A society which appeared to treat its convicts better than its soldiers was a source of concern for Victoria. On 5 March 1855 Lord Panmure, her Secretary of State for War, received a letter bearing the royal crest:
The Queen is very anxious to bring before Lord Panmure the subjects which she mentioned to him the other night, viz. that of providing a hospital for our sick and wounded soldiers. This is absolutely necessary and now is the moment to have them built, for no doubt there would be no difficulty in obtaining the money requisite for this purpose from the strong feeling existing in the public mind for improvements of all kinds connected with the Army and the well-being and comfort of the soldiers.
Nothing can exceed the attention paid to the poor men in the Barracks at Chatham, and they are in that respect very comfortable: but the buildings are bad, the wards more like prisons than hospitals, with the windows so high that no one can look out of them, and the generality of the wards are small rooms, with hardly space for you to walk between the beds; there is no dining room or hall, so that the poor men must have their dinners in the same room in which they sleep, and in which some may be dying, and at any rate suffering, while others are eating their meals.
The proposition of having hulks prepared for their reception will do very well at first, but it would not, the Queen thinks, do for any length of time. A hulk is a very gloomy place, and these poor men require their spirits to be cheered as much as their physical suffering to be attended to …
The Queen’s critique had the influence of her Consort, and that of the pioneering efforts of Florence Nightingale, behind it. Panmure’s equally weighted reply agreed ‘the necessity of one or more general hospitals for the Army’, and proposed ‘an immediate survey to be made for a proper site or sites, which shall combine all considerations for the health of the patients and the facility of access to invalids’. Panmure thought ‘it would be for the advantage of the public service’ if the hospital were built ‘within a moderate distance of either of the great ports of Portsmouth or of Plymouth’. The next man in the chain of responsibility, the Director-General of the Army Medical Department, Dr Andrew Smith, agreed with the minister that the new establishment should be ‘on the coast, or on some large inlet of the sea, so that invalids from abroad could be landed immediately, and marched into their Barracks, and the sick, without injury, be placed in Hospital’. And so the search began.
With the Crimean War already drawing to a close, the new hospital would come too late to help most of its victims. Yet there was still a sense of urgency to find a site (more especially with the impetus of the Queen’s wishes behind the project), and just as the Bishop of Winchester had commissioned the Cistercian abbots to investigate a location for Netley’s abbey 600 years before, so Dr Andrew Smith now charged the Deputy Inspector-General of Fortifications, Captain R. M. Laffan, to find a suitable place on the south coast.
Captain Laffan reported back on potential locations near the naval hospital of Haslar, Gosport and on the Roman remains of Porchester Castle – both on Portsmouth Harbour – along with possibilities at Herstmonceux in Sussex and Appuldurcombe on the Isle of Wight, but none of these proved practicable. Then the Queen’s Physician, Sir James Clark, suggested a spot on Southampton Water which he had presumably passed on his journeys to Osborne. Clark informed Captain Laffan of its ‘numerous advantages, as a site for a great Military Hospital, presented by the sloping ground on the eastern side of Southampton Water, a little below Netley Abbey; that the ground there seemed to be gravelly, and to slope upwards from the water, while there was a high ridge behind it, which sheltered it from the cold northern and eastern winds’. ‘Sir James handed me a strip cut from the Ordnance Survey of Hampshire, upon which he had marked the place he wished Dr Mapleton [Laffan’s colleague] and myself more particularly to examine …’
Yet questions were already being raised about the salubriousness of the proposed site, prompted by reports of ‘exhalations’ of gases in the area. During the Napoleonic Wars, soldiers stationed on the commons of Netley and Sholing had suffered outbreaks of cholera, and it was feared that there was something unpropitious about this desultory peninsula; that the afflictions of Scutari might manifest themselves on Hampshire’s shore. Southampton had been trumpeted in the eighteenth century as a healthy watering hole; Netley was now seen as quite the opposite, and the British Medical Journal went so far as to call the place a swamp whose tidal mud would make the site ‘a pestiferous marsh for twelve hours out of twenty-four’. Any hospital built there could not only subject its patients to cholera, but possibly even malaria.
A subsequent report detailed the problems: ‘Three miles above the site of the Hospital the sewage of the town of Southampton flows into the estuary. Its population in 1851 was 34,000 and it is rapidly increasing.’ The location was ‘of a soft and relaxing climate and opposite a large mud bank. No site on the banks of a tidal estuary with soft mud banks, large quantities of rotting matter giving off gases and offensive smells during warm weather and having the discharge of sewage from a large town, should be entertained.’ Far from benefiting from the sea breezes and healthy ozone, this shoreline was now seen as inimical to health, polluted by a modern town, with a belt of brackish mud, exposed at low tide, believed to emit noxious gases. It was hardly a site for a hospital, still less one intended to serve an empire and its wars.
The intrepid Captain Laffan, who had seen service in South Africa and Mauritius, set off to investigate, with Dr Mapleton in tow. They discovered a small brig, Partridge, permanently moored and embedded in the mud off Netley’s shore. This Dickensian vessel functioned as a home for members of the Preventative Service – coast guards – and their wives and families. At low water, Partridge was ‘entirely surrounded by the wide expanse of mud’, noted Laffan, ‘and we thought, therefore, that the men and women and children living on board would be good witnesses to examine as to the healthiness of the place, and as to any inconvenience which might arise from the vicinity of the land’. Interviewed, the brig-dwellers were found to be
unanimous in declaring that their dwelling was healthy; that at all times, at low water, a slight smell might be perceived from the mud, but that it was not at all offensive, or injurious to health. Their statements were borne out by their appearance; all looked healthy, particularly the children.
From this happy scene of naval mudlarks, the pair drew positive conclusions about the site, noting clear drinking water from wells and freshwater percolating through gravel resting ‘on beds of brick earth’. Laffan and Mapleton also recorded ‘the concurrent testimony of all the people living near the spot [who] declared the neighbourhood to be eminently healthy’, and visited the local churchyard, where they noted the advanced ages on the tombstones. Finally, having engaged in wayside conversation a sprightly pair of eighty-year-old furze-cutters harvesting the area’s characteristic wild crop of gorse, they were convinced. Captain Laffan triumphantly reported back to his superiors that they had found nothing at Netley to deter the building of the hospital (although ironically, when another report was ordered on the site, Laffan was unavailable for further research as he had fallen ill).
On 21 August 1855, negotiations began with the landowner, Thomas Chamberlayne, William’s son, to purchase ‘109 acres, 1 rood and 32 perches of land’, for which £15,000 was authorised in payment; the deal, for five fields, was concluded under the new Defence Act in January 1856. Meanwhile, the building plans were being hurriedly drawn up by Mennie’s office – possibly to designs by the great Sir Charles Barry, the architect, with Pugin, of the new Palace of Westminster.* The Queen, prompted by her architecturally-aware husband, reminded Panmure that she was ‘very anxious’ to see the results, and so a delicate watercolour of the plans was made, each room carefully labelled with its function, and the proposed site embellished with decorative parterres.
This four foot long parchment was signed by the relevant parties and laid before Her Majesty, who was ‘graciously