Friends of Wandsworth Common — Heritage Talk · 11 November 2024
The Third London General Hospital, 1914–1921
Welcome to another Heritage Talk. Appropriately, being the 11th day of the 11th 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.
Thank you. Before we go any further — do these names mean anything to you: Coats, Muir, Nevinson and Stoop? Just indicate if you've heard of them. A few people know. By the end of this evening you will all know who they are — and when each of them is mentioned, someone has to shout out the name. Right — here we go.
I've called this talk "Life and Death on Wandsworth Common: the Third London General Hospital" — but as you'll see, it's really life and death and art on Wandsworth Common, because artists are absolutely central to this story.
I want to start with a painting made during the First World War by an orderly at the hospital — Harry Wood, an Australian born in Britain but who lived in Australia. It's a lovely watercolor and in fact it's the best view we could possibly have of the place at that time: you can see balloons against Zeppelins and planes, huts, local churches, St Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey — there's a huge amount of detail. The huts I'll be talking about in some detail, and interestingly the bowling green and tennis courts are already there in 1915.
Just in case you don't know the background: at the time of the Crimean War, Earl Spencer sold a huge plot of land — 50-odd acres — very cheaply. From his point of view the location was perfect: the railways had come through, first in the 1830s, then in the 1840s and 1850s, and he drew a line straight across as Trinity Road — there's the railway line — leaving just a couple of yards to give people access to Wandsworth Common.
Men were dying in the Crimean War in appalling numbers, as you can imagine. Money poured in from all over the world — particularly from the colonies — to what was called the Patriotic Fund, or Prince Albert's Patriotic Fund. The sum raised was something like one and a half million pounds. They had so much money they didn't know what to do with it. They knew they wanted to look after orphans, because the Army itself at that time did not look after the wives and orphans of soldiers who died in the service of the Empire. They decided: we've got to make something spectacular, build a big building, and put it somewhere prominent by the side of the railway line so that people coming into and leaving London could see it. That's this artist's impression of what it would look like.
The opening ceremony was held in 1857 — thousands and thousands of people came to see a diminutive Queen Victoria plant a seed that would grow into the Royal Victoria Patriotic School. It became an orphanage fairly quickly thereafter. It then became clear that 50 acres was too much land: a chunk was taken out and a boys' school — the Royal Victoria Patriotic School for Boys — was established there, though it only lasted nine years before Emanuel School bought it, in an early example of the privatisation of state assets. The original intention had been to grow food on the remaining land, but that didn't work out either, and the area became market gardens leased by the Neo family.
The roads in that area were subsequently named after four of the people we'll hear about tonight: Coats Avenue, Muir Close, Nevinson Close, and Stoop — and there they are, right next to the Common. I wonder how many people who live in those streets know who those names commemorate.
On the 14th of June 1914 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 people came from miles around to show their children the tree it had struck — the 13th tree from the corner of Trinity Road. If you turned around, what you would have seen at that time was the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum, as it was still called.
That was the 14th of June. Two weeks later, a 19-year-old Serbian student, Gavrilo Princip, shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo. A month after that, on the 28th of July, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Germany declared war on Russia and then on Belgium and France, and it all got going. Over those first days of August 1914, the tension built. At first people thought it would be all right — it wasn't, as you know.
Meanwhile, in what was described in contemporary accounts as "a Scottish baronial Jacobean French château in South London," step forward Colonel H.G. Bruce Porter. He is shown here in a painting by George Coats — thank you, good, I'm glad you're still awake. I'm going to run through some of the paintings connected with this story, because artists are central to it.
Bruce Porter had a fantastic practice in central London, having been in the Army and then become a GP. He was brilliant in all sorts of ways. This is how he chose to be represented in the magazine of the hospital — The Gazette — which I think tells you something about the man. On the surface he's a formidable character, but he's very, very kind, as we'll see.
In his own account he writes:
"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."
This was days before the war actually started. At 11 p.m. on Sunday a telegram was handed to him ordering his immediate return to London. Tuesday night, 11 p.m., another telegram arrived: "Mobilise. Act accordingly." He writes:
"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, how it was to be done — with equally indefinite problems. The only safe course appeared to be to act first, get authority afterwards."
And he did so. A Major Miller accordingly arrived at 6 a.m. on Wednesday morning with 20 NCOs and men, with orders to empty the Patriotic School building — and that meant all of these little girls, some 300 of them, the "crocodile," as they were called, because they walked around the Common every Sunday in a long line. Lots of poems and articles were written about the crocodile girls.
What did they do with them? They moved them to eight houses in Spencer Park — though what happened to the inhabitants of those eight houses, I'm not entirely sure. They may have gone off to their country estates. But the girls didn't go far, and they kept recurring in this story: although they had been shoved out, they weren't sent far away as they were during the Blitz, and they became an important inspiration and consolation to the wounded soldiers who arrived later.
Bruce Porter worked from 6 a.m. until late into the night to convert the building into a hospital. He writes, with great sensitivity:
"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 strung on string and numbered so that they could be identified."
He got his great friend Lady Gladstone and her friends to run up 300 little bags overnight, which were delivered the next morning, so all the children's belongings could be packed and taken off to Spencer Park.
Another of the central figures 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. What I remember is rows of beds — endless small beds, 4 feet 6 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."
The beds were a serious problem. Nobody had thought about them properly — perhaps someone had assumed that the school's 300 beds would do, but soldiers don't tend to be 4 feet tall. Bruce Porter spent several days going out of his mind trying to find beds: people in stately homes were opening them as emergency hospitals and buying up beds all over London. Eventually the War Office provided him with hundreds of bunk beds — not ideal for injured men, but he succeeded.
Now — do you know what this building is? It's the Chelsea Arts Club, here in its famous Dazzle camouflage. Why are we talking about the Chelsea Arts Club? Because into that building stepped Colonel H.G. Bruce Porter. You might have thought: this is a stuffed shirt, what's he doing talking to artists? Well, he gave them a talk, and at the end of it 25 artists signed up to become orderlies at the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum. Most of them were either too young, or more often too old or unwell for active service. They formed what was called the Chain Gang.
Now I don't know how familiar you are with early 20th-century British fine art, but in this group we have C.R.W. Nevinson, Muirhead Bone, George Coats, Kirkpatrick Muir, and others — painters, sculptors, writers. Some of you here may even be members of the Chelsea Arts Club. The archivist there has been incredibly helpful in discussing all of this.
Their first job was to transform the Common area into a hutted ward complex. They built a great straight path all the way across the cricket pitches — as a convalescent patient wrote in verse:
"A dreary waste 'neath ashen skies, where no flower blooms, where no bird flies, where nought relieves the aching eyes… a path which swerves not left, swerves not right, which stretches endless out of sight."
That path came all the way across the pitches. There's also a wonderful painting of the Chain Gang at work — the artist is H.M. Bateman. Does Bateman ring a bell? Good. He lived at the top of Nightingale Lane before the war, was injured as a soldier, and became a patient there. He's perhaps best known for cartoons like "The Man Who Threw a Snowball at Sumo" or "The Discovery of a Dandelion on the Centre Court at Wimbledon." But when he was in the hospital he did some lovely drawings — "No, no, no tonic please, Sister" and so on — a wonderful contribution to the well-being of the hospital.
Now back to that group image. There are alternative ways that artists visualised the scene. C.R.W. Nevinson — he's usually called Richard Nevinson — was young, 24 or 25 at this time, and he describes himself as the only Futurist in the camp. All the others were older men who painted representationally or humorously; he did not paint humorously. His images are really anguished in many ways.
He had a close connection with Wandsworth Common: his mother was a suffragette, and Wandsworth Common was one of the many London Commons and parks where suffragettes spoke on Saturdays and Sundays. So he knew the area quite well.
Just to give you an idea of what the hospital looked like: it was loads and loads of wards. You might think they'd be horrible, but Muirhead Bone writes incredibly well about why it was such a good idea. Inside they were really comfortable — dry, much better than trying to refurbish the older rooms in the Asylum, which was a "characteristic maze in the Scottish baronial style of architecture beloved by mid-Victorian philanthropists." The new huts were clean and well-made; there were no draughts. But most importantly, everything was dead level: the whole area was one huge flat site, and many of these men had lost limbs or needed to be pushed in wheelchairs — no lifts or stairs required. It was a brilliant design. The Hopper-sash windows all along the side let in light and fresh air without admitting rain.
There was one more thing that made the whole enterprise possible. You might wonder what Bazalgette's great aqueduct across South London has to do with this — but if you didn't have a large main sewer, you couldn't deal with the waste produced by 2,000 men every day. The whole hospital was only possible because of Bazalgette's sewer, which ran just to one side of this site. It's still there.
The great fear was attacks from planes and Zeppelins. There's an image here of the front of the Patriotic Asylum with nurses and soldiers looking up at a Zeppelin that's been hit. Zeppelins became progressively less dangerous after 1915, thanks to the invention of a special kind of incendiary bullet by a boy from Dulwich College called Brock — of Brock's Fireworks fame — who used his knowledge of pyrotechnics to make something that could set fire to them. A conventional bullet would just put a hole in the envelope; this set it ablaze.
The other side of the anti-Zeppelin system was searchlights, and here's Nevinson's picture: you're looking eastward, upward, searchlights everywhere. And here — these red lines are telegraph wires. The whole of London's anti-Zeppelin network was co-ordinated from Putney. There's a little reservoir by a pub there — the Whidbourne, I think — and because you can see the whole of London from there, north, south, east and west, that's where the control centre was.
Wandsworth had a stationary searchlight and a stationary gun. It was called, inevitably, Big Bertha — they all were. It was a 75mm French gun that could also be mounted on a truck and raced around if Zeppelins were spotted elsewhere. It was very loud and caused significant distress to patients, many of whom were already suffering terribly from shell shock. It was positioned at roughly the corner of Chivalry Road, where the Lady Allen playground now is.
When the Chain Gang wasn't building roads in the daytime, in the middle of the night they would have to turn out to go to Clapham Junction Station to collect the wounded. Not everybody arrived by ambulance — most people came by local car. The Dent family, for instance, organised all their friends to lend their vehicles to bring men from the station to the hospital.
The majority of arrivals — perhaps two thirds to three quarters — were walking wounded. They were in a pretty terrible state but, by all accounts, not downhearted. Their uniform was blue, a kind of khaki converted for hospital use. The orderly Arthur Muirhead writes about them arriving:
"An orphan's home on August the 4th, next morning 6 a.m. it was a military hospital. I don't say it was a military hospital in working order, but if by a miracle wounded had turned up there was at least the staff of medical officers and orderlies on the premises to receive them."
It was a few weeks before Mons happened at the end of August, and that's when people started arriving in earnest. They were injured in northern France or Belgium, shipped across the Channel to Southampton, and when the military hospital there filled up, the overflow came up the railway lines — first through Charing Cross or Waterloo, but Clapham Junction was obviously very convenient, and they could be brought straight in. Later, a platform was built at the bottom of the railway line so that hospital trains could discharge patients directly.
Throughout the whole war, by every single account I have read, it was completely extraordinary how gently, generously and kindly every wounded man was treated as he arrived — whatever time of day or night, whatever the weather. For the first two years, at least, a woman — I believe her name was something Dent — would give each man a red rose as he arrived, to show how welcome he was. The importance of telling the wounded, and their families back in the colonies, that they were being treated as well as possible comes up time and again.
Here's a painting titled "Arrival of the first Australian wounded from Gallipoli at Wandsworth Hospital, London," dated to approximately April 1915. It's by, inevitably, George Coats — who was Australian but lived in England and was a member of the Chelsea Arts Club, at this point a Sergeant. Interestingly, when it was first shown in 1924 it was titled with a capital-F "First Australian"; people protested that Europeans who arrived in Australia aren't the First Australians, so it's now lower-case. The figures are being very tenderly cared for, a stretcher is coming in with more men, an orderly on the left is making up a bed under the eye of the Sister or Matron, and there appears to be a viewing gallery at the back with people watching.
Nevinson's much harsher take on the same scene makes for an interesting contrast. The soldiers didn't stay in the Great Hall for long — it was just a receiving room and they were sent out to the wards very quickly.
The hospital had its own magazine, The Gazette, for which Muirhead Bone was the editor. It came out monthly for four years. What's remarkable about it is that there is almost no anti-German propaganda in it — almost not a word over four years. There are perhaps two or three images; this is the strongest of them, and even that is relatively mild. They decided that wasn't that sort of magazine.
What they were keener on was this kind of caring, familial image — a soldier in the middle, a nurse, a family — because the magazine went all over the world. One of the best collections is held in Australia. Over and over there are references to Australians in the hospital and the magazine says, in effect, to people out there: look, we are taking care of them. By the end, 2,000 copies were printed each month; initially it was only sold locally, but it eventually circulated internationally.
There's Bruce Porter and, alongside him, Francis Derwent Wood — a very famous sculptor. At first he was just an orderly, one of the Chain Gang. But Porter thought: we've got the Professor of Sculpture at the Royal College of Art here making splints, and that's stupid. So he gave Wood a different assignment.
Wood was deeply distressed for six months — "fretted" is too mild a word — because he realised that men were being so badly facially disfigured that they couldn't face the world. People were killing themselves; others were desperately anxious and unable to go out. He worked out a way that he, as a sculptor, could help them: he made masks — perfect fits, out of tin. The place became known as the Tin Nose Shop. He would fit them and then paint them exactly the same colour as the patient's skin tone, with their eyes and everything else precisely matched.
After the war, Wood went on to model the bust of Marshal Foch, and later created his memorial to the Machine Gun Corps at Hyde Park. It's a complicated, emotionally rich piece: David with Goliath's great sword, the small having vanquished the great — and at its base, an actual Vickers machine gun encased in bronze.
Which brings us to Hiram Maxim, who invented the machine gun, though it's often called the Vickers because he sold the patents to Vickers. He was a Wandsworth man — born in the United States, but he came to England and lived in what was then Wandsworth (now technically Lambeth). He is buried in West Norwood Cemetery. And here is Nevinson's take on the machine gun — a very powerful image, and one that many artists at the time considered the quintessential image of the First World War. He did a colour version too, but to me it doesn't quite have the same emotional impact.
I want to give you a quick sense of life in the hospital beyond the medical work. There was a great emphasis throughout on recreation, morale and — crucially — getting people out of the wards. Bruce Porter fought hard to keep different functions separate: the chapel remained as a chapel, not converted into more ward space; a separate Catholic chapel was established, painted by Coats in a Pre-Raphaelite style; and the building that's now the Alra theatre was kept for activities and entertainment.
Coats's images in The Gazette are consistently reassuring — a hand at cards, men reading, outdoor games. There's the bowling green with the roller. There were wrestling matches and boxing matches. There were sports days on the Common — and amazingly a short film survives, 59 seconds long, of one of these sports days. You can see regular grass and the houses of Duthie Road in the background, with a massive 10-foot-high wall that ran dead straight across to Trinity Road, which has since come down.
For men who weren't physically capable of sport, there was hat-trimming — and here they are being inspected by Queen Amélie of Portugal. She had been born in Twickenham, was from the Orléans family, and had married the King of Portugal, who was assassinated, as was her son. She carried on with the honorific title and during the war worked really hard. Everybody says she did not lord it over the other nurses but worked just as hard as everyone else.
There were concerts and theatre — sometimes professionals came in from the West End, sometimes it was amateur performances, and you can imagine what a laugh that was. This is a particularly fascinating image: a Pierrot singing a popular song in the recreation room, and if you look closely the majority of the audience are the little girls from the Patriotic School — there they are again, having been brought back in. They were given a Christmas party every year, came for New Year, and apparently fought one another to sit on the soldiers' laps. Different times.
One of the regular contributors to The Gazette was a woman called Helen Nightingale — our local postman, as she called herself (it was a deliberate choice of word), a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment, who lived on West Side and was a suffragist playwright. She wrote an affectionate profile of the hospital's most colourful Sergeant, referred to throughout as Lord Raspberry:
"He had 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."
His real name was Ernest Joseph Pharaoh — and I believe his grandson is here tonight. Very good.
One of the recurring themes in The Gazette, again and again over four years, is snow. They had snow in those days — lots of it — and many of the most charming images are snowscapes of the Common. One is particularly targeted at Australians: "An Australian's introduction to snow." The magazine went all over the world, and part of its job was to say to people in Australia: don't worry, they're having a good time, we're looking after them.
There were 62,000 patients in total who passed through the Third London General Hospital over the course of the war. Of those, roughly 450 are buried in Magdalen Road Cemetery. That number is extraordinarily small in proportion, which says something about the quality of the care.
A local woman called Peggy Betts, born in 1909 and living on Magdalen Road, witnessed the last phase with a child's wide-open eyes. She wrote, looking back:
"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."
Characteristically, The Gazette saw things rather differently. Its final piece was titled "Paradise in small doses" and included a tribute to the nurses:
"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 a lot of pressure on the hospital to release its remaining patients, but they couldn't be moved and no suitable place could be found for them. The London County Council wanted to restore the land to cricket pitches, as had been planned before the war. On the 1st of April 1921 — yes, April Fool's Day — everything was auctioned off: corrugated iron and wooden buildings, sergeant's mess, wooden huts, kitchens and all the rest. The last patients moved out in early 1921, the land was levelled and cleaned up, and the sheep returned to the Common.
The building itself is still there, of course, in yet another incarnation — endlessly recycled, endlessly reused. Emanuel School is there too, though it hasn't had its spire since the early 1930s; contrary to what's often said, it wasn't destroyed in the Second World War — the spire had already gone before the war, though the building was very badly hit.
I'll end with the title of Muirhead Bone's collected works: Happy Though Wounded. I think that rather sums up the perspective of this whole remarkable episode.
Who did Earl Spencer sell the land to?
The Patriotic Fund set itself up as a charity in effect — they had the money and took over responsibility. They then sold off different bits at different times. Emanuel School was sold first, around 1880. They leased the remainder out and then sold it to the London County Council in the 1890s, carrying on with the building itself for a little longer.
What happened to the rest of the enormous sum raised?
It's a really good question. Technically the money wasn't raised specifically to build the building — the building arose because they had an excess of funds and had to find something to do with it. What they thought they would have to do was find other schools and places for the girls and then the boys. They took over a building for the boys on East Hill and built wooden shacks for them, which was pretty appalling, and waited 15 years before they built Emanuel School. All the while they were giving certain amounts to the deserving, but constantly checking up on the morality of the recipients: if they found anything unseemly, the woman was cut off from funds and the daughter withdrawn from the school. It was pretty heavy duty. But they believed they had to husband that sum of money for as long as possible — which is why it lasted 100 years. For a long while, although Britain was fighting wars all over the world and people were dying, the fund was kept just for Crimea orphans. But of course they grew up, left school at 14, and became maids generally speaking, so gradually it was opened up to orphans of subsequent conflicts. Other institutions around the country were funded too — for Catholics, for instance, because of complications around the Anglican nature of the original institution.
Did the chapel revert to religious services while the hospital was operating?
Very interesting. Bruce Porter called it "now the dispensary," but he faced a lot of pressure from the War Office to use every single square foot for wards. He said: we've got to look after people's spiritual welfare. We must keep this as a chapel. They bought and installed a very fine organ — I'm pretty sure that organ continued to be used into the late 20th century, it was a beautiful instrument. He also set up a separate Catholic chapel, which Coats painted in a Pre-Raphaelite style. And he refused to give up the activities building either: people who are really ill just want to be left alone; we want to get the others out and about, walking and doing things. We'd call him enlightened now. He fought to keep the different functions separate and going.
How were the orderlies paid, given there was no National Health Service?
That's a really good question and I'm not entirely sure of the answer. I think the government paid them — they had a kind of private rate of pay, and some of them actually received stripes: some were Corporals or Sergeants and presumably got a little extra. But some of the artists were quite well off anyway — Nevinson, for instance. I will try to find out and let you know.
How many London General hospitals were there?
A lot of the books say four, but I think there were at least five. One was at St Thomas's, another at Chelsea, and others elsewhere. In addition, many hospitals including Bolingbroke and St James's also took patients. The specialist unit in London for seriously mentally ill patients was Springfield Hospital. And if you face the front of the main Royal Victoria Patriotic building, just off to the right there's a building like a miniature version of it — I think it was originally called something for "idiot children," which gives you a sense of the sensitivity of the time — and that was taken over for soldiers suffering from shell shock and other psychological breakdowns. It continued to be used in that way for a very long time.
Did Florence Nightingale ever visit?
Interesting. Until 1914 it was just a school, not a hospital, so there would have been no particular reason for her to visit. I guess she had her work cut out transforming nursing practice at St Thomas's and, being very ill herself, wasn't inclined to visit these institutions. Whether she came here or not, I rather suspect not. But many people did — queens and kings and princes came every couple of years, and there are wonderful photographs of the girls being formally presented.
What did Bruce Porter do after the war?
While he was at the hospital he also went off to Mesopotamia and Malta and set up medical systems there, then came back. At the end of the war he resigned from the Army and returned to his private practice, which was very lucrative. But he also became obsessed with diet and exercise, and with teaching people to be healthy. He was a lacto-ovo something-or-other — he believed in milk products and eggs as the basis of all healthy life — and was very successful in promoting that philosophy.
Are the Nevinson paintings and Coats watercolours available to see somewhere?
Yes, the originals are held in various collections. I'll try to make a little art gallery on my website — probably as November's Chronicles, since I haven't done that yet — covering some of the aspects I couldn't get to tonight, and including the paintings and where they can be seen.
Huge thanks again to Philip — we all know how much work goes into these talks, and to do it within the hour with that amount of detail and information is truly impressive. Thank you all very much for coming.