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

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

77–85 Fulham Palace Road

London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2001

Copyright © Philip Hoare 2001 and 2002

The right of Philip Hoare to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

HarperCollins Publishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9781841152943

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2014 ISBN: 9780007394586

Version: 2014-08-26

Philip Hoare was born in Southampton and brought up next to Netley’s military hospital. He is the author of Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant (1990); Noel Coward: A Biography (1995); and Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy & the First World War (1997). His film on Hampshire for BBC2’s Travels with Pevsner was broadcast in 1998, and in 1999 he co-curated the Icons of Pop exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. He lives in London.

‘A book that has everything a passionate reader could want – a subject that far transcends the trivial pursuits of contemporary writing, concerns both public and private, astonishing details, stylistic precision, a unique sense of time and place, and a great depth of vision.’

W. G. Sebald, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year

‘A brilliantly evocative memoir of childhood in a landscape, and a sensitive, absorbing account of the Royal Victoria Hospital as a locus of the grandeur and misery of Britain’s apogee as an imperial and global power … Spike Island is [an] intensely personal, compelling work.’

Paul Smith, Times Literary Supplement

‘Punctuated with grief and loss, cross-cut with flashbacks to the author’s suburban boyhood, this biography of a hospital is gruesome, startling, grainily authentic, as if Hoare were inching his way through history’s dark wood with a hand-held camera, reporting what he sees in close-miked voiceover. Spike Island comes as near as it is possible to get to a scholarly equivalent of The Blair Witch Project .’

Hilary Spurling, Daily Telegraph

‘No one could describe the scenes of this hospital in a more evocative fashion than Philip Hoare. His history of Netley is alternately poignant and brutal.’

Joanna Bourke, Independent

‘A heterogeneous mix of familial reminiscence and conjecture, aesthete’s Bildungsroman, countless fragments of lives, countless fragments of anecdote, meditations on the nature of romanticism and of the Gothic.’

Jonathan Meades, Evening Standard

‘Hoare’s … insights … achieve a similar suggestiveness – a sense of lost worlds dragged back into view – to that of W. G. Sebald’s spooky crisscrossing of Suffolk in The Rings of Saturn … [He makes] you want to go straight down to Southampton.’

Andy Beckett, Guardian

For Leonard, Andrew and Peter

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Copyright Copyright Map Dedication PROLOGUE PART I Spike Island In a Lonely Place Southern Gothick PART II Pray Stop All Work In the Very Best Style A Remarkable Improvement Enter His Gates with Thanksgiving Remembrance Day D Block Towards a Better Britain PART III His Dark Estate The World is Infinitely Forgiving EPILOGUE AFTERWORD Keep Reading Source Notes Index Footnotes Acknowledgements About the Publisher William Collins An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road London W6 8JB www.harpercollins.co.uk First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2001 Copyright © Philip Hoare 2001 and 2002 The right of Philip Hoare to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. HarperCollins Publishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication. Source ISBN: 9781841152943 Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2014 ISBN: 9780007394586 Version: 2014-08-26

Map Map Map Dedication PROLOGUE PART I Spike Island In a Lonely Place Southern Gothick PART II Pray Stop All Work In the Very Best Style A Remarkable Improvement Enter His Gates with Thanksgiving Remembrance Day D Block Towards a Better Britain PART III His Dark Estate The World is Infinitely Forgiving EPILOGUE AFTERWORD Keep Reading Source Notes Index Footnotes Acknowledgements About the Publisher