Friends of Wandsworth Common — Heritage Talk · 11 November 2024
The Third London General Hospital, 1914–1921
Welcome to another Heritage talk. Appropriately, today being the eleventh day of the eleventh month, tonight's talk is about the First World War and the use of the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building as a military hospital. Our local historian Philip Boys is here to tell us all about it. Philip — over to you.
I want to begin with a painting made during the First World War by Harry Wood, an orderly at the hospital — Australian-born, though he came to live in Britain. I have cut small details from it to focus on scenes of activity: people arriving at the building, the landscape as it appeared at the time. It is, in fact, the best view we could possibly have of the place. Barrage balloons are up against Zeppelins and aircraft; if you study it closely you can see huts, local churches, St Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey — a huge amount of detail. Those huts are something I will be talking about in some depth.
I have called this talk “Life and Death on Wandsworth Common: the Third London General Hospital” — but as you will see, it is really “Life, Death and Art on Wandsworth Common,” because artists are absolutely central to this story.
And before we go any further: do the names Coats, Nevinson, Muirhead Bone and Sargent mean anything to anyone? A few hands — good. By the end of this evening you will know who they all are.
You are sitting, at this very moment, very close to the heart of the story. The area of grass we now call the cricket pitches, and the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building just a couple of hundred yards away, are both visible in that painting. Interestingly, the bowling green and the tennis courts are already there in 1915. The land between here and the Patriotic Building was covered in large huts during the war. Trinity Road ran along the back; infectious cases were isolated to one side so as not to infect everyone else. A water tower, which features in a great deal of the artwork of the period, is also visible.
A little background, in case you don't know it. During the Crimean War, enormous sums of money poured in from all over the world — particularly from the colonies — to the Patriotic Fund, sometimes called Prince Albert's Patriotic Fund. A million and a half pounds or more arrived, far more than they knew what to do with. The Army at that time did not look after the wives and orphans of soldiers killed in the service of the Empire, and there was a strong feeling that something had to be done, and that it should be done spectacularly. The decision was made to build a grand building on a plot of land sold very cheaply by Earl Spencer — some fifty-odd acres, conveniently positioned beside the railway so that people coming into and leaving London could see it from the train.
What was built was, in the description of contemporaries, “a Scottish baronial Jacobean French château in South London.” The opening ceremony in 1857 was attended by thousands of people, all coming to watch a diminutive Queen Victoria plant a seed that would grow into the Royal Victoria Patriotic School — an orphanage for the daughters of soldiers killed in the Crimea. Boys were catered for too, in a separate institution on the same estate, though the boys’ school lasted only nine years before Emmanuel School bought it — an early example, you might say, of the privatisation of state assets.
It fairly quickly became clear that fifty-odd acres was more land than was needed. Part was separated off for the boys’ school, part was leased as market gardens to the Niell family, and the remainder would eventually be acquired by the London County Council — which had been intending, before 1914 intervened, to lay it out as cricket pitches.
On 14 June 1914 — a date worth remembering — there was a terrible thunderstorm on Wandsworth Common that killed seven people, four of them small children. It made not just the national press but the international press, and caused great discussion. People came from miles around to show their children the tree that had been struck — the thirteenth tree from the corner of Trinity Road. Turn round from that spot and what you would have seen, still called at that time the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum, was the building we are talking about.
Two weeks later, on 28 June, a nineteen-year-old Serbian student named Gavrilo Princip shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo. A month after that, on 28 July, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Germany declared war on Russia and then on France and Belgium, and the world changed.
Step forward Colonel H. G. Bruce-Porter. He was a remarkable man: a brilliant doctor with a flourishing practice in central London, a former Army officer, and — as we shall see — formidably energetic. A fine bust of him survives, but the image he himself seems to have preferred was a rather spare portrait in the hospital’s magazine, The Gazette, which gives something of his character: he looks formidable on the surface but is, as his actions constantly reveal, extraordinarily kind.
Here is his own account of those first days:
During the early days of August 1914 we were hourly expecting the word “mobilise,” but we had to carry on as though war were a thing remote. At 11 p.m. on Sunday a telegram was handed to me ordering our immediate return to London. Tuesday night, 11 p.m., another telegram arrived: “Mobilise. Act accordingly.” The first difficulty was that there was nothing to say what the word “accordingly” meant. There had never been a rehearsal; nothing positive was known as to the source of supply of equipment, who was to give the order to take over the building, or how it was to be done. With equally indefinite problems, the only safe course appeared to be to act first and get authority afterwards.
And act he did. At six o’clock on the Wednesday morning, twenty NCOs and men arrived with orders to empty the Patriotic School building — which meant moving all 300 of those little girls, who walked every Sunday around the Common in a long line known as the crocodile. They were moved to eight houses in Spencer Park (one wonders what happened to the houses’ previous occupants), and they kept coming back throughout the war, serving as an important comfort to the wounded soldiers.
Bruce-Porter’s own account of clearing the school is touching:
The lockers in the recreation room contain the treasures of the little ones, and those who understand children will realise what grief would have been caused by the loss of old toys. The chapel was used as a storehouse, as it was essential that the children’s things should not be mixed. The hundreds of small pairs of boots, each on its own rack in what is now the dispensary, had to be hung on string and numbered so that they could be identified.
He enlisted his great friend Lady Gladstone and her friends to run up 300 little bags overnight; they were delivered the next morning, the children’s belongings packed into them and sent off to Spencer Park.
Then the real work began. The building that was “spacious and handsome outwardly was, as to its interior, a characteristic maze in the Scottish baronial style of architecture beloved by mid-Victorian philanthropists.” Everything had to be transformed:
Hundreds of mattresses, hundreds of sets of bedclothes, hundreds of suits of pyjamas — but why prolong a brain-racking list? Pulling down and fixing up partitions; removal of every single window for replacement by hopper sashes; fitting in of bathrooms, laboratories, ward kitchens, sink rooms, dispensary, cook-house, operating theatre, pathological laboratory, linen store, steward’s store, clothing store, detention room, administration offices, X-ray department…
The hopper sash, incidentally, is a window hinged so that it can open inward at the top or bottom, letting in air without allowing rain to enter — an important consideration in a ward full of patients.
One particular problem was beds. The orphan girls’ beds were four feet six inches long, and soldiers, Bruce-Porter observed, are rarely four feet tall. He spent frantic days scouring London for full-length beds, competing with the owners of stately homes who were simultaneously converting their houses into emergency hospitals. Eventually the War Office provided bunk beds — not ideal for injured men, but workable.
Bruce-Porter also tracked down the only X-ray machine in London that was available for purchase and installed it in the new hospital.
Another figure central to the early days was the Principal Matron, Ellena Barton. She recalled:
It was very hot, and I was just starting for a holiday which I considered I needed very badly, when I was summoned to the Third London General Hospital. What it was I didn’t know. I remember rows of beds — endless small beds, four feet six inches long, one room leading out of another till I was bewildered. I thought of the poor nurses who would have to stoop over those beds, and my back ached with sympathy. After tea we sat under some beautiful trees on the lawn and discussed the possibility of making a hospital.
She and Bruce-Porter and the others made it happen.
One evening in the early weeks of the war, Bruce-Porter walked into the Chelsea Arts Club ball at the Albert Hall and gave the assembled artists a talk. At the end of it, twenty-five of them signed up to become orderlies at the hospital — most of them either too old or not fit enough for active service. They became known as the Chain Gang.
This matters because among them were some of the most significant British artists of the early twentieth century: George Coats, C. R. W. Nevinson, Muirhead Bone, Francis Derwent Wood, and others — writers and painters and sculptors. Their job in those first weeks was to help transform the grounds: clearing, levelling, and building the long straight path that stretched right across the pitches. One of them, writing in verse, described:
A dreary waste ‘neath ashen skies,
Where no flower blooms, where no bird flies,
Where naught relieves the aching eyes…
A path that swerves not left nor right,
That stretches endless out of sight.
A wonderful watercolour by H. M. Bateman — who lived at the top of Nightingale Lane before the war, was wounded as a soldier and came to the hospital as a patient — shows the Chain Gang at work with a donkey called Jenny, making that path straight across the Common. Two-thirds or more of the figures depicted were members of the Chelsea Arts Club. (The archivist there has been extraordinarily helpful in confirming identities.)
Bateman is, of course, famous for his Punch cartoons — “The Man Who…” series: the man who stole the prize marrow, the man who threw a snowball at Lord’s, the discovery of a dandelion on the centre court at Wimbledon. While in the hospital he also did some lovely drawings of ward life: “No, no — no tonic, please, Sister” and similar scenes that must have done a great deal for patients’ morale.
The main accommodation for patients was in large huts erected across the land between the Patriotic Building and what is now the cricket pitch area. Muirhead Bone wrote about them with great enthusiasm: inside they were dry, comfortable, and far better than trying to refurbish the older rooms in the building. They were new, they were clean, and — crucially — they were all at one level. Many of these men had lost limbs or could not manage stairs; the flat layout meant no need for lifts or carrying. It was a brilliant solution, and the men spoke very positively about living in them.
Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson was the youngest and most artistically radical of the orderlies — twenty-four or twenty-five at the time, and the only self-described Futurist in the group. Where the others painted representationally or humorously, Nevinson painted with an anguish that is immediately recognisable. He had a particular connection with Wandsworth Common: his mother was a suffragette who often spoke on the Common on Saturdays and Sundays, as suffragettes did at Commons and parks all over London.
His images of the hospital — the receiving hall, the ambulances, the machine gun — are among the most powerful British art produced during the war. His take on the arrival of the wounded is very different from Coats’s: darker, more disturbing. The driver of his ambulance “doesn’t look very happy” — an understatement. His picture of a machine gun is considered by many to be the quintessential image of the First World War; he also produced a striking colour version, though to my mind the monochrome carries more emotional force.
George Coats was Australian-born but living in England, a member of the Chelsea Arts Club and a sergeant at the hospital. He painted the most famous image associated with the Third London General: Arrival of the First Australian Wounded from Gallipoli at Wandsworth Hospital, London, probably April 1915. When the painting was first exhibited in 1924, “First Australian” was capitalised; people protested, rightly, that Europeans who arrived in Australia were not the first Australians. The title now uses a lower-case “f.”
In the painting the wounded soldier is being tended by nurses of several different services, with Red Cross nurses prominent. In the background a stretcher is being brought in; an orderly is making up a bed; and there appears to be some kind of viewing gallery at the back, with observers watching. Coats’s images throughout the war tend toward the reassuring — a hand at cards, a man reading to blind patients — and many were clearly designed to tell people in Australia and the colonies that their men were being well cared for.
Francis Derwent Wood was a professor of sculpture, either at the Royal College of Art or the Royal Academy. At first he was simply an orderly like the others, but Bruce-Porter soon realised that using a sculptor of his calibre to carry stretchers was absurd. Derwent Wood was put to making splints and prosthetic limbs — but what consumed him most profoundly was the problem of facial disfigurement.
Men whose faces had been so badly damaged that they could not bear to be seen in public, or whose injuries drove them to despair, were referred to him. He worked out a way to help them: he made masks, fitted precisely to each face, cast in thin tin, painted in exact matches to the patient’s skin tone and eye colour. The department became known, unsurprisingly, as the Tin Nose Shop. Some of the surviving prostheses are remarkably realistic — surreal objects that speak volumes about the ingenuity and compassion brought to bear on wounds that medicine could not otherwise address.
After the war, Derwent Wood created the Machine Gun Corps Memorial, now in Hyde Park. It depicts David with the sword of Goliath, the small vanquishing the great — and at its base is an actual machine gun encased in bronze. Which brings us to Hiram Maxim, inventor of the machine gun: a Wandsworth man (though born in the United States), who offered his invention to the War Office and was told it was “grossly ungentlemanly.” He then sold the patents to Vickers. Maxim is buried in West Norwood Cemetery.
The fear of Zeppelin and aircraft attack was very real, particularly in the early part of the war. There is an image by one of the artist-orderlies showing nurses and soldiers at the front of the Patriotic Building watching a Zeppelin come down in flames after being hit. Zeppelins became significantly less dangerous after 1915, thanks largely to the invention by a boy from Dulwich College named Brock — of the Brock’s Fireworks family — of an incendiary bullet that used his knowledge of pyrotechnics to set the hydrogen-filled envelopes alight rather than simply puncturing them.
Nevinson painted the searchlight defences: looking eastward across London at night, the beams criss-crossing the sky. The nerve centre of London’s anti-Zeppelin system was, remarkably, in Putney — at a small reservoir by the side of a pub on the hill there, which had a clear sightline across the whole of London. A Wandsworth gun — a 75mm French field gun, I am told, which could be mounted on a truck to be moved rapidly to wherever a Zeppelin was sighted, though the Wandsworth one was fixed — was stationed at what is now the Lady Allen playground, at the corner of Chivalry Road. It fired frequently, and it was very loud, which was deeply distressing for patients suffering from shell shock.
Men wounded in northern France or Belgium were shipped across the Channel to Southampton, where the military hospitals filled quickly. The overflow came up the railway lines: at first through Charing Cross or Waterloo, but Clapham Junction was more convenient for the hospital, and later a platform was constructed at the bottom of the railway line to allow patients to be brought directly in. The orderlies — the Chain Gang — had to turn out at one in the morning to meet hospital trains at Clapham Junction Station.
Many of the wounded did not arrive by ambulance but by private car, organised by local people. The Dent family, for instance, arranged for their friends to lend cars. The majority — perhaps two-thirds or three-quarters — were walking wounded, in a terrible state but, as accounts consistently emphasise, not downhearted. One woman, whose name may have been Dent, was there for the first two years at least, giving each arriving soldier a red rose whatever the time of day or night, to show how welcome he was. The importance of communicating to men and their families in the colonies that they were being well treated was a recurring theme throughout the hospital’s life.
One of the most remarkable things about the Third London General was its monthly magazine, The Gazette. It ran for four years — which is extraordinary in itself — and Muirhead Bone was its editor. The first issue began with only 2,000 copies, sold locally; by the end it was going all over the world, with Australia one of the largest readerships.
The magazine is almost entirely free of anti-German propaganda — two or three images at most, and one cover, in four years of publication. It is not that kind of magazine. What it consistently features instead is care, kindness, and the texture of daily life: a hand at cards, a man reading to two blind men, an Australian Bushman patient listening to a music-hall programme via an electrophone, a pièce of comic verse, a wrestling match. It says, over and over and in different ways: “Look — they are having a good time. We are looking after them.”
The snow is a recurring motif — and not accidentally: the hospital treated large numbers of Australians, for whom English winter was a novelty, and the magazine was very conscious of its audience in the southern hemisphere. There are lovely images of snowmen and snow fights clearly aimed at amusing Australians reading at home.
The magazine was a vehicle for considerable literary and artistic talent. Helen Nightingale — a local woman, a playwright and suffragist who lived on West Side — contributed a wonderful character sketch of the hospital’s longest-serving sergeant, whose proper name was Ernest Joseph Pharaoh but who was known by four names:
Pharaoh, which was his own proper legal one and only used on state occasions; Staff, which he shared in Common with all the other staff-sergeants, good, bad and indifferent; Tabby, which even the registrar was known to use in moments of relaxation; and Lord Raspberry, which is the title by which most of us will always remember him best.
Tonight, Sergeant Pharaoh’s grandson is in the audience — and has very kindly confirmed who Lord Raspberry was.
Bruce-Porter was enlightened in his approach to patients’ welfare in a way that was genuinely ahead of his time. He fought against War Office pressure to use every square foot for ward space, insisting on maintaining the chapel for religious services (and installing a fine organ), keeping a separate space for theatrical performances and recreational activities, and using the lawn and pitches for outdoor sports.
The photographs and paintings show cricket, boxing, wrestling, basketball, and — for those not physically capable — hat-trimming. Sports days were held. A film survives, fifty-nine seconds long, of a sports day on what is clearly the area near Duthie Road, identifiable by the familiar houses in the background — and by a ten-foot-high wall that ran dead straight to Trinity Road in those days.
The indoor recreation took place largely in what became the Alra theatre building. Visiting companies came from the West End, and amateur productions were staged; the men loved theatre of all kinds. There is a lovely image of a pianìst singing a popular song, with the audience mostly composed of the little girls from the Royal Victoria Patriotic School, who kept returning to visit throughout the war and were given a party every Christmas. They apparently competed fiercely to sit on the soldiers’ laps.
Queen Amélie of Portugal — born in Twickenham, from the Orléans family, her husband and son both assassinated — worked as a nurse at the hospital during the war. By all accounts she did not “queen it” over anyone, but worked hard and was much liked.
A brief note on infrastructure: the hospital, with up to two thousand patients, produced a great deal of waste that had to go somewhere. It was only possible to manage this because of Bazalgette’s great sewer, which runs very close to the hospital site, just to one side of the Three Island Pond, on its way north towards the Thames. Without that Victorian engineering, the thing could not have been done.
62,000 patients passed through the Third London General Hospital between 1914 and 1921 — a staggering number. Of those, approximately 450 are buried in Magdalen Road Cemetery. Ivy Betts, born in 1909 and growing up on Magdalen Road, remembered what she saw as a small child:
For many months after the war ended, the military funerals from the hospital went on coming, though at longer intervals, down the road past our house — the soldiers, the limbers, the sound of hooves, the coffin draped in the flag. Still the Last Post sounded for these stragglers — these were the soldiers who had died late of their wounds, for whom there had once been hope but it had faded. I was aware that these late-comers, who came last to the Last Post, had died slowly, just up the road from me. The living soldiers began to come back after the war. These were not the same as the ones who had gone away. They looked older and duller; the hair was not so bright.
The Gazette, characteristically, saw things differently. The last issue carried a piece in the spirit of Omar Khayyám:
They may be thoroughly relied upon to continue their respective duties until the last patient leaves the hospital — but oh, to be that last patient!
There was considerable pressure on the hospital to move everyone out, and the London County Council was eager to restore the land to cricket pitches — the purpose for which it had been intended before 1914. On 1 April 1921, everything went up for auction: “the corrugated iron and wooden buildings comprising sergeant’s mess, wooden huts, kitchens,” and so on. The last patients left in early 1921, the huts were cleared away, the land was levelled, and the sheep returned.
Muirhead Bone’s collected pieces from the hospital were published after the war under the title Happy Though Wounded. I think that rather well summarises the spirit of the place.
Who did Earl Spencer sell the land to? The Patriotic Fund set itself up effectively as a charity and took responsibility for the land and the building. Different portions were sold off or leased at different times: Emmanuel School acquired what became its site first, around 1880; the London County Council acquired the grounds — the area intended for cricket pitches — in the 1890s; the building itself remained with the school for longer.
A comment on Hiram Maxim and the machine gun: Maxim offered his invention to the War Office, was told it was “grossly ungentlemanly,” and sold the patents to the Germans. The result was appalling carnage. What I was going to ask was — the fund raised something like one and a half million pounds, yet the Patriotic Building only cost about £35,000 to build. What happened to the rest?
Philip Boys: Technically the money was not raised to build the building — that was more of an afterthought when they found they had an excess of funds. The main purpose was to provide for the orphaned girls and, later, boys. They funded a building for the boys on East Hill, and eventually waited fifteen years before building Emmanuel School. All the while they were dispensing money to deserving families, but also constantly scrutinising the moral behaviour of the widows: any hint of impropriety and the woman would be cut off from funds and her daughter removed from the school. They felt obliged to husband the money for as long as possible — which is why the institution lasted a hundred years. As Britain fought successive wars, the fund was gradually opened to orphans from other conflicts too; separate provision was also made for Catholic families, given the Anglican character of the institution.
Did the chapel revert to religious use during the hospital years? Yes. Bruce-Porter faced strong pressure from the War Office to use every square foot for ward space, but he insisted on restoring the chapel and keeping it for services. A very fine organ was installed, which I believe continued to be used well into the late twentieth century. He also set up a separate Catholic chapel, which Coats painted in a Pre-Raphaelite style. Bruce-Porter’s consistent view was that people needed to get out of the wards, that they needed spiritual welfare, recreational activities, sport — and he fought to keep all those functions separate and functioning.
How were the orderlies paid, given there was no National Health Service? I honestly don’t know the full answer. I suspect some form of Army pay applied — some of the orderlies held NCO rank and received the appropriate pay. Some were relatively wealthy in their own right, so pay may not have been their primary concern. It’s a good question and I will try to find out.
How many London General hospitals were there? Most sources say four, but I believe there were at least five. One was at St Thomas’s, another at Chelsea; there were others. In addition, many local hospitals — including Bolingbroke and St James’s — also took patients. The specialist unit in London for serious mental illness was Springfield Hospital, and a building within the Springfield site — a miniature version of the main building, originally built for “idiot children,” as it was then described — was taken over for soldiers suffering from shell shock and psychotic episodes. It continued in that use for a long time.
Did Florence Nightingale or any nurses from the Crimean period return to the building during the First World War? Almost certainly not in Nightingale’s case — she had her hands full transforming nursing practice at St Thomas’s and was in any case very ill herself. The building was not a hospital at all until 1914, so there was no direct institutional connection. Many distinguished visitors did come during the war, however — queens, kings and princes — and there are wonderful formal photographs of the girls presented to them.
What did Bruce-Porter do after the war? While running the hospital he also went out to Mesopotamia and to Malta to set up medical systems there, then returned here. After the war he resigned from the Army and returned to his very lucrative private practice. He also became deeply interested in diet and exercise, and was something of a lacto-ovo vegetarian — believing in milk products and eggs as the basis of healthy life. He was very successful in promoting that philosophy.
Are Nevinson’s paintings and the watercolours of the building available to see? I am planning a small online art gallery as part of my November’s Chronicles, covering aspects of this story I couldn’t get to tonight — including where the paintings can be seen. I will make that available shortly.
Huge thanks again to Philip. I know how much work has gone into this, and to cover it all within the hour is impressive. Thank you very much.