The long spell of good weather lately has not been very conducive to research and writing indoors. I have made some progress, and have have begun revising the Suffolk page and did a bit of spring cleaning on the Aberdeenshire page. As always, any contributions of recent snaps, historic photos or drawings that could be added to the site would be very gratefully received.
Lots of public buildings have foundations stones; these stones were usually laid by a local dignitary, marking the commencement of work. Usually they are inscribed with the name of the person laying the stone, the date, and often the names of the architect and builder. Recently I was sent photographs of Letchworth Hospital, including the one above ofthe foundation stone for the new wing built in 1921. It was the first time I had ever come across a foundation stone laid by the local May Queen. It also seemed unusual that the May Queen in question was not identified. I thought that I would easily find details in the local newspapers on the British Newspaper Archive, but have so far failed to turn up anything on the new wing or the May Queen. With a bit more digging, I found that the website Herts Memories lists all the May Queens from 1906 to 1966. The May Queen for 1920 was Edith Fox, later Mrs Stark, and I assume she was still in post in January 1921 when the foundation stone ceremony took place, before she was succeeded by Mary Cook (later Mrs Pound).
Letchworth Hospital was established in a converted house at the beginning of the First world War. Plans had been drawn up before the war for a purpose-built hospital to designs by Barry Parker, of Barry Parker & Raymond Unwin based in Letchworth. Fundraising had been proceeding in 1913, but the amount raised fell far short of the £6,000 target by July 1914 when war was declared. War-time conditions made the need for a local hospital even greater, as beds in the London hospitals, where people from Letchworth had gone for surgery, were reserved for the military, and the nearest cottage hospital at Hitchin could not be relied on to have free beds for patients from Letchworth.
A number of Letchworth homeowners came forward to offer up temporary accommodation. The hospital committee accepted an offer from Mr and Mrs Cockerell to take Pixmore House on lease for one year. At that time, many people believed that the war would not last long, so a year’s lease seemed adequate. Letchworth Temporary Hospital opened in October 1914. By March 1917, having extended the lease, the hospital’s board of management decided it should drop ‘Temporary’ from the hospital’s name. After the War a new fundraising scheme was launched to build a ‘peace memorial wing’. This was the extension for which the May Queen laid the foundation stone on 9 January 1921. Work was completed by November 1922. As well as not naming the May Queen, the stone did not record the names of the architect or builder, so as yet I am stumped. The plans may well have been provided by Barry Parker, who continued his association with the hospital into the 1930s. He was also the architect of Royston Hospital, about 12 miles north-east of Letchworth, built in 1920-4 to replace the earlier cottage hospital there.
Over the last month or so I have been revising the Cumbria page. While doing some research to fill in gaps for one or two of the hospitals I was delighted to find that the cottage hospital at Cockermouth had been designed by one of the leading Arts & Crafts architects of the early twentieth century, Sir Guy Dawber. It was a relatively small commission.
Delight turned to dismay when I discovered that the building had been demolished relatively recently. It was damaged by the terrible floods that occurred in 2009, and a new hospital built further south. Part of the site has been redeveloped with retirement apartments (called Lancaster Court). The Guy Dawber hospital had been built in 1915, and by the late 1930s had 14 beds and two cots for children.
A highlight for me this month was a trip to Margate on the Kent coast. Apart from the delights of Dreamland, the Walpole Hotel, the Margate Bookshop and many other attractions, it was an opportunity to catch up on developments at the former Sea Bathing Hospital site.
The hospital closed in the 1990s when services transferred to Thanet District General. After a decade of standing empty planning permission was granted to convert the historic core into luxury apartments, and since then much of the former hospital has been adapted into housing.
New apartment blocks have been built in sympathy with the 1880s additions to the hospital, and some high-end town houses built facing the sea. For more on the history of the site there’s a separate post here: Margate’s Sea Bathing Hospital
Insch & District Cottage Hospital, photograph from the hospital’s Annual Report of 1922 reproduced courtesy of NHS Grampian Archive
As Remembrance Sunday approaches, I wanted to reflect on the work of the Red Cross in the First World War, on the auxiliary hospitals for war wounded that were set up in private houses, and on the founding of the cottage hospital at Insch, in Aberdeenshire, as one of the many hospitals built as a ‘lasting memorial to those who fell in the war’.
Sadly, today the Insch and District War Memorial Hospital stands empty, its future uncertain – despite strong support locally and an active Friends group.
The cottage hospital at Insch is one of four war memorial hospitals that I know of in Scotland. There is one other in Aberdeenshire, the Kincardine O’Neil Hospital at Torphins, which opened in 1925, and there was one established at Peebles and a fourth at Lamlash on the Isle of Arran. If you search the Imperial War Museum’s register 148 records appear for hospitals, though some are memorials within older hospitals. At Leith Hospital, Edinburgh, for example, a children’s ward was added as a memorial.
Funds to build a hospital at Insch were bequeathed by William Smith, advocate, of Aberdeen, after his death in 1917.[1] In February 1919 the question of memorialising the war was discussed by local parish councils. In the parish of Premnay, the erection of a cottage hospital at Insch was considered the most suitable memorial and a committee was appointed to make arrangements.
OS quarter-inch map of administrative areas published in 1940 CC-BY (NLS)
Hospitals must have seemed a particularly fitting memorial, having been one of the most tangible ways in which those at home encountered war, through the many war hospitals established in Britain. Large numbers of existing hospitals were either given over entirely or in part to treat war casualties, and these were supported by auxiliary hospitals run by a coalition of the Red Cross and the Order of St John. Most of these were in private houses and adapted halls and hotels.
Postcard of Drumrossie House, n.d. c.1910
There were two auxiliary hospitals in or near Insch, at Drumrossie House and Leith Hall. Drumrossie House had been a Red Cross auxiliary hospital with 20 beds.[2] It served as a VAD hospital from 1914 until half-way through 1919. The patients supported the proposed war memorial hospital, helping to raise funds, one of their fund-raising events took place in March 1919 when some of the wounded and convalescent soldiers put on a concert in the Public Hall. [3]
Leith Hall, at Kennethmont to the west of Insch, was opened for casualties and convalescent patients from October 1914 until May 1919. Henrietta Leith Hay received a medal after the war for her work in the hospital. (She presented Leith Hall to the National Trust after the Second World War, both her husband and her son had died in 1939.) The site for the hospital at Insch was granted to the hospital managers by her husband, Charles Edward Norman Leith Hay.
Details of the portraits of Henrietta Leith Hay and her husband that hang at Leith Hall.
Leith Hall and Drumrossie House were two of the eleven Red Cross auxiliary hospitals in Aberdeenshire, and of the 44 in the North East of Scotland. (For a list of the hospitals see the post on First World War Auxiliary Hospitals.) The local newspapers regularly published notes of thanks for gifts to these hospitals and of entertainments put on for the patients. Amongst the lists of people thanked for gifts to the patients at Leith Hall was a Mrs Helen Scatterty of Earlsfield, Insch, who donated three-and-a-half dozen eggs in June 1917. She may have been related to the first matron of Insch Hospital, Isabella Scatterty (b.1886). Isabella grew up on her father’s farm, Mains of Boddam, and trained at Stobhill Hospital, Glasgow and then the Royal Maternity and Women’s Hospital, also in Glasgow. Latterly she had been a sister at Bangour War Hospital in Edinburgh.
Plans for the Insch Memorial hospital were drawn up in 1920 by the Aberdeen architect, George Bennett Mitchell (1865-1941). Mitchell had been an assistant in the firm of Jenkins & Marr, and from 1887 was architect to the surveyors’ department of Davidson & Garden, advocates of Aberdeen. In the 1920s his son, George Angus Mitchell, was working with him, becoming a partner in 1929. [4] Confusingly the local doctor in Insch was another George Mitchell, he advised on the planning and became the hospital’s chief medical officer. The plans for the hospital were also vetted by the Scottish Board of Health. This was a condition of a grant from the Board in recognition of Insch hospital providing maternity beds under the County Council’s Maternity Services and Child Welfare schemes.[5]
The contractors for the building were as follows: mason, John Smith, of Kintore; carpentry, John Fraser, Insch; slater, George Glennie, Insch; plaster and cement work, George Robertson, Inverurie; painter, Alexander Duffus, Aberdeen and Insch; plumber, James Laing and Sons, Inverurie; electric lighting, John Souter, Insch; out-house buildings, John Morrison, carpenter and ironmonger, Insch.[6]
Many worked hard to ensure establishment and success of the hospital, including Colonel George Milne of Logie (1857-1939), who was the president of the Executive Committee of the hospital and chairman of the management committee. Milne and his wife, Florence (née Barclay) had been active in raising funds for hospitals during the war and Florence had served as County Director of the Aberdeen Red Cross. [7]. Charles W. Beattie (1872-1955), the committee secretary, was also an active supporter of the hospital, he later served as Provost of Insch and was honorary president of Insch Golf Club in 1928. In February 1939 he and the matron, Isabella Scatterty, were married – they were both in their 50s by then.[8]
The hospital was officially opened on 24 August 1922 by Sir Napier Burnett, a native of Fraserburgh who had become a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist. He had risen to prominence during the First World War in the administration of the emergency hospital services. In March 1920 he had been appointed director of hospital services to the Joint Council of the British Red Cross Society and the Order of St John. ‘In this capacity he visited probably most of the hospitals in Great Britain’ (quite a feat, even in peace time.)[9] On either side of the central entrance door are the granite tablets bearing the names of residents from Insch and Premnay parishes who had lost their lives in the war.
Within the entrance hall, facing the door, was an oak tablet with the names of 139 people who had died from the six parishes that contributed to the founding of the hospital. The tablet was gifted by Major Cleghorn of Drumrossie, and beneath a red cross was an inscription that read: : “Insch and District War Memorial Hospital. To the glory of God, in everlasting gratitude to all of this district who served in the Great War 1914-1918, and to the hallowed memory of those who died, this Hospital is erected”
The newly extended hospital photographed in 1933 from the Annual Report, reproduced courtesy of NHS Grampian Archives
Originally the hospital had just 12 beds, including three for maternity cases. The rest of the beds were allocated evenly for men and women in two three-bedded wards and two single rooms. There was an operating theatre, a sitting-room and bedroom for the matron, a bedroom for a nurse and for a maid, a kitchen, scullery and washroom. Lighting was by electricity, and the grounds were planted with trees and shrubs, and with flowers at the central entrance. [10] The plan is quite unusual for a cottage hospital, and particularly interesting because of the involvement of the Board of Health in vetting its design. It is unusual to have so many doors, presumably providing direct access to the small wards. (The original plans are in Aberdeen City Archives, but at the moment the archives are closed to the public while they move to a new home.) The doors have since been blocked, their upper parts turned into windows, but the hospital preserves a good sense of its former appearance, with original elements surviving such as the ventilation flues on the roof ridge and the timber brackets supporting the eaves.
By 1930 the hospital managers were discussing the need to increase the number of beds available, as the number of patients admitted each year was steadily rising. It was decided to add another wing to serve as a nurses’ home and allow the former staff accommodation to be reconfigured. [11] The matron’s and nurses’ bedrooms were turned into a new maternity ward with two beds and a private ward. The new wing added to the east of the main south block provided a nurses’ sitting room, seven bedrooms, linen-room, and lavatory. It continued the line of the existing hospital, and was designed to match the earlier building in style.[12]
Since 1948 the hospital has been part of the National Health Service. Additions from the 1970s include a day-room extending from the main entrance. It is perhaps more of a useful addition than a visual enhancement to the south front of the building. More attractive is the health centre of 1979, which is in scale with the original buildings. The jaunty mono-pitch roof on the north entrance range gives it character, and the shrubs and surrounding gardens soften its grey-rendered walls.
I recently had the pleasure of talking to Jackie Bird for the Love Scotland podcast, discussing the use of country houses during the First World War as auxiliary hospitals by the Red Cross. Two National Trust for Scotland properties had been used by the Scottish Red Cross: Leith Hall in Aberdeenshire and Pollok House, Glasgow.
Pollok House, photographed in 2008 by <p&p>photo, from flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
In the first weeks of the war, the authorities were swamped with offers of private houses and other buildings for use as hospitals. Plans to provide emergency hospitals in the event of a war had been made by the Royal Army Medical Corps as early as 1907, the idea then was that a number of territorial force hospitals would be established in converted buildings, mostly schools, colleges or workhouses. That programme was rolled out at the beginning of the war, but had to expand as the conflict intensified taking over more schools and poor-law buildings. The numbers of wounded arriving in Britain rose dramatically over the winter of 1914 to 15.
Fourth Scottish General Hospital, nurse with four American soldiers: Lieut. John Martin, Chaplain Thomas E. Swan, Captain H. I. B. Rice and Lieut. W. W. Gillen, 1918, from American National Red Cross photograph collection
At the outbreak of the war the British Red Cross joined forces with the Order of St John of Jerusalem to set up a Joint War Committee. The Red Cross had secured buildings and equipment and were able to set up temporary hospitals as soon as wounded men began to arrive from abroad. They were staffed by Voluntary Aid Detachments.
Oaklands Red Cross Hospital, Clevedon, Somerset, England, photograph taken following the signing of the Armistice on 11 November 1918 and made into a postcard
The auxiliary hospitals were attached to central military hospitals – receiving patients from those hospitals after they had been treated. The men needed time to rest and recuperate before returning to the Front. By sending them out to these country house hospitals, beds were freed up for more serious cases in the central hospitals, while the domestic surroundings and access to gardens, were ideal to aid recovery.
Leith Hall in Aberdeenshire is another of the country houses used by the Scottish Red Cross during the First World War. The gardens are in the care of the National Trust for Scotland.
In Scotland there were between 160 and 180 auxiliary hospitals and just over a hundred of those were houses. Most were similar in size to Pollok house, although a few were larger – such as Hopetoun House, Glamis and Thirlestane Castle. Of course it was not necessarily the whole house that was used as a hospital. At Pollok house two of the main reception rooms were used: the dining room and the music room.
Glamis Castle, photographed in 2008 by Rev Stan on Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
Other buildings used as auxiliary hospitals were mostly community halls, but there were also some schools, and in Glasgow the headquarters building of the North British Locomotive Company at Springburn was one of the larger Red Cross hospitals with 400 beds.
Hyde Park Ward, Springburn Red Cross Hospital, from Scottish Archives for Schools. (National Records of Scotland reference: BR/LIB(S) 5/63)
Below is a list of auxiliary hospitals in use in Scotland during the First World War. They are divided into the three Red Cross districts covering the West of Scotland, East of Scotland and Northern Scotland. The list is adapted from the list on the Red Cross website, with information added from Gordon Barclay’s report on the built heritage of the First World War in Scotland.
