Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital. Philip Hoare

‘I am only too glad to think, if indeed it be the case, that my poor brave soldiers will be more comfortably lodged than I am myself’, while Prince Albert remarked that it was a source of ‘deep gratification’ to them to know that the sick and wounded would be treated near to their own home at Osborne. As a further indulgence, the Queen asked to be allowed to lay the foundation stone herself, ‘when we are in the Isle of Wight during the Whitsuntide holidays’.

      The project was hastened along, with contractors given just one month to tender and two years to complete the building. Matters seemed on course, but when the plans made it necessary to expand the proposed site to accommodate a military asylum, Thomas Chamberlayne proved reluctant to sell the extra land. He was probably holding out for a better price, but his hesitancy was also evidence of the continuing doubts about the site – not least among a local gentry suspicious of the hospital, and still more so of its proposed asylum. It was in the interest of such nineteenth-century nimbys to encourage rumours about the unhealthy gases, and they may have played on Victorian fears of ‘effluvia’ and pervasive miasma, a fearful memory of plague-ridden times; but in an industrialised country already polluting itself and its waterways, some of these fears were well founded, and for all Captain Laffan’s evidence to the contrary, their shadow hung over the wooden scaffolding going up on Netley’s shore.

      The fact that the bricks used to construct the hospital were made from clay dug for its foundations – the building growing organically from its terrain – seemed to invest its very fabric with the germs of the land, or its spiritual malaise. Just as the abbey’s stones were cursed, so the land appeared imbued with a dark gothic spirit about to be passed on to this new institution. Far from being removed from such concerns, the nineteenth-century’s response to these superstitions – the scientific assessment of the site’s suitability – was an echo of the ‘enormous importance’ the philosopher Montesquieu ‘attached to soil, climate and political institutions’. At Netley, the clash of rationality versus the romanticism of gothic decay was set to run over again, as if it were caught in a cycle that would continue for generations to come, ‘that great drama in a hundred acts reserved for Europe in the next two centuries, the most terrible, most dubious drama but perhaps also the one most rich in hope …’ as another philosophical exponent of blood and soil, Friedrich Nietzsche, would write.

      If the Hardy’s exploding gun at the hospital’s foundation had been an omen, it was one to which many critics were already attuned – not least in the wake of the disastrous losses in the Crimea. As the Queen’s letter to Panmure indicated, public opinion had been sensitised to the plight of its troops – largely by the very public campaign of one woman. Florence Nightingale was determined to learn by the war’s lessons and not let British hospitals replicate the hellish conditions of the Scutari Barracks. ‘I stand at the altar of the murdered men and while I live I shall fight their cause’, she pledged, and having visited Chatham, declared, ‘This is one more symptom of the system which, in the Crimea, put to death 16,000 men.’ Just as her inspiration underlay the building of Netley’s new hospital, so Nightingale’s animus – a weapon quite as mighty as the guns of Sebastopol – would now be directed against it.

      Tall, dark haired and rather more beautiful than some portraits suggest, Nightingale’s sharp, ascetic features betrayed an even sharper intelligence, driven by a sense of religious duty which gave her the moral right to challenge even the highest authority. As a sixteen-year-old girl, she had recorded, quite precisely, that on 7 February 1837, ‘God spoke and called me to His service.’ Part nun, part nurse, part reformer, her passionate zeal was both shared and sponsored by her friend Sydney Herbert, then Secretary of State at War, who had sent her to the Crimea as ‘Superintendent of the Female Nursing Establishment’. She returned as a national heroine, openly compared to Joan of Arc. ‘What a comfort it was to see her pass even’, wrote one wounded veteran. ‘We lay there by hundreds, but we could kiss her shadow as it fell, and lay our heads on the pillow again, content.’ The Lady with the Lamp became a cult, nightly revived in stage tableaux. The image of a saintly miracle worker was one with which she was not comfortable; nonetheless she would use it, adeptly, in order to pursue her campaign.