Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital

Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital
Philip Hoare

This ebook contains a limited number of illustrations.The story of Netley in Southampton – its hospital, its people and the secret history of the 20th-century. Now with a new afterword uncovering astonishing evidence of Netley's links with Porton Down & experiments with LSD in the 1950s.It was the biggest hospital ever built. Stretching for a quarter of a mile along the banks of Southampton Water, the Royal Victoria Military Hospital at Netley was an expression of Victorian imperialism in a million red bricks, a sprawling behemoth so vast that when the Americans took it over in World War II, GIs drove their jeeps down its corridors. Born out of the bloody mess of the Crimean War, it would see the first women serving in the military, trained by Florence Nightingale; the first vaccine for typhoid; and the first purpos- built military asylum. Here Wilfred Owen would be brought along with countless other shell-shocked victims of World War I – captured on film, their tremulous ghosts still haunted the asylum a generation later. In Spike Island, Philip Hoare has written a biography of a building. In the process he deals with his own past, and his own relationship to its history.

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William Collins

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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

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Source ISBN: 9781841152943

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2014 ISBN: 9780007394586

Version: 2014-08-26

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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

Dedication (#ulink_deecd97f-f9b9-5f95-be1c-87e51b50fce4)

For Leonard, Andrew and Peter

Contents

Cover (#ud627c48a-1159-594c-925e-857de275f8d5)

Title Page (#u3da6b7f4-060f-5b5a-b379-78a5dea57f92)

Copyright (#ulink_a328845c-c755-511e-aad0-ba6ac8cf3dfd)

Map (#ulink_2f4815db-6909-54c2-9003-0939c52ee76f)

Dedication (#ulink_b8cbbada-34b7-591a-898b-2dbc2e8ca029)

PROLOGUE (#ulink_a4a44b0a-7b86-5544-bd7f-103a8c0e4532)

PART I

Spike Island (#ulink_783ba491-0e7c-5078-9089-07f94494cad9)

In a Lonely Place (#ulink_d7fd394b-c871-55d3-99ae-4ae07f0ac6c6)

Southern Gothick (#ulink_5a1d89ff-ff18-5b13-9249-1029a92cf48e)

PART II

Pray Stop All Work (#ulink_20be8984-0257-59ea-b8bb-994570d7e28c)

In the Very Best Style (#litres_trial_promo)

A Remarkable Improvement (#litres_trial_promo)

Enter His Gates with Thanksgiving (#litres_trial_promo)

Remembrance Day (#litres_trial_promo)