More medical personnel were appointed, some twenty-five physicians and surgeons arrived and a registrar, Dr Phillips, was appointed as deputy to the colonel. Vincent Blachford, became Lieutenant- Colonel RAMC, his horse-drawn cab was replaced with a motor car and he occupied an official apartment in the administrative block. Most of the permanent staff found themselves now working for the armed service, 'volunteers' given suitable military rank. Just as the building was modified for military use, so its personnel were given new roles. Stanley Spencer, the painter who served as a medical orderly in 1915–1916, can be glimpsed in one of these photographs – a diminutive, slightly dishevelled figure in an ill-fitting tunic, surrounded by long avenues of beds, each separated by large, ungainly wooden lockers.
#Valley of war hospital windows#
Contemporary photographs show, however, that the hospital retained some of its pre-war character, and the wards are strewn with large potted plants and ornate furnishings, though little could disguise the hard deal tables, the flagstone floors and the high windows with their cast-iron glazing bars. Throughout the asylum, rooms were crudely adapted to act as operating theatres, radiography departments and pharmacy stations. Even the maximum restraint cells were requisitioned for temporary use. To cope with emergency admissions, corridors were refurbished to provide a further 180 bed spaces. Day rooms and night wards were converted into twenty-four medical and surgical wards. At War Office expense, three frantic months were spent converting the asylum to house up to 1,460 wounded soldiers. Īpart from 45 patients who were retained to work the farm, the service departments and the kitchen garden, its patients were evacuated, often with very little notice, to rural asylums in the south-west, some as far afield as Cornwall and Dorset. Pearson’s report also noted that it would now be known as 'Beaufort War Hospital, for the general medical and surgical treatment of sick and wounded soldiers', the name deriving from the patronage of the Duke of Beaufort who owned the land and extensive properties in the city of Bristol.
In his Annual Report for that year, Alderman George Pearson, chairman of the Asylum Committee of Visitors, recorded that the hospital had urgently been called into military use because the other Bristol hospitals could not cope with the increasing numbers of wounded being sent from the Western Front, and more recently from the Dardanelles. Like many hospitals across the country it had been requisitioned by the War Office, which had demanded some 15,000 beds to be supplied nationally for war wounded. First World War īy the time the first wounded soldiers arrived in late 1914, the asylum had undergone a major conversion. Between the ominous stone wings were a number of neatly planted interior courtyards whose orchard trees and tidy flower-beds were meticulously maintained by inmates of the asylum. Beyond the rather severe appearance of the building and its austere interiors, there are glimpses of the extensive grounds of the hospital, an estate that contained a pig-farm and allotments that provided most of the garden produce required by the asylum and, indeed, returned a good profit to the hospital economy. Ĭontemporary photographs of the wards show that they were self-contained units, with separate day and night rooms.
The same rough-hewn material had also been used for the construction of the orphanages that Stanley Spencer had passed with such trepidation in nearby Ashley Down. An expanding population required more accommodation, and numerous wings and extensions were added in the same locally quarried hard grey sandstone that had the uncomforting appearance of granite. By the start of the 20th century it housed some 951 long-term patients (419 male, 532 women) though this number continued to swell up to the eve of World War I. In the 1850s all of the patients of Fishponds House, an older asylum at the intersection of Manor Road and Fishponds Road, were moved to the Bristol Lunatic Asylum. Originally designed for 250 in-patients it had to be extended numerous times during the next thirty years. The building was by Henry Crisp, with subsequent additions by Crisp and George Oatley. Built next to the co-located Stapleton Hospital mental health facility, the Bristol Lunatic Asylum was the city’s response to the 1845 Mental Asylum Health Act, which laid upon local authorities the statutory duty to provide treatment facilities for in-patients.
0 kommentar(er)
