Philip Hoare - Spike Island - The Memory of a Military Hospital

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 ‘The lance had to be sawn in two before it could be withdrawn’, it was noted, ‘but marvellous to relate, the man survived and was perfectly cured.’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 for a game, was a collection of decapitated and mummified heads. These represented indigenous peoples from around the imperial world: the inhabitants of Java, New Zealand, Malay and Africa, arranged for anthropological identification and scientifically labelled – ‘Kaffir: Tambuki tribe’; ‘Kaffir: Amulosali tribe’; Hottentot and Maori. Like the animals in the entrance hall, they too were endangered species: Tasmanians killed off by the colonial process or the South Africa San ‘bushmen’ who would even a hundred years later still be regarded as suitable subjects to be hunted.

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.