This index of Victorian anthropology had come from the catacombs of Fort Pitt, Kent, where the director, Sir James McGrigor, had assembled no less than 458 skulls, 29 casts, 7 dried heads and 2 mummies. Expanded by an appeal, made in 1833, for new specimens of ‘Monstrosities’, ‘the bodies of foetuses at different ages’, ‘crania of various races of mankind’, and ‘snakes and lizards from the Colonies, preserved in spirits’, the collection had acquired a national reputation, visited by ‘distinguished surgeons and naturalists’. It had been transferred to Netley when the hospital opened, ‘rather a gruesome sight’, admitted a contemporary account, ‘but to the student of anthropology the facial characteristics of the different peoples are full of interest’. The ‘ghastly array’ was, ‘for those not accustomed to such display … not very agreeable’, agreed another Victorian guide, ‘but people come from far and wide to see it; from Germany, France, America, for it is one of the best collections of Asiatic and African skulls in the world’. Whatever its scientific merits, the ironies of this gothic ossuary in the entrance hall of their hospital were not lost on the inmates. They nicknamed it ‘Skull Alley’.
In a burgeoning scientific age, the new theories of evolution and natural history had spread even to the officers’ quarters at Netley. A gracious villa-like building with twin Italianate towers (a deliberate echo of Queen Victoria’s holiday home, Osborne, just across the Solent on the Isle of Wight), its well-appointed rooms fit for gentlemen were separated from the hospital by fir trees.
These had been planted not only for decoration, but for their medicinal qualities: the healthy scent of pine oil provided a barrier between their quarters and the miasma of the great building across the lawn.
In this refined white contrast to the hospital’s red-brick rigours, surgeons and doctors dined to a theatrical backdrop of aspidistras, palms and a huge decorative screen embellished, not with nineteenth-century ‘scraps’ of ladies in décolletage and blowsy roses, but with florid recreations of Victorian dinosaurs. Besporting themselves in an antediluvian jungle, these monsters were the cousins of those at Crystal Palace, where Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’s saucer-eyed ichthyosaurs and arched-neck plesiosaurs reared out of the primordial swamp in a London park. Hawkins had begun his dinosaur theme park in 1853, shortly before work started at Netley, and had invited Richard Owen – the inventor of the name and concept of the dinosaur – to dine with him in the cement carcass of an iguanadon under construction; Netley’s officer doctors would have to make do with eating in the shadow of prehistoric monsters.
As they sat at their mahogany dining table, these men of science doubtless discussed Mr Darwin’s theories, published in 1859 and exemplified by the living dinosaurs of the Galapagos, the lumbering swimming lizards which he called ‘imps of darkness’, just as he called himself the ‘Devil’s chaplain’. Only later would Netley bear witness to the more problematic offspring of evolutionary science: social Darwinism.
Victorian man was busy digging into his past to explain his present, the reason for his supremacy. If ‘Skull Alley’ and the expanding Empire provided living proof of one aspect of the theory, then dinosaurs were the prehistoric exemplars of another. Indeed, the two sensibilities combined in Alfred Waterhouse’s secular gothic cathedral of the Natural History Museum, built ten years after the hospital in 1873, complete with demonic terracotta pterodactyl gargoyles hanging by their leathery wings from a façade which, like Netley’s, appeared to emulate geological strata in its layers of brick and stone, yet which, like the Gothic Revival, also referred back to a medieval past.
That had been an age of unwavering faith. Now the search for an explanation of Man’s origins became a metaphor for the loss of faith, in an age in which science and religion battled for the hearts and souls of Victorian man. In that battle the hospital would become a resonant symbol. For a hundred years it would bear testimony to the rise and fall of the Empire; to reason and rationality subjected to forces of superstition and fear; to issues of class and sex; to experimentation and scientific advance – sometimes at the expense of human beings. This vast building would stand for a century of British history, but it too was a dinosaur, excavated from Hampshire clay; the monster on Netley’s shore.
When I was twelve years old, my family went on holiday to Scotland. It rained most of the time, and we took shelter in a series of guest houses and caravans. At Inverness we spent the night in a bed and breakfast seemingly constructed from a series of extensions joined together by skewed corridors and acrylic carpet. We younger children – myself and my two younger sisters, my brothers now too old for family holidays – were bedded down in a creaky room covered in white-painted woodchip wallpaper. I was excited: the next day we would be arriving at Loch Ness. We were already at the head of the huge body of water which, as I was at pains to tell my parents, was twice as deep as any of the water around Britain. I seemed to feel its nearness and its depth; and in that depth, the presence of its alien denizen, the reason for my excitement.
Ever since I could remember seeing pictures in the newspapers or hearing jokey items at the end of the news, I’d felt affronted by the cynics who rejected its existence, the so-called experts from the Natural History Museum who were trundled out every time there was a new sighting. Implacable in my belief, I knew what it was; a childhood spent with my head in dinosaur books told me as much. Their vivid reconstructions of prehistory were photographically real to me, and as scary as the pictures of deep-sea fish in my encyclopaedias which I could not touch – I had to turn the page with my fingertips, as if the lithographic image could, by a process of osmosis, drag me to unfathomable depths and into the nightmare jaws of the angler fish. My faith in the loch’s monster was a gesture of defiance against the sceptical adult world. At home in Southampton, living within the sound of the sea yet encircled by suburbia, I was always fascinated by monsters and ghosts; by the bottomless ocean and the endless forest; by derelict buildings and damaged beauty; by loss and memory – by the memory of things and places I’d never seen. Myths and legends seemed more real to me than the reality around me. I sought to glamorise my everyday life; to find something strange and perhaps even mystical beyond it – to populate those ruinous buildings with ghosts, and to fill the sea with monsters.
That night, as I slept in my Inverness bunk, I looked down, not into unknown depths, but on the shallow end of the loch, where the waters petered out into reedy marsh. The scene was sunlit, the reeds yellow-russet, the sky blue, the water clear and still. It was picture-postcard bright, not gloomy and grey like other images I’d seen of the place. And as I watched from my elevated position, looking down, as it were, as though filming the scene from a camera on a crane, a slow-moving greenish-brown form slipped up and out of the water beneath me; obscenely snakelike and sinewy, its massive, muscular bulk was not out of place in the natural landscape, but somehow part of it, or lord of it. It undulated through the shallows, its full serpentine length visible through the clear water, its indiscernible lower reaches stirring the silt below. It moved powerfully and swiftly on, its broad slow-worm head held high as it swam towards the open loch.
Then it was gone, and I woke up.
What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! … The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.
JOSEPH CONRAD
On a foggy autumn morning in Southampton’s eastern suburbs, you can hear ships’ horns cutting mournfully through the thick air like sonorous sheep lost in the mist. By night the clank-clank of the dredger takes over, as it gouges out a passageway from the sea bed. In the still air sound bounces off suburban walls, and behind curtain-darkened windows