Royal Victoria Hospital World War I at Home

100 years ago, this stretch of Southampton Water was

black with ships.

It was the First World War and they were carrying troops back

and forth from the Western Front.

Packed into hospital ships were thousands of wounded soldiers.

They were brought here to Netley,

a village on the south coast of Hampshire.

At the time it was the location for the largest military hospital

ever built. A vast Victorian edifice, sprawling along the shore.

For some it would be a place of peace and recuperation.

For others it became a prison, a place of shadows and nightmares.

In this programme I will be discovering previously unseen

letters, hospital records

and fragile photographs that offer a glimpse into the primitive

and sometimes brutal world of medicine during the First World War.

Our most famous war poet, Wilfred Owen, was a patient here.

What happened to him shaped some of his best work.

We'll find out how.

'And with the help of experts'

we'll investigate disturbing new

evidence that reveals what really happened here.

-This is a faked scene.

-Unbelievable.

The story of this hospital reveals the true

impact of the First World War and its horrors, re-enacted here,

on the shores of the south coast of England.

'My name is Philip Hoare. I grew up close by,

'and I still swim here every day.'

I learned about this place from my mother.

As a young girl, her father,

my grandfather, who'd served

in the First World War, used to take her on Saturday outings to Netley.

She remembered peering through the gates of this huge military

compound, seeing what looked like grown men being

wheeled about in prams.

In fact, they were the paralysed victims of the war,

still languishing here in the 1920s.

Later, as a reprobate teenager,

I trespassed in the grim buildings of the hospital's lunatic asylum.

What I saw told me that this place was anything but a playground.

In fact, it was one of the darkest sites you could imagine.

Its stories, mysteries and ghosts,

inspired me to write a book,

in which I sought to bring the building

and its history back to life.

Because the hospital has been demolished,

it's hard to imagine how huge this place was.

To do that you need a lot of imagination or a little help.

One quarter of a mile long, with 1,000 beds,

this imperial edifice was a tribute to Victorian ambition.

30 million bricks were used to build it.

It was the largest brick building of its age.

Behind the hospital a Red Cross extension housed another

2,500 beds.

There were officers' quarters,

a railway station, stables and gasworks.

It was a town in its own right.

And tucked away out of sight was D Block, the first

purpose-built military asylum.

When I first started to work on the history of the hospital there were

very few official records to document it.

But now, a remarkable collection has come to light.

A series of very rare postcards.

Many photographers worked at the hospital,

producing postcards which patients could send home to loved ones.

These sepia images reveal snapshots of life here.

Traction wards with rows of shattered limbs.

Doctors in their surgeries.

Operating theatres

and new therapies such as whirlpool baths for amputees.

These poignant photographs help tell the story of Netley's

hospital. One which spans 100 years of warfare.

The hospital was founded in 1856.

After Queen Victoria visited Fort Pitt in Chatham which is

where the Crimean War veterans were being treated.

The conditions were appalling so Her Majesty decreed a splendid

new hospital should be built for her brave soldiers.

But the building was mired in controversy from the very beginning.

The whole design of the place seemed to go against modern medical

architecture.

Those great long corridors separated the men in their wards

from the sunny seaside aspect of the place.

When they showed the plans to Florence Nightingale she was aghast.

She said, "You might as well take 1,100 men out on

"Salisbury Plain each year and shoot them, as put them in this building."

In fact, history would prove her correct.

Fast forward 150 years and the site is now a much-loved country park.

But the people who work here are still discovering Netley's past.

Richard Gough knows a few of Netley's secrets.

So what is this building then, Richard?

It used to be the powerhouse. And it used to run all the

electricity to the hospital.

We think it was run with steam engines.

-Very big steam engines.

-It's an amazing building.

What's this horrible looking contraption?

That's an iron lung.

These were used for people suffering from polio, weren't they?

Polio, lung damage. I wouldn't want to be in one, let's put it like that.

Looks like a metal coffin.

I though it looked like an aeroplane, but anyway.

PHILIP LAUGHS

But you must know the real secrets of the hospital,

-working here for quite a long time.

-Some of them.

Underneath us, there's supposed to be half a tank underneath our feet.

Under here?

-Yes, but whether it's there or not, I don't know.

-Oh, my God.

The hospital had its own dedicated pier built in 1856

by Eugenius Birch.

The man responsible for the piers at Brighton and Bournemouth.

Unfortunately, it was totally useless.

It didn't go out far enough to receive

the troops from the ambulance ships.

And so a dedicated railway line was built from Southampton

docks into the hospital itself.

The pier, by now, was a place of resort and refuge.

A place to recuperate.

You can see from these wonderful postcards, the veterans,

the wounded soldiers, taking the sun and the sea air.

Right by the pier and next to it is this tree.

In the image you can see it's about six foot high.

Now, it's a massive, fully grown pine tree.

A real marker of the passage of time of the years between then and now.

During the First World War the hospital railway station was

working at full pitch.

Sometimes three trains a day would arrive from the Western Front.

Bringing the casualties with the mud and blood of war still on them.

You can still see the train tracks embedded in the tarmac.

But just imagine how busy this place would have been

when a train arrived.

An alarm bell would go.

Everyone would stop work and run to come

and help bring the wounded off the trains.

A nurse working here wrote vividly about the patients

arriving at the station.

"Outside the bad cases were unloaded.

"The men. Men with chunks of steel in their lungs

"and bowels were vomiting great gobs of blood.

"A splendid boy of Black Watch was but a living trunk.

"Both his arms and legs had been shattered.

"Men without noses and brains throbbing through open scalps."

So I have a postcard here which shows the hospital with the

station at the back. You can see the train tracks running here so I

guess that's the line of the tracks there.

Which runs right into here.

Which must mean...

You can see, actually, there's the tower rising up through

the pediment of the hospital, the back of the chapel.

So the railway line and station actually run straight along there.

Extraordinary if you can imagine that suddenly coming back

out of the past and all those men, all those troops.

Amazing scene, really.

It was one of these ambulance trains that brought a young soldier

named James Roberts to Netley.

Six months earlier,

20-year-old Jim had graduated as an officer from Sandhurst.

He'd had a privileged Edwardian upbringing of horses and cricket.

Jim and his sister Hilda had grown up close to one another,

having lost their mother as children.

'Hilda's nephew, John Woolmer,

'only recently discovered his aunt Hilda's diary.'

This is the entry in 1916.

"Then Jim had another leave.

"He said he wanted to spend it in London

"and not waste time travelling to Westow. We spent it hectically.

"Theatres, meals out, anything to forget the horrors at the front.

"Jim knew a big battle was planned.

"And I think he knew he might not come back.

"When the time came and his leave was up,

"I was the only one he allowed to come to the station.

"But not even me onto the platform.

"Then the Battle of the Somme started."

And that's where she finished her diary.

She didn't write anything more although she lived for another

70 years.

Aged just 20, Jim found himself in charge of defending

an infamous area of ground called High Wood.

So many men had died here that the troops had nicknamed it,

"the rottenest place on the Western Front."

Jim wrote home to his sister,

"What an awful time we have just had.

"It started just as soon as the snow began to melt. Icy cold water poured

"down the trenches which came over the top of my waders. Then the

"Huns started blowing in our trenches which mixed with water

"had made thick mud.

"At 2:30am we were relieved and

"most of us had to leave our boots behind.

"How much longer the brigade staff

"expects the men to carry on like this,

"I do not know."

Hilda wrote back to Jim, but he was never to receive

the letter. On the 14th July, he was ordered to attack the Germans.

During the battle, Jim was shot in the back.

He was taken to a nearby clearing station,

bandaged up and rushed back to Netley.

The surgeons battled to save Jim's life, but he died six days later.

Tucked away in the quiet grounds of Netley Hospital is its cemetery.

It was here that Jim was buried.

His nephew is visiting the grave for the first time.

Lt James Thursby Roberts.

2nd Battalion, Queen's Guard.

Only son of Major Herbert Roberts of Westow.

It's very, very moving. I didn't know a great deal about my half-uncle

because my aunt was so shattered by his death she didn't

talk much about him.

But it's very moving to come here and to see this

and to realise what the end was for him and so many, many others.

The medics who treated Jim on the front line were

trained at Aldershot in Hampshire.

This footage, filmed 100 years ago,

shows the Royal Army Medical Corps drilling on the parade ground.

YELLING

Nowadays they do things differently.

4 Medical Regiment are part of today's Royal Army Medical Corps.

They still train here in Aldershot.

So what do they make of the 1914 footage?

Stretchers look the same.

-Are they the same? Are they, really?

-They've evolved slightly.

Ours are collapsible and

more lightweight material so we can take them on patrol with us.

You'd find casualties would be rolling around screaming, as well.

Whereas they're just sat quite nicely for them.

That's not going to happen.

It's harder when they're writhing about on the floor to treat them.

I guess the other key thing is they don't have a Chinook

-waiting for them.

-That's a horse and cart, isn't it?

Exactly.

From point of injury to a hospital with surgeons, doctors,

you're looking at maybe 30 minutes. Sometimes quicker than that.

30 minutes. During the First World War it could have taken two days

to reach Netley.

And by the middle of the war its wards were full-to-bursting.

Even the corridors were lined with beds.

The strict hospital regime varied only on one day of the week,

on Sunday, in the chapel.

You had to be almost on death's door

if you were to be excused Sunday worship in Netley's chapel.

It's a wonderful space,

the stained glass windows, the inscriptions, the pulpit.

You can imagine the men sitting in the balconies around us

or in the stalls listening to probably an interminable sermon.

In fact, behind the organ here we

found graffiti scratched in by bored soldiers

whiling away the time.

150 feet high, Netley's tower was once a vast water reservoir.

Nowadays it offers great vistas,

if you've got the energy to climb to the top.

It's an amazing view from up here.

The whole of Southampton Water spread before you.

The port and the refinery.

And the sense of this great waterway and then this amazing

hospital straddling the whole of this eastern side of the water.

As a kind of counterpoint to the industry going on around it.

Sometimes when the grass goes brown in the summer, it dies away and

you can see the foundations of the hospital coming up out of the site.

Almost like a ghostly nuclear shadow of the building it once was.

This sprawling site had

expanded in response to the exponential spread of the war.

As result of the desperate shortage of beds, the British Red Cross

had set up a wooden hutted camp at the rear of the building.

Unlike the main hospital, now 50 years old, the Red Cross

hospital was modern, comfortable and offered innovative treatments.

Some of these images really tell extraordinary stories.

You can see the faces of the men.

Rather haunted, probably by the experiences they've been through.

But here one gets the impression, compared to the main brick

hospital, of a happier place.

A place where there's a kind of community life.

But not all the images from this place were happy

and this is perhaps one of the most gruesome images, to my mind.

A series of sometimes double amputees perched on chairs

and stools, arranged like a fairground sideshow in a way.

And this image really speaks to the

true horror of the First World War.

Many of the soldiers in the Red Cross hospital were

cared for by VADs, short for Voluntary Aid Detachment,

or as the troops fondly called them, very adaptable dames

since they did almost every job.

Can I have a cup of tea and a glass of water

and a piece of bread pudding...?

'Judy Stokes was just a teenager

'when she joined the VADs in the Second World War.'

The first thing we had to do was go

through what we called the Chamber of Horrors.

These were photographs of all the worst patients to see

if you could take it.

Not every girl could. She probably had talents in another direction.

So we had to see whether you could take it without reaction.

These men were already damaged physically.

So you had to think of what was happening to them mentally.

When families came to visit and brought photographs of what

some of these men had looked like, heartbreaking.

Absolutely heartbreaking.

So we were not only nurses, we were also shoulders to cry on.

We were kids one day and women the next.

Sometimes all the nurses could do was to comfort the dying men.

I personally used to sit and hold their hands.

Just give the odd squeeze to let them know they weren't alone.

But some of them were so young, younger then we were.

I was thinking of my brother.

How I would like him to be treated.

And do the same for somebody else's brother.

In 1917, one of the injured soldiers arriving at Netley was Wilfred Owen,

destined to achieve immortality as Britain's most celebrated war poet.

Dr Jane Potter from Oxford has been studying his letters.

Wilfred had been hit by a shell on the front line.

Exhibiting signs of erratic behaviour,

he was sent to Netley, from where he wrote home to his mother, Susan.

"We are on Southampton Water, pleasantly placed but not

"so lovely a coast as Etretat.

"They kept me in bed all day yesterday but I got up for an hour

"and went out today.

"Only to be recaught and put back to

"bed for the inspection of a specialist."

It's tantalising for me, having grown up next to Netley, to

think of the greatest war poet wandering through.

How do you think it influenced his poetry, if at all?

Owen was so good at absorbing his surroundings.

And turning that into his letters and obviously into his poetry.

If we have a look at Mental Cases, he starts out with,

"Who are these?

"Why sit they here in twilight?

"Wherefore rock they.

"Purgatorial shadows.

"Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish.

"Baring teeth that leer like skulls' teeth wicked."

And he goes on in much more graphic detail

and that's his depiction of what he was seeing.

What he was seeing in his own dreams, as well.

So it was a combination of his own personal experience

and those around him.

Wilfred only spent a few days at Netley being

assessed for shell shock.

Others were not so lucky.

Hello, Professor, nice to meet you.

'Even now, we know very little about the treatment given to

'patients suffering from shell shock.

'But one piece of surviving footage offers precious clues.'

In the Pathe archives,

there's a remarkable film called War Neuroses, shot here at Netley.

The film was produced by Major Arthur Hurst

of the Royal Army Medical Corps, seen here on the right.

They show servicemen being treated for a variety of bizarre,

psychosomatic disorders.

But many in the Army suspected these victims of malingering or

even cowardice.

Alarmed at the number of mentally damaged soldiers arriving

at Netley, the government wanted Hurst to make a film proving

shell shock was treatable.

In effect, it was a propaganda exercise.

Professor Edgar Jones of King's College London has been

studying the footage.

One of Hurst's ideas was that shell shocked patients were

particularly suggestible.

So you could re-educate them using theatre,

using the hospital as a stage.

And it was his power as a doctor, laying on of hands that would

enable these men to get better.

We can see this scene here where he's got the man to remove

most of his clothes.

He's got just a loincloth.

One of the ideas behind that is it's more scientific,

so you can see the outline of his body against a plain screen.

But another idea is to make the man deliberately vulnerable

so he's more suggestible and more able to be re-educated in this

vulnerable state.

When Edgar examined the film in closer detail,

he discovered it was not quite what it seemed.

This scene apparently shows Sergeant Bissett in a state of invalidity.

He's bent double, walking with sticks.

And the inter-title says it's September, 1917.

In the next scene he's described as being almost cured two months later.

But if we look very carefully at the background,

we can see the same group of nurses,

the same column of smoke coming out of the chimney from the hut behind.

So Hurst has ordered him to recreate his illness to demonstrate

the effectiveness of his treatment.

This is a faked scene.

Unbelievable.

Many of these seemingly

"miracle cures" were only temporary and did not last.

What we think is happening is in 1918 he was able to promise servicemen

that if they got better, he could discharge them from the Army.

So it was in their interest to say their symptoms had gone away

because then they could get a much better paid job in a munitions

factory and they weren't haunted by the fear

that they would have to go back to the front line.

And possibly be killed.

That is absolutely extraordinary.

Clearly, soldiers suffering from shell shock got mixed

treatments at Netley, to say the least.

But those suffering complex

and misunderstood mental illnesses fared even worse.

Often referred to as "mental cases",

they were assessed in a separate unit, set discreetly

away from the main hospital, known by the sinister name of D Block.

D Block was a kind of clearing house,

where soldiers' fate would be decided.

Between going home, going

to a dreaded lunatic asylum or, even worse, being sent back to the front.

In charge was Captain Frederick Clindening, a colonial

officer with no psychiatric training and little sympathy for his charges.

'Author Dr Peter Barnham discovered some of his notes

'he made on patients.'

"He is dull, plaintive and stupid, speech thick."

Captain Clindening was, if you like, old army.

He was already in his 40s when the war started.

"He is intensely dull and stupid.

"His attitude and manner are not convincing. Much of this is put on."

That's classic Clindening.

Much of this is put on.

He had this sense that even stupidity is put on.

In 1914, a German prisoner of war named Otto Scholz arrived at Netley.

What happened to him is still wreathed in mystery.

'Indeed, we wouldn't know anything about Otto and his links with

'Clindening if it weren't for the man I'm meeting today.

'Lawyer Simon Daniels was

'so intrigued about the stories surrounding Otto's death that

'he's spent the past 20 years trying to uncover the truth.'

On the 6th of September, 1914, this incredible advance by the German

army which everybody thought was unstoppable,

and certainly the Germans did,

were finally halted at the Marne.

And very painfully pushed back.

Otto was at the very forefront there. His horse fell onto him.

It was not a serious wound.

But it was sufficient for him to get stuck there.

And the French were immediately upon him.

Is the next record of him being at Netley then?

The next record of him is

dying at Netley.

On the 16th December, 1916, two years after he was lightly injured,

Otto was buried here in Netley's cemetery.

His family were told he died from a stomach illness

but the truth was rather different.

His relatives had no idea that a radically different

cause of death had been recorded on Otto's death certificate.

Simon Daniels was able to track down a copy.

I was stunned to read that the cause of death was acute mania.

And that the complication was exhaustion.

Nobody in the history of the human race has ever actually

died from being insane.

And exhaustion in 1916 frequently referred to loss of blood.

And it was that which led me on to further research

when we discovered that experiments were carried out

here at Netley into blood transfusions.

So are you telling me Otto was a human guinea pig?

I'm suggesting the circumstantial evidence was that there were

guinea pigs here at Netley.

If Otto had died by acute mania you would not have expected

the cause of death to be certified by a surgeon.

But the name is Clindening.

That's very interesting because we've heard that name already.

Is that so?

For not being particularly sympathetic towards

the prisoners/patients.

That really has an extremely startling significance in that case.

Really?

Because we just don't have satisfactory

evidence about the conditions in which Otto was held.

It is bizarre that somebody who is apparently lightly wounded

when his horse was shot and fell on top of him would be

here in a military hospital for two and a quarter years and

then dies of acute mania.

There's no doubt Netley has some dark secrets. Ones which may

remain for ever hidden.

But we shouldn't forget that over 100,000 soldiers were treated

here during both world wars.

Most of them made a full recovery, due to the care and attention

they received here, almost in spite of the antiquated building.

After the Second World War the hospital fell into disuse.

And in 1966 the order was given to demolish the building.

Some people regretted the loss.

But nature began to heal the scars of warfare and the past.

And now only the lingering memory of this vast military hospital remains.