned to him the other night, viz. that of providing a hospital for our sick and wounded soldiers. This is absolutely necessary and now is the moment to have them built, for no doubt there would be no difficulty in obtaining the money requisite for this purpose from the strong feeling existing in the public mind for improvements of all kinds connected with the Army and the well-being and comfort of the soldiers.

Nothing can exceed the attention paid to the poor men in the Barracks at Chatham, and they are in that respect very comfortable: but the buildings are bad, the wards more like prisons than hospitals, with the windows so high that no one can look out of them, and the generality of the wards are small rooms, with hardly space for you to walk between the beds; there is no dining room or hall, so that the poor men must have their dinners in the same room in which they sleep, and in which some may be dying, and at any rate suffering, while others are eating their meals.

The proposition of having hulks prepared for their reception will do very well at first, but it would not, the Queen thinks, do for any length of time. A hulk is a very gloomy place, and these poor men require their spirits to be cheered as much as their physical suffering to be attended to …

The Queen’s critique had the influence of her Consort, and that of the pioneering efforts of Florence Nightingale, behind it. Panmure’s equally weighted reply agreed ‘the necessity of one or more general hospitals for the Army’, and proposed ‘an immediate survey to be made for a proper site or sites, which shall combine all considerations for the health of the patients and the facility of access to invalids’. Panmure thought ‘it would be for the advantage of the public service’ if the hospital were built ‘within a moderate distance of either of the great ports of Portsmouth or of Plymouth’. The next man in the chain of responsibility, the Director-General of the Army Medical Department, Dr Andrew Smith, agreed with the minister that the new establishment should be ‘on the coast, or on some large inlet of the sea, so that invalids from abroad could be landed immediately, and marched into their Barracks, and the sick, without injury, be placed in Hospital’. And so the search began.

With the Crimean War already drawing to a close, the new hospital would come too late to help most of its victims. Yet there was still a sense of urgency to find a site (more especially with the impetus of the Queen’s wishes behind the project), and just as the Bishop of Winchester had commissioned the Cistercian abbots to investigate a location for Netley’s abbey 600 years before, so Dr Andrew Smith now charged the Deputy Inspector-General of Fortifications, Captain R. M. Laffan, to find a suitable place on the south coast.

Captain Laffan reported back on potential locations near the naval hospital of Haslar, Gosport and on the Roman remains of Porchester Castle – both on Portsmouth Harbour – along with possibilities at Herstmonceux in Sussex and Appuldurcombe on the Isle of Wight, but none of these proved practicable. Then the Queen’s Physician, Sir James Clark, suggested a spot on Southampton Water which he had presumably passed on his journeys to Osborne. Clark informed Captain Laffan of its ‘numerous advantages, as a site for a great Military Hospital, presented by the sloping ground on the eastern side of Southampton Water, a little below Netley Abbey; that the ground there seemed to be gravelly, and to slope upwards from the water, while there was a high ridge behind it, which sheltered it from the cold northern and eastern winds’. ‘Sir James handed me a strip cut from the Ordnance Survey of Hampshire, upon which he had marked the place he wished Dr Mapleton [Laffan’s colleague] and myself more particularly to examine …’

Yet questions were already being raised about the salubriousness of the proposed site, prompted by reports of ‘exhalations’ of gases in the area. During the Napoleonic Wars, soldiers stationed on the commons of Netley and Sholing had suffered outbreaks of cholera, and it was feared that there was something unpropitious about this desultory peninsula; that the afflictions of Scutari might manifest themselves on Hampshire’s shore. Southampton had been trumpeted in the eighteenth century as a healthy watering hole; Netley was now seen as quite the opposite, and the British Medical Journal went so far as to call the place a swamp whose tidal mud would make the site ‘a pestiferous marsh for twelve hours out of twenty-four’. Any hospital built there could not only subject its patients to cholera, but possibly even malaria.

A subsequent report detailed the problems: ‘Three miles above the site of the Hospital the sewage of the town of Southampton flows into the estuary. Its population in 1851 was 34,000 and it is rapidly increasing.’ The location was ‘of a soft and relaxing climate and opposite a large mud bank. No site on the banks of a tidal estuary with soft mud banks, large quantities of rotting matter giving off gases and offensive smells during warm weather and having the discharge of sewage from a large town, should be entertained.’ Far from benefiting from the sea breezes and healthy ozone, this shoreline was now seen as inimical to health, polluted by a modern town, with a belt of brackish mud, exposed at low tide, believed to emit noxious gases. It was hardly a site for a hospital, still less one intended to serve an empire and its wars.

The intrepid Captain Laffan, who had seen service in South Africa and Mauritius, set off to investigate, with Dr Mapleton in tow. They discovered a small brig, Partridge, permanently moored and embedded in the mud off Netley’s shore. This Dickensian vessel functioned as a home for members of the Preventative Service – coast guards – and their wives and families. At low water, Partridge was ‘entirely surrounded by the wide expanse of mud’, noted Laffan, ‘and we thought, therefore, that the men and women and children living on board would be good witnesses to examine as to the healthiness of the place, and as to any inconvenience which might arise from the vicinity of the land’. Interviewed, the brig-dwellers were found to be

unanimous in declaring that their dwelling was healthy; that at all times, at low water, a slight smell might be perceived from the mud, but that it was not at all offensive, or injurious to health. Their statements were borne out by their appearance; all looked healthy, particularly the children.

From this happy scene of naval mudlarks, the pair drew positive conclusions about the site, noting clear drinking water from wells and freshwater percolating through gravel resting ‘on beds of brick earth’. Laffan and Mapleton also recorded ‘the concurrent testimony of all the people living near the spot [who] declared the neighbourhood to be eminently healthy’, and visited the local churchyard, where they noted the advanced ages on the tombstones. Finally, having engaged in wayside conversation a sprightly pair of eighty-year-old furze-cutters harvesting the area’s characteristic wild crop of gorse, they were convinced. Captain Laffan triumphantly reported back to his superiors that they had found nothing at Netley to deter the building of the hospital (although ironically, when another report was ordered on the site, Laffan was unavailable for further research as he had fallen ill).

On 21 August 1855, negotiations began with the landowner, Thomas Chamberlayne, William’s son, to purchase ‘109 acres, 1 rood and 32 perches of land’, for which £15,000 was authorised in payment; the deal, for five fields, was concluded under the new Defence Act in January 1856. Meanwhile, the building plans were being hurriedly drawn up by Mennie’s office – possibly to designs by the great Sir Charles Barry, the architect, with Pugin, of the new Palace of Westminster.* The Queen, prompted by her architecturally-aware husband, reminded Panmure that she was ‘very anxious’ to see the results, and so a delicate watercolour of the plans was made, each room carefully labelled with its function, and the proposed site embellished with decorative parterres.

This four foot long parchment was signed by the relevant parties and laid before Her Majesty, who was ‘graciously pleased’ to approve the proposals, and added her signature in black ink. Victoria’s cipher was the royal imprimatur for the project, both physically and spiritually. The proposed building would indeed appear ‘as though a Venetian palace had been erected on the scale of Versailles with traditional English materials’, as one contemporary report speculated, and the Queen would declare, ‘I am only too glad to think, if indeed it be the case, that my poor brave soldiers will be more comfortably lodged than I am myself’, while Prince Albert remarked that it was a source of ‘deep gratification’ to them to know that the sick and wounded would be treated near to their own home at Osborne. As a further indulgence, the Queen asked to be allowed to lay the foundation stone herself, ‘when we are in the Isle of Wight during the Whitsuntide holidays’.

The project was hastened along, with contractors given just one month to tender and two years to complete the building. Matters seemed on course, but when the plans made it necessary to expand the proposed site to accommodate a military asylum, Thomas Chamberlayne proved reluctant to sell the extra land. He was probably holding out for a better price, but his hesitancy was also evidence of the continuing doubts about the site – not least among a local gentry suspicious of the hospital, and still more so of its proposed asylum. It was in the interest of such nineteenth-century nimbys to encourage rumours about the unhealthy gases, and they may have played on Victorian fears of ‘effluvia’ and pervasive miasma, a fearful memory of plague-ridden times; but in an industrialised country already polluting itself and its waterways, some of these fears were well founded, and for all Captain Laffan’s evidence to the contrary, their shadow hung over the wooden scaffolding going up on Netley’s shore.

The fact that the bricks used to construct the hospital were made from clay dug for its foundations – the building growing organically from its terrain – seemed to invest its very fabric with the germs of the land, or its spiritual malaise. Just as the abbey’s stones were cursed, so the land appeared imbued with a dark gothic spirit about to be passed on to this new institution. Far from being removed from such concerns, the nineteenth-century’s response to these superstitions – the scientific assessment of the site’s suitability – was an echo of the ‘enormous importance’ the philosopher Montesquieu ‘attached to soil, climate and political institutions’. At Netley, the clash of rationality versus the romanticism of gothic decay was set to run over again, as if it were caught in a cycle that would continue for generations to come, ‘that great drama in a hundred acts reserved for Europe in the next two centuries, the most terrible, most dubious drama but perhaps also the one most rich in hope …’ as another philosophical exponent of blood and soil, Friedrich Nietzsche, would write.

If the Hardy’s exploding gun at the hospital’s foundation had been an omen, it was one to which many critics were already attuned – not least in the wake of the disastrous losses in the Crimea. As the Queen’s letter to Panmure indicated, public opinion had been sensitised to the plight of its troops – largely by the very public campaign of one woman. Florence Nightingale was determined to learn by the war’s lessons and not let British hospitals replicate the hellish conditions of the Scutari Barracks. ‘I stand at the altar of the murdered men and while I live I shall fight their cause’, she pledged, and having visited Chatham, declared, ‘This is one more symptom of the system which, in the Crimea, put to death 16,000 men.’ Just as her inspiration underlay the building of Netley’s new hospital, so Nightingale’s animus – a weapon quite as mighty as the guns of Sebastopol – would now be directed against it.

Tall, dark haired and rather more beautiful than some portraits suggest, Nightingale’s sharp, ascetic features betrayed an even sharper intelligence, driven by a sense of religious duty which gave her the moral right to challenge even the highest authority. As a sixteen-year-old girl, she had recorded, quite precisely, that on 7 February 1837, ‘God spoke and called me to His service.’ Part nun, part nurse, part reformer, her passionate zeal was both shared and sponsored by her friend Sydney Herbert, then Secretary of State at War, who had sent her to the Crimea as ‘Superintendent of the Female Nursing Establishment’. She returned as a national heroine, openly compared to Joan of Arc. ‘What a comfort it was to see her pass even’, wrote one wounded veteran. ‘We lay there by hundreds, but we could kiss her shadow as it fell, and lay our heads on the pillow again, content.’ The Lady with the Lamp became a cult, nightly revived in stage tableaux. The image of a saintly miracle worker was one with which she was not comfortable; nonetheless she would use it, adeptly, in order to pursue her campaign.