Chapter Six : The New Hospital Wing and the First World War and the visit of King George and Queen Mary

A picture of Fort Pitt which evoked its Edwardian tranquillity, before the horrors brought by the outbreak of the First World in 1914, is conveyed when the Quartermaster-Sergeant wrote that in March 1911 in the N.C.O's Mess which was housed in its own building sited between the guardhouse and the Officers’ house to the north of the old 1832 Hospital wing : 

 

‘A very successful smoking concert was held by the members of the N.C.O,’s mess. 10th Company R.A.M.C., at Fort Pitt, to bid farewell to Sergeant-Major Ford who was leaving on furlough prior to discharge to pension on completion of twenty-five year’s service. A large number of visitors from all the various Corps in the garrison, also several ladies were present. A well-varied programme had been drawn up, the songs, recitations etc., rendered, all tending towards the evening’s enjoyment. After a most enjoyable evening, ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and ‘God Save the King’ brought the proceeds to a conclusion at 11pm’.

The N.C.O's Mess was housed in its own building sited between the guardhouse and the Officers’ house to the north of the old 1832 Hospital wing. In 1910 the face of Fort Pitt underwent its biggest change for 80 years with the demolition of the Central Tower, which had dominated the site for a hundred years and was then being used by civilians making leather boots and saddles for the Army. 

At the same time one of the two Hospital wings, the west wing of the old 1832 Hospital, was demolished. The remaining East Wing, which is listed and still stands is seen here standing to the left of the new central hospital block. It is still used by Fort Pitt Grammar School today and would have been demolished, had not the outbreak of the First  World War intervened and led to the suspension of all plans for modernisation and the use of the old wards to house the casualties from the fighting front in Belgium and France.

In the event, a new wing was built along with a new administration block, which housed the  new main entrance and was connected on two floors to the old and new hospital blocks by means of bridging corridors, seen below to the left of the main building.

Fortunately the new hospital wing, built as an extension to the new hospital block was built in handsome red brick which now formed the western flank of the Hospital was completed just before the First World War broke out in 1914 and was immediately able to receive casualties. Built on up-to-date lines it had an electric lift to take patients to the upper wards. It had a designated operating theatre, an X-Ray Department and its attendant anesthetic, sterilizing and warming rooms. The surgeons and their teams worked in the theatre which was housed in the single floor building seen here on the left. The glass, pyramid-shaped, sky-light which was installed to maximize daylight for the surgeons, can been seen peeping out on the roof.

At great expense Italian craftsmen were employed to lay terrazzo flours in the corridors and wards, employing a technique using marble, quartz and granite chips bonded together and polished into a easy-to-clean surface and rounded where the floor met the walls to avoid the accumulation of dirt and dust. In addition, the wards were ventilated with windows which had an inward opening tilt and were free from draughts. 

By 1914 the Hospital was being run by the Royal Army Medical Corps which had been set up in 1898 and was also using Fort Pitt as a training school for its officers and men. The Commanding Officer was Lieutenant-Colonel Haines and by the end of 1915 he managed a staff of 371 NCOs and orderlies which included 38 sisters accommodated on the site in the building which once housed the Asylum. 

Commanding Officer Lieutenant-Colonel Haines (front and third from right), photographed in the Hospital grounds with his 19 fellow officers in 1916. 

No 10 Company R.A.M.C Medical staff drawn up on the steps of the new front entrance of the Hospital in 1915.

The Staff worked in either the ‘Surgical’ or ‘Medical’ Divisions, which in turn were divided into departments. The Surgical Division had 400 beds and was housed in the new Hospital block and dealt with men who had received shrapnel and bullet wounds which needed surgery. The Medical Division was housed in the remaining 1832 hospital block on the east side of the hospital and worked in conjunction with the Radiant Heat and Massage Department and the Dental, Ophthalmic and Throat and Ear Departments. 

All officer patients, regardless of their condition, were treated in the new smaller 'Ward 22', sited off the top corridor connecting the new and old blocks. In addition, patients suffering from mental illness and infectious and skin disease were housed in the external ward blocks 26 and 27, to the west of the main block which had been added to the site after the Crimean War and stood to the west of the Tower. 

The Hospital food was prepared by kitchen staff on the ground floor of the new wing to the rear of the Administration Block and under the eye of the master cook and sent to the first floor by means of an electric lift. In addition to the main kitchen, there were smaller kitchen units outside the wards. 

The Hospital had nursing sisters, but also civilian women from the Voluntary Aid Department, which had been founded in 1909. Miss Margaret Buggy started work there in 1916 in the Pack Store and Linen Wash as a clerical assistant. One of her jobs was to open the packs of the new patients and make an inventory of the contents. She later recalled the packs were often caked in mud and blood and had to be baked in order to kill the lice. The fact that she left the store to work in the wards caring for typhoid and dysentery patients reminds us that service men suffered from serious medical conditions contracted in trench warfare. After leaving Fort Pitt in 1920 Margaret worked as the matron in a number of schools, including Repton.  

In an echo of Fort Pitt serving as the first base of the Army Medical School in the 1860s, the Hospital now provided training for civil doctors and surgeons who had enlisted at Chatham as temporary lieutenants and attended to gain insight into military medicine, before being posted abroad. In addition, and as a mark of its importance, Fort Pitt now had a new

 ‘Auxiliary Hospitals Department’ 

which was responsible for organising hospital accommodation for soldiers in the whole of South East England. For this purpose it had jurisdiction in 65 hospitals in Kent, Sussex and Essex, many of which were temporary for the duration of the War. Broadly the job of the Department was to supervise convoys of wounded soldiers who entered these hospitals and provide for their upkeep and inspection.

For its own conveyance the Hospital now had new motorised transport, with its ambulance housed in garage in front of what had been the officers’ house and now housed 'Pay and Clothing Offices'. It was but a short ride from Chatham Railway Station down the hill to pick up the casualties, landed from crossing the Channel, who had been loaded on to trains at Dover.

The visit of King George V and Queen Mary to Fort Pitt in October 1914, must have been awaited by the staff and patients at the Hospital with excitement, reminiscent of that generated when Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and the King’s father, Edward, Prince of Wales, had visited Crimean War veterans, 60 years before. The King, dressed in naval uniform and Queen Mary visited the sick and wounded in the Hospital to Fort Pitt in October 1914.

The King and Queen arrived at 4.20 pm and were met outside the Hospital’s new front entrance by Lt-Col Haines and after being received by the Matron and a Miss Tulloch, they visited the 208 patients in the Surgical Division, who at this point in time included the 109 from the fighting across the Channel on the Western Front. The King asked about the regiment, wounds and progress of the patients in the Surgical Division and was shown x-ray plates and some of the bullets and shrapnel the surgeons had removed from the men, reminiscent of the the round shot removed from soldiers in the Crimean War and shown to his grandmother, Queen Victoria, on her visit to the hospital in the Crimean War.  

Before leaving the Royal Party went to the part of the Hospital where five German Naval Officers were held in a separate ward. It is possible the King spoke to them in German. He had been brought up speaking English, but had learned German when he was Prince of Wales. At least seventy German prisoners were treated at the Hospital during the War and on recovery, were held in the Blockhouse for its duration. The submarine bell, which now hangs in the first floor corridor in the girls grammar school which now occupies the site, connecting the new with the old wings was donated by German Naval Officers in appreciation of the care they received in the hospital.                                                   

During the period from August 1914 and April 1918, 89,419 patients passed through Fort Pitt of whom 367 were officers, almost 30,000 were classed as ‘local’ and almost 54,000 were ‘British Expeditionary Force France’. In addition, 3,000 were Canadians, 2,600 were Australians and 140 were prisoners of war. 

An additional wooden hut had been built to increase patient accommodation and in 1978, one Australian veteran in New South Wales recalled : ‘I was in Ward 19, which was along narrow hut and noted for the speed the servicemen went through the hands of the very efficient and kindly staff and progressed to convalescent homes. This ward was nicknamed ‘The Tuppenny Tube’. I was a patient for a record number of 3 months, a record for Ward 19, and saw 500 men pass through the ward’. This ward was to the rear of the newly built parts of the Hospital and stood in front of the Staff Officers’ house.                         

Another Australian, in more comfortable accommodation in the new wing of the Hospital and marked with an ‘X’ above his head on the left in the December 1915 photograph, seated and with a bandaged head, was Private Cecil Horace "Noddy" Price, serving from 1915, as a stretcher bearer with the 11th Reinforcements, 13th Battalion. (link)  In 1917 he was serving on the Western Front near Bullecourt. His recommendation to receive a Military Medal stated that working with a Private Campbell and although they were badly shaken by shell fire : ‘They stuck to their work, returning again and again to the enemy's wire although under fire from snipers and machine guns. under fire from snipers and machine guns. They continued at this work until both were severely wounded and then refusing help, dragged themselves to the Dressing Station. These men have done consistently good work in all our operations in France’.  The brave Private Price died in Fort Pitt of his head wounds on 24 September 1917, aged 24. 

The letter of condolence written by Sister Boyd to the mother of a soldier who had died in the Hospital in 1916 was one of many hundreds which were sent to mothers and wives during the course of the War between 1914-18.

Lance Corporal William Angus in 1915, treated in the Ophthalmic Department and is seen here proudly wearing his Victoria Cross was treated in the Ophthalmic Department after losing an eye on the outskirts of Givenchy La Basse in Northern France in 1915. His act of bravery was to rescue the wounded Lieutenant James Martin from where he had fallen in No Man’s Land in front of the German position. Having done this through a hail of bombs and bullets, he drew enemy fire to allow the officer to be dragged to safety having himself received shrapnel wounds in the process. (link) (link)

His citation read : 

'For most conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty at Givenchy on the 12th June, 1915, in voluntarily leaving his trench under very heavy bomb and rifle fire, and rescuing a wounded Officer who was lying within a few yards of the enemy’s position. Lance-Corporal Angus had no chance whatever in escaping the enemy’s fire when undertaking this very gallant action, and in effecting the rescue he sustained about 40 wounds from bombs, some of them being very serious'. 

The London Gazette of 29 June 1915 (link)                                           

At least once a week patients in the wards were entertained by artists from local theatres, either Barnard’s Palace of Varieties or the Theatre Royal, the Chatham Empire and occasionally, London theatres. No doubt the theatrical sketches, variety performers, concerts and instrumental turns acted as a tonic to the men confined to their beds. Some of them were part of the Empire Forces, like 21 year old Thomas Rooney of the 59th Australians who died in November 1916 and was one of the 53 who died that year and 18 year old Private Robert Costello of the Canadian Forces who died in April 1917, one of the 43 that year. The majority, of course, were British and either patched up and returned for duty, discharged or sent elsewhere for convalescence. 

This poem by Claude Hulbert, published in a pamphlet in 1915 entitled ‘The Wounded in our Hospital’, painted a picture of the Hospital in the War. 

When the War came to an end in 1918, few would have predicted that with eight years the Army Hospital at Fort Pitt would close and a secondary school for girls would open in its place. Over fifty years ago, in 1972 when I was a young history teacher at the school, I showed two elderly gentleman around the site on a saturday morning when it was closed. They were the brothers Kerstin and had lived with their parents in the officers' residence in the grounds at the rear of the hospital. Their faces lit up when they recognised buildings familiar to them when they were boys back in the 1920s. Their father had been a member of the medical staff and although the building they lived in had long been demolished, there was enough of the old hospital and its grounds for them revisit happy childhood memories.

With the War over, Lieutenant Colonel Haines, now promoted to Colonel, had only four more years of command at Fort Pitt. The Hospital closed its doors in 1922 and 130 years of medical care came to an end. His life had been blighted by the fact that his daughter, Miri, had died at the age of 27 in 1916, while nursing the wounded at St, Thomas’ Hospital and he himself died at the age of 62 at Fort Pitt in 1923 and was buried in Fort Pitt Military Cemetery. His wife, Elizabeth, who was later buried with him, lived in Strood and survived him by 15 years.  

In the next chapter I shall deal with the start of the massive changes which would change the site of Fort Pitt out of all recognition in the 20th century in  : 'Chapter Seven : Conversion into the Medway Technical High School for Girls’.        

                               John Cooper  

Linked later or earlier chapters :                                                                                                 

Chapter One : Construction and function as a Napoleonic Fort

Chapter Two : The Army Hospital

Chapter Three : The Army Hospital and Medical Research  

Chapter Four : The Army Hospital in the Crimean War and Queen Victoria's three visits

Chapter Five : Florence Nightingale and the Army Medical School

Chapter Six : The New Hospital Wing and the First World War and the visit of the King and Queen

Chapter Seven : Conversion of the Fort into the Medway Technical High School for Girls

Chapter Eight : The School in the Second World War and the second half of the Twentieth Century

Chapter Nine : The Site of Fort Pitt in the 21st century. 

                                                                                                       

Chapter Five : Florence Nightingale and the Army Medical School

It was not the Crimean War itself, but the period shortly after the War which witnessed the greatest changes in British Army Medicine and Medical Practice. Despite the favourable account given in Dr Dartnell’s account of the treatment of the soldiers at the time of Queen Victoria’s visits to Fort Pitt Military Hospital, all was not well within the Army Medical Service. The War which saw, more men die from diseases like cholera, than service wounds, witnessed the fact that it was high time for reform. This need was heightened because public attitudes towards the private soldier had been transformed by the War. 

Forty years before the Duke of Wellington had described his army as : “The scum of the earth enlisted for drink” and attitudes had not changed much since then. The Crimean War was to change this simply by making people aware of the conditions in which the private soldier lived, fought and died. (link) The dispatches sent back to ‘The Times’ by William Russell did much to help this (link) However, it was, perhaps, the work of Florence Nightingale which really caught the public eye.(link)

If Nightingale’s lasting victory at this time was to elevate nursing into a profession, her other great aim was to see that the incompetent Army Medical Service was reformed. Here her obstacles were mountainous as she found herself, a woman, battling against centuries of tradition and miles of War Office red tape. Undeterred, she was determined that the health and diet of the private soldier should receive as much attention in peace as in war. With this in mind, she began to gather statistics and other information which would support her case and it was a fact-finding mission which first brought her to Fort Pitt in November 1856.        

The outbreak of the Crimean War had put the Inspector-General, Andrew Smith and his assistants in London under severe pressure. Several Committees of Enquiry were set up during the War before which Nightingale placed all the evidence she had amassed. As a result Smith was largely exonerated for the failings of the Army Medical Department, but suffered much from the stress to which he was subjected. It seems likely that he broadly approved the formation of an Army Medical School, as would have his predecessor, McGrigor, would have done. However, he played no part in organizing it and in 1858 retired on ground of ill health.  

Now Nightingale she pushing hard for the creation of an Army Medical School which would train young surgeons for the medical conditions which would confront them in ‘military’ as opposed to ‘civilian’ medicine. She confirmed the need for such a school when she wrote : ‘Formerly young men were sent to attend to the sick and wounded who perhaps had never dressed a serious wound, or never attended a bedside, except in the midst of a crowd of students. Following in the wake of some eminent lecturer, who certainly had never been instructed in the most ordinary sanitary knowledge, although one of the most important functions hereafter was to be prevention of diseases in climates and circumstances in which prevention is everything and  medical treatment little or nothing’.                                                                                           

Florence Nightingale made what must have been a number of visits to Fort Pitt prior to the opening of the Army Medical School in October 2nd 1860. Her great ally in reform of medical care in the Army was the Secretary of State for War, Sydney Herbert. The first step towards reform was made in 1857 when he was   appointed as President of the ‘Royal Commission on the Health of the Army’ which began sitting in May of that year. It was later in that year that he  recommended the setting up of an Army Medical School and by the end of the year, Nightingale had drawn up the regulations and nominated the teachers. However, when in October 1858 a Royal Warrant was published which laid down the rules for the future admissions, promotion and retirement of Army Medical Officers, no provision was made for setting up a staff of female nurses and it was envisaged that the sick would continue to be looked after by regimental hospital orderlies or men of the Medical Staff. These men were generally retired soldiers or pensioners paid 3 – 6 pence a day and free rations.

Nightingale, however, had already been instrumental in breaking with that tradition when her nurses in the Scutari Hospital in the Crimean with Herbert’s approval, Nightingale had swiftly assembled a cohort of 38 nurses to travel to Crimea. She favored young women from the lower classes, assuming they would be better-equipped to withstand the hard work and difficult conditions ahead. Once the War was over some of these were later already employed at the Fort Pitt Military Hospital. 

The new School was to be self- governed by a Senate which was charged with the supervision of training of candidates for medical commissions. It was to be composed, prestigiously, with the Director General of the Army Medical Department as its first Principal Medical Officer. In addition, Sir Thomas Longmore (left) was appointed the Professor of  Military Surgery and the great military sanitarian, Dr Edmund Parkes, was the Professor of Hygiene and there was also a Professor of Pathology. Implicit within the management of the new School was its autonomy and this was due to Nightingale’s influence. She had seen that the failures of medical arrangement in the Crimean War were due to the lack of executive power in the Army Medical Department and was determined to see that this did not happen to the new School.

Even though the creation of the School seemed assured, three more years were to pass before it finally opened at Fort Pitt in 1860. For a start, Lord Panmure, the Secretary of State for War, could not be induced to confirm Nightingale’s appointments, as Sydney Herbert  wrote : ‘Even if the Angel Gabriel had offered himself, St Michael and all the angels to fill the different chairs’. Eventually Panmure’s successor made the appointments, but there was still much to do.  

It was at this point Fort Pitt enters the story as the chosen site for the School and its choice was an obvious one. Even before the Crimean War it had been a place of education, a school where young assistant surgeons picked up the military aspects of the profession. In addition, it had a scientific and educational basis in its museum and medical library and its long experience in dealing with soldiers’ ailments, medical conditions and service wounds. In the opinion of ‘Historic England’ in its survey report : ‘Fort Pitt was a major military hospital at which almost all soldiers invalided to Britain from the colonies were assessed prior to their discharge from service’ and ‘Fort Pitt was ‘de facto’, the most important military hospital’. (link) 

In preparation for the arrival of the School, one ward had been converted into a lecture theatre and another into an operating ‘theatre’ designed to allow the young surgeons to observe the surgery, with other rooms converted for the professors and secretarial staff. Outside the main hospital other buildings were appropriated for a pathology laboratory known as the ‘Microscopical Room’ and there was a ‘Dissecting Room’. In addition, quarters and mess buildings were assigned to the officers in training.  

After three years preparation, the opening of the School in 1860 was, according to Nightingale, ‘a disaster’. On September 3rd she wrote in her diary : ‘On Saturday I had a letter from the Professors of the Medical School quiet desperate. The authority for the instruments and the money had not yet come. Ten of the students arrived. They stared at the bare walls and in the absence of all arrangements for their work, concluded that the School was a hoax’. 

The problem of the instruments was solved later that year when the School received a large teaching collection of surgical instruments, along with ambulance wagons and stretchers from Trinity College, Dublin. According to the ‘Medical Times and Gazette’, the first 43 students were reported to be an ‘extremely gentlemanly and fine looking set of men, of who the Service may well be proud’. Each student who, having passed the entry examination, followed a 5 month course of instruction which concluded with an examination in Hygiene, Pathology, Surgery and Military Medicine and those who qualified in these subjects were gazetted as ‘Medical Officers’. 

Sir James Clarke, physician to Prince Albert and revered by Queen Victoria, paid tribute to Nightingale’s success in getting the School opened when he wrote : ‘In the Medical School just instituted, hygiene will form the most important part of a young medical officer’s instruction. For originating this School we have to thank Miss Nightingale, who, had her long and persevering efforts effected by no other improvement in the Army, would have conferred by this alone an inestimable boon upon the British soldier’. The opening ceremony on October 2nd 1860 was carried out by Sydney Herbert as Secretary of State for War and the opening address was made by Sir Thomas Longmore as the Professor of Military Surgery. 

In addition to soldiers suffering from illness and service wounds, the students were also able to study those suffering from mental illness housed in the Asylum. Opened at the site in 1847, and now a listed Grade II building, it had a colonnade and veranda and could accommodate 32 men and 2 officers. Its humane approach to its patients is indicated by the fact that it was described at the time as : ‘More a house of detention or observation than an asylum. The fence surrounding the building is only four and a half feet high and has frequently been cleared by patients at a bound’.  A letter, addressed to ‘Maggie and Fred’ and dated March 19th 1869, was found in the rafters of the building, by electricians working in the building about a hundred years later. It read : ‘I now find myself in the Asylum surrounded by lunatic friends all joining me in my proceedings’. 

In 1862 Arthur Anderson became Inspector General of Military Hospitals and took over as Principal Officer at Fort Pitt. Prior to that he was educated at Maris College in Aberdeen and graduated with a medical degree from Edinburgh University in 1834 and served as a surgeon with the 82nd Foot, 10th Dragoons and the Rifle Brigade, before being appointed a Surgeon Major in 1854. He was in charge of Nightingale's hospital care in Scutari Hospital in the Crimean War when Nightingale had been stricken with 'Crimean Fever', now known to have been brucellosis and was acutely ill for twelve days, but later recovered and returned her duties at the hospital in Scutari. 

The school opened in 1860 with five sets of students attending before it was transferred in 1863 to the Royal Victoria hospital, Netley, Hampshire. Fort Pitt was a "practical" medical school with students attending for 4-9 months of clinical experience. This included "instruction in tropical medicine" delivered by members of the Indian Medical Service. 

When the School moved it took with it, in addition to the School’s equipment, the contents of the medical museum where the pathological section alone had a staggering 6,000 specimens and the library of over 10,000 volumes. Anderson and his clerk, were the first personnel to leave and the remaining staff followed including Crimean nurses, like Sister Jane Catherine Shaw Stewart, who maintained correspondence with Nightingale and became the first Lady Superintendent in the Royal Victoria Hospital in Netley. This contingent of nurses now broke new ground and, by default, led to the recognition of female nurses in Army hospitals when, in 1866, much to Nightingale's approval, a Royal Warrant legitimised the appointment of female nurses to any military general hospital and subsequently they were then employed both at Netley and Fort Pitt. link

Hospital patients were also moved physically from Fort Pitt to the Royal Victoria Hospital which was soon handling patients from Malta, China and India who formerly would have previously been taken to  Fort Pitt before being discharged either back to their former regiments of from the Army as veterans. In 1865 Lord Panmure, now the Earl of Dalhousie, speaking in the House of Lords, offered an interesting insight into his thinking about why this was a good thing when he said :  “A more unfortunate place for the reception of invalids than Fort Pitt never existed. Whenever any large body of invalids landed from the East, the place became a scene of the utmost demoralisation and many a non-commissioned officer had to regret that, while waiting there for his discharge he lost his stripes and pension attached to them. To avoid this was one of the objects contemplated by the erection of Netley Hospital”. 

When he referred to their “demoralisation” he meant their being drawn into immorality and referred to the temptations of prostitutes and drink which, Victorian Chatham, on the Hospital’s doorstep, had in abundance, as opposed to Netley, which was isolated on the banks of Southampton Water. 

Despite the fact the removal of the Army Medical School to new Royal Victoria Hospital in 1863, must have dealt a blow to the prestige of Fort Pitt, it continued to be a site of some importance and in 1873 it became a ‘Garrison Hospital’ with its officers, for the first time, under the command of the Army Medical Department and not the local regiment. 

At the end of the 19th century, superficially, the site of Fort Pitt had changed very little. All the defensive ditches around perimeter of the Fort were still in place and the Tower, casemates in the Blockhouse and underground chambers were still being used for Hospital purposes. On the surface of the site, the 1832 ‘H’ shaped hospital blocks and two houses for the Medical Officers and their families, were still in use, as was the 1847 Asylum. However, some change was apparent: Two new single story ward blocks had been built to the west and of the Tower and other buildings to house the dining room, stores, laundry and mortuary had been built at the front of the Hospital site. The building which had once housed the Museum was now converted into a Dental and Ophthalmic Block which also treated outpatients from troops based in Chatham. One day’s leave was given for the extraction of a tooth and the fact that the return for one month in 1915 read : ‘Cases treated : 1,137. Teeth extracted : 1,690’, provides some insight into the parlous state of the dental health of the servicemen at this time. 

As the 20th dawned we have a description, in the local newspaper, of the Hospital’s Christmas in 1909, just before the outbreak of the First World War. It reported that those patients who could walk, sat down to a meal in the Dining Room which was laid out by the matron, nursing sister and staff nurses. The rest had their dinner in bed. After dinner the men of No10 company of Infantry and Special Reserve sat down to their meal in No18 barrack room (in the blockhouse) where they were visited by Lieutenant Colonel Cree who was about to leave for India. The N.C.Os, after waiting on the Company, sat down to their dinner at 3pm in the Mess Room. In the evening a concert was held for the patients in No 5 Ward. 

The celebrations were brought to a close on New Year’s Eve, with a tea for patients and the families of the R.A.M.C followed by presents from a Christmas tree and a cinematograph show (link) on the ground floor of the Old Crimea block, little changed since Queen Victoria's visit during the Crimean War, fifty-five days before. 

Five years later, the Christmas of 1914 would take place in the Hospital transformed by new buildings and the outbreak of the First World War. The dramatic modernisation of the hospital in the early 20th century and the impact of the War shall be dealt with in : 'Chapter Six : The New Hospital Wing and the First World War’.  

John Cooper

Linked later or earlier chapters :                                                                                                 

Chapter One : Construction and function as a Napoleonic Fort

Chapter Two : The Army Hospital

Chapter Three : The Army Hospital and Medical Research  

Chapter Four : The Army Hospital in the Crimean War and Queen Victoria's three visits

Chapter Five : Florence Nightingale and the Army Medical School

Chapter Six : The New Hospital Wing and the First World War and the visit of the King and Queen

Chapter Seven : Conversion of the Fort into the Medway Technical High School for Girls

Chapter Eight : The School in the Second World War and the second half of the Twentieth Century

Chapter Nine : The Site of Fort Pitt in the 21st century. 

Chapter Four : The Army Hospital in the Crimean War and Queen Victoria's three visits

In 1854 the peace in Europe was broken by the outbreak of the Crimean War.(link) It started when a clash between Tsarist Russia and the declining Ottoman Empire led Britain and France to support the Sultan and fight Russia in order to protect their interests in the Eastern Mediterranean. 

It was on the Russian Crimean Peninsula where Britain was got its foretaste of the horrors of modern war and the siege of the Russian naval base at Sebastopol cost the country in excess of 20,000 dead and wounded alone. This was the first war to be brought home to the British public via photographs and the dispatches of William Howard Russell in 'The Times' newspaper. (link)

As the War progressed, casualties from the Battles of the River Alma, Balaclava, Inkerman and the Redan began to arrive at Fort Pitt Military Hospital. (link) Many of the men were severely wounded, barely surviving the travails of the journey home. Others had lost limbs or were suffering from mental conditions brought on by the strains and horrors of war. In 1855, when the first batch of wounded men returned from the Crimean War, Queen Victoria invited a small group of veterans to Buckingham Palace. (link) The sight of these 'mutilated' men so affected her that she recorded that the speech of welcome she had prepared 'all stuck in my throat' and she had to excuse herself from it for fear of breaking down. Though such encounters were distressing, the Queen met as many of the wounded as possible and showed a personal interest in their recovery. On the morning of March 3rd 1855, both staff and patients must have been keen with excitement for Queen Victoria and the Royal Party were to visit the Hospital.  

The visitors arrived at Strood South Eastern Railway Station and were taken by carriage to the colonnaded front entrance of the Hospital, a scene which was perfectly captured by Sir John Tenniel’s splendid painting. The presence of the Royal Party must have been an awesome assembly for blue-coated convalescents who were housed in the old casemates of the Fort and not bed-bound like the other patients and now stood to attention and waited to be inspected by the Queen who was conducted around with Dr Dartnell, the Deputy Inspector General of Hospitals, on her right hand. 

In addition to Dr Dartnell, the Queen, who incidentally was 36 years old, was met by the Commandant and the Staff Surgeons. She was accompanied by Prince Albert and two sons, Edward, the Prince of Wales, who was 14 and Prince Alfred, who was 11. Dr Dartnell recorded details of the visit in ‘A few brief anecdotes connected with Her Majesty’s visits to the Hospitals at Chatham. 1855-56’ which forms a valuable and detailed source of information. 

When the Royal Party entered the Hospital, they visited the patients in the lower wards and the scene was recorded in an oil painting by the artist Jerry Barrett in which 21 figures were portrayed. In addition to Dr Dartnell, these included : a sombre Duke of Cambridge, Lord Hardinge, Former Governor General of India, who had been invalided out of Crimea; the Queen’s Lady-in-Waiting, Viscountess Charlotte Canning, the wife of the Prime Minister and active in nursing organizations; the Staff Surgeon, Henry Cooper Reade, shown explaining the nature of the injuries; and among the soldiers, the heroic Sergeant John Breese, ‘who left his arm among the Muscovites, but took from them a dozen lives to balance the account’ at the Battle of Inkerman and standing to attention on the far right of the painting. Victoria, incidentally, saw to it that Private Breese, on discharge from the Army, was appointed to the Yeoman of the Guard with a pension for life. (link)

1. Queen Victoria  2. Prince Albert  3. Edward, Prince of Wales  4. Prince Alfred  5.Duke of Cambridge  6. Major General Grey  7. Mrs Edew   8. Dr Dartnell   10. Col. Sir C.B.Phipps 11. Viscountess Canning  12. Lord Hardinge   13. Staff Surgeon Reade 14. Colonel  Edew  15. Sergeant  Breese  16. Sergeant  Leucy  17. Sergeant McCabe 

 

Each patient, for the purpose of the visit, had a card at the bottom of his bed on which was written his name, regiment, age, service, nature of wound and place of action where he was wounded, as seen on the blanket stamped with a chevron and ‘B.O.’ (Board of Ordnance) of the bed next to the Sergeant Leucy in conversation with Prince Alfred. 

In her progress around the Hospital, some cases, which had involved skilful surgery, particularly interested the Queen, like the case a young soldier called Barrett who had been struck in the face by a thirteen inch canister shot which had been removed a few days before by Staff Surgeon Paroy. Dr Dartnell, possibly thinking to steer the Queen’s conversation onto a lighter vein, suggested that they should visit the upper wards and, in particular, Private George Hayward, the Hospital’s longest staying patient.  

As the Royal party approached ‘Old George’ he propped himself up in bed and without waiting for an introduction said : “God Bless Your Majesty for deigning to come and see a poor old helpless creature like me who has been suffering for so many years with the asthmatics and the rheumatics and the pleuritics and the paralytics.  I well remember your Majesty’s father, the late Duke of Kent and I ken well the time that I often saw your Majesty yourself, when you were a wee thing of eight years old, running about the Kensington Gardens”.       

George must have been a little ‘creative’ on this last point, The Queen was eight years old in 1827 and according to Dr Dartnell, George had been a patient at the Hospital since before 1821 and a little later George himself admitted that he had been hospitalised in 1819, the year in which the Queen was born. But this is beside the point. George continued : “And this is Prince Albert and these are Your Majesty’s royal children, God Bless them and  may I make so bold to ask Your Majesty, which is His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales ? The eldest I suppose ? Well, God Bless him too and grant that he may be as good a man as everybody says his father is”. 

Here was one old soldier, not in the least overawed by royalty. On learning that George was ninety years old and had been in the Hospital for so many years, the Queen remarked : “Dear me, how wonderfully well he looks, even now” to which Dr Dartnell replied : “I hope Your Majesty will look upon the fact as proof of the care we take of Your Majesty’s soldiers in this establishment”.   

Before leaving his bed the Queen bowed ‘graciously’ to Old George, which must have added greatly to the old man’s enjoyment. However, when Victoria made the second of her three visits to Fort Pitt, she omitted to see George, a fact which Dr Dartnell records, was a ‘cause of great distress and vexation to him’. It is, perhaps, possible that, on hearing the reasons why George had become an army invalid in the first place, she may have deliberately avoided him and devoted herself to ‘worthier’ patients. The reader may remember that George was the young private who had cut the hamstrings in one leg in order to avoid going into battle in Wellington’s Peninsula War and, as punishment, the Duke had ordered the same to be done to his good leg and as a result he became an army invalid for the rest of his long life. 

On this first visit, as the royal party were leaving Prince Albert said : “May I ask Mr Dartnell. If the Hospital is always as clean and nice as it is today?” To which the Doctor replied that it wore “it’s real and everyday garb” which he was sure they would more appreciate. “And you were quite right” the Queen replied, before they drove away. Despite this, the Queen was not entirely satisfied with her visit and recorded in her journal for that day ‘many sad’ words and her concern about ‘cramped wards’ and ended : ‘I cannot say how interested I was, and how well I understood the ladies devoting themselves to the nursing of these brave fellows’. Later, she took things further when she wrote to Lord Panmure, Secretary for War, criticising the Hospital buildings at Fort Pitt, with their high windows, small wards and lack of a dining room ‘So that the poor men must have their dinners in the same room in which they sleep. Or in which they may be dying’. 

The Queen made her second visit to Fort Pitt three months later on June 19th. The weather was bright and fine and 200 patients were drawn up in a double line in front of one of the old defensive mounds, a ‘cavalier’ at the rear of the Fort and behind a thatch shelter, as captured by one of the attending photographers. The Queen remarked to Dr Dartnell on the beauty of the grounds, which he informed her had been laid out by the Purveyor, Mr Bult, some thirty years before. He also told the Queen that the men had unrestricted liberty and that “in fine weather you would see them sitting under the shade of the trees, reclining on the grassy slopes, reading, conversing, smoking and amusing themselves as they please”. 

As the Queen inspected the men, she moved up and down the ranks asking questions as she went. Dr Dartnell recorded : ‘The mounds and slopes were covered with spectators and the whole scene, the Royal Party, the staff and other officers in their uniforms, the maimed and weather beaten warriors in their blue hospital dresses with their wooden legs and crutches was particularly imposing and interesting’. 

On her June visit to Chatham the Queen had visited a new civilian prison before going to Fort Pitt and was heard to say : "It seems extraordinary that there can be no difficulty in obtaining money to erect a magnificent building for convicts and that it should be impossible to find a means of building a commonly comfortable barrack for our convalescent soldiers".

The Queen visited Fort Pitt for the third and last time on November 28th 1855. She saw the men in upper and lower wards and remarked on their ‘contented countenances’. She visited Chatham again in 1856, but by that time there were only five or six Crimean invalids left in the wards and she occupied herself at the Brompton Hospital, which she had also seen on the two previous occasions.  

What kind of impression did Victoria make on these visits? Certainly her obvious interest in the condition of the men and her ability to remember names and faces clearly impressed Dr Dartnell. In some cases she helped in a practical way by giving artificial limbs and spring crutches which were superior to those supplied by the Board of Ordnance.  

Her visits were immediately followed up by detailed reports from the medical staff on the health of the men she had seen and the distinguished photographer, Robert Howlett, was commissioned to take portraits of individuals or groups that had been of particular interest. One such portrait was of Private Clemence Brophy, of the 34th Foot, seated with his pipe in hand, against a wall at Fort Pitt. Born in Kilkenny, Ireland, he had joined the British Army, aged 21 in 1847. He lost his arm while fighting at Sevastopol on 31 August 1855 and as a consequence of his injuries, was discharged from military service on 29 May 1856.

 

Royal Photographer, Robert Howlett, photographed Private Jesse Lockhurst (seated)  and Private Thomas O'Brien, both holding Russian round shot which had been lodged in and surgically removed from their bodies in the Crimea. (link) Victoria recorded in her journal that she had held the two shots in her hands.

The wood engraving depicts the convalescents drawn up outside to meet the Queen.                  

Dr Dartnell ended his account of the Queen’s visits by writing that ‘the sympathy evinced by Her Majesty for the wounded and her repeated visits to them and their sick comrades in those hospitals made a lasting impression on the whole Army.’ One of the patients composed this poem in appreciation which was published in the local newspaper in the 1930s.    

The Crimean War Memorial in the Fort Pitt Military Cemetery, Grade II listed in 1991, surmounted by cannon, rifles, hammers and pick axes with a central inscription for the men buried there. 

In the years that followed the Crimean War the Hospital still treated patients with battle wounds, but also tropical diseases like yellow fever. The Cemetery Register revealed that, for example, laid to rest were Samuel Noble, Staff Sergeant, School of Musketry in 1870 age 30, Corporal Henry Keyton, Rifle Brigade in 1872, age 31 and Drummer Elkington who died at the age of 16. In total there were 68 burials between 1870 and 1874.  

Dr Dartnell’s son who, as a boy, lived in the Officer’s Quarters built in the grounds next to Hospital building and who himself became a doctor, told the antiquarian, Edwin Harris, that he and other boys : ‘Used in the afternoons to gather on the banks of the trench which looked towards Ordnance Place and the field immediately in front across which the military funerals went to the aforesaid burying ground. The afternoon funerals were many and frequent. If it was an officer’s with brass bands and all the military pomp which was usual, they were pleased. But if it was a private’s with drum and fife band, they were very disappointed’.    

The eastern defensive bank of the fort on which Dr Dartnell’s son and his friends stood to watch the military funerals progress along Boundary Road to the Military Cemetery.  

Not long after the end of that period in the 1850s when the Hospital handled a large number of casualties from the Crimean War and then in 1857, the Indian Mutiny, Fort Pitt would take on the role as the first home of the new Army Medical School, which I shall deal with in Chapter Five : 'Florence Nightingale and the Army Medical School’. 

John Cooper

Linked later or earlier chapters :                                                                                                 

Chapter One : Construction and function as a Napoleonic Fort

Chapter Two : The Army Hospital

Chapter Three : The Army Hospital and Medical Research  

Chapter Four : The Army Hospital in the Crimean War and Queen Victoria's three visits

Chapter Five : Florence Nightingale and the Army Medical School

Chapter Six : The New Hospital Wing and the First World War and the visit of the King and Queen

Chapter Seven : Conversion of the Fort into the Medway Technical High School for Girls

Chapter Eight : The School in the Second World War and the second half of the Twentieth Century

Chapter Nine : The Site of Fort Pitt in the 21st century.