To the unsuspecting visitor approaching from the seaward side, it looked like any other large country estate. Next to the great iron gate topped with glass lanterns was a low porter’s lodge, but on the other side of the drive stood a sentry box, occupied by a uniformed soldier.
To that newcomer, the first intimation of the extraordinary building that lay ahead was the glimpse of Italianate towers over the parkland’s newly-planted firs. As he walked up the lane, the vastness of Netley’s Royal Victoria Military Hospital would suddenly be revealed. Rising over Southampton Water was a classical skyline, dominated by a central dome. From this sublime eye-catcher the visitor’s gaze ranged in disbelief, scanning an edifice so wide that he had to move his head to see it – no one glance could take it all in.
Flanking the grandiose verdigris dome in either direction were great arms of Welsh granite, Portland stone and Hampshire brick – indeed, the clay to make the bricks had been excavated from the site itself – each crowned with their own spires and turrets. At their ends, these elongated wings bent back on themselves – as if too long for their own site – to form galleried barracks at the rear; as one architectural historian was to note, ‘each would make reasonable major buildings in themselves’. In their deceptive embrace, the hospital was actually twice as big as it first appeared: it was as if it stretched into infinity.
Everything about the place was monumental. Its architecture aspired to eighteenth-century rationality, yet it spoke of nineteenth-century imperialism. Somehow the sense of proportion had been subtly overbalanced, as though designed by a team of architects whom no one had told when to stop, its creators having suffered a fit of megalomania. If there had been a soundtrack to that revealing first sight of the hospital, it might have been provided by Richard Wagner, then composing his equally grandiose Ring Cycle.
But the building was also the product of bureaucracy, dwarfing the mere human like some enormous town hall conceived by committee. From a dark interior of the War Office, orders had been issued to E. O. Mennie, Surveyor of the Royal Engineer Department, and his army of assistants in Pall Mall, an architectural sweatshop producing sheet after sheet of plans, measurements and specifications. This was a building under royal patronage, created by the richest and most powerful nation on earth, and nothing was to be spared in realising its imperial vision.
The exhaustive plans demanded ‘the best hard, sound, well-burnt and square stock bricks’, ‘the piers and arches to be of the best Portland stone’, ‘the whole of the ornaments, carvings and enrichments to be done in the very best style, with spirit, boldness and without blemish’. Nor was the interior neglected. In true Victorian tradition, every item was specified in a manifesto published for the contractors, E. Smith of Woolwich. Each fixture and fitting was defined: from ‘blue pointing mortar’ to ‘fresh air tubes’, from ‘Rufford and Finch’s baths’ to ‘Anglo-American stoves’, from ‘wine bins’ to early washing machines; every article of equipment, ironmongery and furnishing was listed ad infinitum. In an age of mass production, this was architecture by multiplication, as though the hospital had been built by a great Victorian machine. Its façade reached one quarter of a mile in length, pierced by row upon row of arched windows, more than two hundred of them, regimented along three cliff-like storeys. The detail was overwhelming, almost hypnotic in its rhythm.
The new hospital was a statement of imperial intent, an advertisement in brick and stone of the country’s international standing; it would make Netley a household name. A later report would note that ‘Passengers by Cape and American line steamers, and those who journey up and down Southampton Water, are familiar with the immense façade of the hospital, built in red brick and Portland stone, with pillared porticoes of granite, and towers and windows which in some way suggest stately Venetian palaces.’ Half-imaginary engravings of the building created before its completion depicted it as a kind of waterside Versailles, complete with parterres and decorative sheep cropping its neat turf, and gravel drives along which carriages could take the air, as if on some elegant gentleman’s estate.
Framed by its greensward and, set back from the sea, looking out magisterially over the empire it was built to serve, the hospital straddled its 200 acres with immutable solidity. A remarkable aerial photograph taken soon after its completion reveals the scale of a building that had to be measured in yards and furlongs rather than feet. The balloon-borne camera rose smoothly into space above Southampton Water, the only way to capture the extent of the hospital as it stretched along the shore, set on some vast pedestal for display to the passing yachts and oyster boats, troopships and liners. Like the Great Eastern, which moored alongside it in 1861, reflecting the new building in Brunel’s enormous million-pound creation – five times bigger than any other ship afloat, part-yacht, part-factory, part-hotel, with its stovepipe chimneys like his stovepipe hat – Netley’s hospital was a grand, if not arrogant display of technological progress.
For the Great Eastern’s passengers, as for the soldiers on troopships en route for foreign postings, Netley was a reminder of Britain’s greatness, a symbol of power and potential succour as they sailed down the water to extend or defend the Empire. But for those inside the building, the hospital held different prospects. For all its glittering window eyes, it remained faceless, impenetrable, keeping its own secrets. Yet viewed in perspective from the literal height of nineteenth-century technology, the entire undertaking appeared almost shimmering in its new brick and stone; a magnificent delusion, a Victorian vision for a miraculous age.
Having paused to take in the enormity of the view that confronted him, the awed visitor would walk along the hospital’s façade, counting the rows of arched windows as he went. Reaching the central portico, he would pass through the great double doors and into the building itself. Here, in a high-ceilinged and panelled hallway reminiscent of a railway hotel, he would be greeted, not by scurrying nurses and doctors in white coats, but by the bleached white bones of a full-size elephant.
This was the hospital’s Museum of Natural History, a room-sized cabinet of curiosities guarded by its ghostly and eyeless pachydermic porter. Ranged above the stone staircase was a cluster of spiky antelope horns and deer antlers – the kind of display you’d find gathering dust in any country house of the time, trophies of exotic shooting parties in the bush or the veldt. But crocodiles also crawled the walls, and a school of stuffed fish swam under the stairs, frozen mid-stream in the plaster. Other animal remains had been cemented in their death rictus, and on the shelves of one long vitrine, the length of a wall, stood tens of glass specimen jars, each containing the spiralled pickled corpse of a snake. It was hardly the kind of exhibition to calm the fears of a nervous hospital patient.
Yet this gloomy dissection of the natural world had an even more gothic counterpart in the hospital’s other collections. One was devoted to military surgery, and had been started in Dublin in 1846 by a retired army surgeon, Professor Tufnell, as ‘a museum of appliances for the transport and treatment of the wounded’. Brought to Netley to grace the new hospital, it displayed ‘native’ weapons next to surgical instruments, described in lugubrious nineteenth-century tones as ‘the implements by which man ingeniously shortens his neighbour’s life and the appliances by which he seeks to preserve his own’ – in other words, a visual lesson in the survival of the fittest. One item on show was a broken lance which had passed through the body of a lancer after his horse threw him. ‘The lance had to be sawn in two before it could be withdrawn’, it was noted, ‘but marvellous to relate, the man survived and was perfectly cured.’
In one corner stood an antler-like hatstand festooned with headgear from the battlefields of the Crimea, resplendent with red plumes and glossy cockades like stuffed birds of paradise. Meanwhile in another nearby case, neatly stacked on shelves like bowling balls waiting