Southampton Water was black with ships taking troops to the front (one half of all the British Expeditionary Force left Britain down this seaway) – and with ambulance ships bringing back their broken bodies. There was even a salty swimming pool, fed by a windmill pumping water from the sea.īut with the advent of industrialised war, Netley's massive edifice proved unable to cope. There was a grand officers' mess, complete with ballroom, and modest married quarters for other ranks. The hospital was, after all, a town in itself, a 200-acre medicropolis with its own gasworks, reservoir, school, stables, bakery and prison. When Conan Doyle published his first Sherlock Holmes mystery, A Study in Scarlet, he told his readers that Dr Watson trained as an army doctor at Netley – its name was so well known that the author did not need to explain any further. Only a precious few, such as this album, survive to reclaim a site that was once world-famous. Thousands of men and women lived and died in this place, remembered in sepia-scored letters and postcards, and pictures taken by local photographers. What emerged instead were family memories of 1914-18, years that saw Netley's resources at peak demand. Yet almost nothing remained in the public archive to commemorate it. The hospital stood, from its foundation in 1856 to its demolition in 1966, for more than a century. When I began to write my book Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital, I was amazed at how few records remained to document Netley's story. Left to right: a ward maid at Netley, an orderly with ominous-looking barrow, and an officer in one of Royal Victoria Hospital's long terraces. During the first world war, this sprawling brick behemoth – a quarter of a mile long – became a microcosm of what was happening across the English Channel. It would end up ministering to apocalypse. Set on the shores of Southampton Water in Hampshire, it was created in response to the Crimean war, and designed to serve an empire. The Royal Victoria Military Hospital at Netley was not only England's biggest building, but also its "largest palace of pain", according to a 1900 report. But behind them rises an enormous building, its vast array of pillars and arched windows seen through the trees. And in a seaside scene, convalescent soldiers socialise with their families on a pier that might be Bournemouth or Brighton. ![]() A glamorous young officer poses in a cane chair. A quartet of stretcher-bearers wait on a dockside to unload an ambulance ship. A handsome stable hand, straight out of War Horse and proudly holding a pair of equine charges, looks hesitantly into the camera's lens. Ward maids, country-looking girls, pose in utilitarian overalls designed for dirty work, rather than the pristine starch of nurses' uniforms. A hospital orderly, wearing what resembles a butcher's apron, poses with an equally ominous-looking trolley.
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