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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. .png)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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)
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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.
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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..png)
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. 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.
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