Postcards of military hospitals are common and the Archives contain a number from different places. Usually they show buildings, or groups of staff or patients. Many have no identification marks so it may be a matter of conjecture as to where they were taken; I have put more than one up for analysis with some success.
Most cards appear to have been bought as souvenires, and have never been written upon or posted. I have for the first time been able to identify the sender of a card from Sidcup which I bought recently on EBay.
The content of the message suggests that this was a family card. Our records conatin a Garrod F, listed as being in the Lincolnshire Regiment. Checking with the medal rool reveals that he was indeed Frank Garrod, although there listed with another regiment. He was in the hospital for continuing surgery at the time the card was sent, so everything fits, and here he is two years previously, as photographed for the notes.
Added 23rd August 2010
It is always nice to make a discovery, but when this is a rediscovery within one's own collection it poses questions about organisation, cataloguing and all sorts! Harold Gillies' second textbook, "Principles and Art" was illustrated with a number of colour plates, prepared at considerable expense using the three colour process devised by Percy Hennell, who also took pictures at East Grinstead and Mount Vernon hospitals during WW2. We recovered a number of the original prints from the Rooksdown notes, but about 6 years ago they disappered during a re-filing exercise. I am delighted to report that they have resurfaced; during his research in the archives, Prof Murray Meikle, now of Singapore but late of Guy's and St Thomas's, unearthed them. I will construct a gallery of them once scanned.
Added 21st December 2009
One of the Sidcup staff, named Stuart, bought a small book by David Grayson entitled "Adventures in Contentment" in 1920. As a bookmark he or she used a copy of the bed state of the hospital, dated 24th June, which was found by Mr RJC Eburne after he bought the book in a secondhand shop; he kindly donated the find to us.
Even so long after the war had ended it is clear the hospital was busy, as an inspection of the number of empty beds makes clear.
Added 19th April 2009
Queen Mary's Sidcup NHS Trust featured in a BBC series on surgery. The hospital, a worldwide pioneer in plastic surgery, was set up in 1914 to care for world war one servicemen with facial injuries. It featured in episode 4 of 'Blood and guts: A history of surgery' which aired on BBC4 on 10 September, presented by Michael Mosley.
. Michael Mosley with the wax model from the Queen Mary's Archives
Other stories featured in the programme include the gruesome tale of American socialite and beauty, Gladys Deacon, who aged 22 had hot wax injected into her face to perfect her nose. It melted and destroyed her looks and she ended up in a psychiatric hospital where she died at 96.
The programme also looked at present day plastic surgery, which is on the cusp of one its greatest achievements of all time - the first full face transplant. Top surgeon Peter Butler discussed what it would feel like to live with someone else's face.
These photos courtesy of the BBC; permission from: pictures@bbc.co.uk
Added October 24th 2008This exhibition at the National Army Museum is the first public showing of material from the Gillies Archives, and illustrated graphically the effects of bullets, shells and fire on the human face. Casenotes, photographs and plaster casts were complemented by the evocative textile work made by Paddy Hartley of Project Facade
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These two images, recently acquired by the archive, are of the hands of two of the most famous surgeons of the 20th century, Harold Gillies and Archibald McIndoe. The photographs were taken by Percy Hennell who, in WW2, worked with all the major UK units having developed a colour photography process that produced fadeless prints.
Percy Hennell produced the colour prints that were used in Gillies & Millard "Principles and Art of Plastic Surgery. Related to the silversmiths, Hennells of Bond Street, he was a renowned photographer who became head od design for the Metal Box Company. His photograph of two choirboys (one his son Garvin) adorned tins of Sharp's toffees. He collaborated with Andre Simon on his series of books for wine conoisseurs and became one himself.
(L) Hennell in theatre with his three lens camera (courtesy, BAPRAS archive) and (R) his obituary in "The Times", 1971
Gillies presented Hennell with one of his own oil paintings and the archive is pleased to have acquired this recently.
Garvin Hennell and his wife Diana with a painting by Sir Harold Gillies, presented by him to Percy Hennell
added 24th July 2008
During the course of conservation of the Tonks pastels in the Royal College of Surgeons a new image has been found on the revese of that of Gunner Dyson (see the pastels gallery). This appears to be of a New Zealander, Pte Guthrie of the 1st Canterbury regiment; the photograph from the notes is very similar, and Tonks made a drawing of the surgery. Maybe there are more hidden gems to come.
Norman Eric Wallace was a Canadian artillery officer attached to the RFC who was badly burned in an aircraft fire. Quite by chance we have discovered what happened to him after the war and it is a story we did not expect, both tragic and heroic. I will post a digest shortly.
Many WW1 hospitals arranged for their patients to have photographs, either of where they were or indeed of themselves and their colleagues. We have been collecting many of these images and are pleased to add a hospital postcard web gallery of them here. It includes cards of a number of hospital ships. We are always on the lookout for more! If you should come across any such images we are keen to expand the collection - a scanned image would be quite sufficient but feel free to email with information.
The images are of varying sizes and quality. Many are scanned from the archive's own collection while others have been garnered from the web - mainly, it has to be said, images of cards that the Curator has tried, but failed to buy! The gallery is large so you will may to be patient when downloading full-sized images.
A useful list of UK hospitals, and their functions can be found on the Long Long Trail site via this direct link
The picture below is of some of the nurses at Addington Palace hospital, near Croydon, which was used for the treatment of typhoid. The names of the nurses have been added to the mount in fountain pen - an unusual find.
L to R: Warburton, Wring, Jenkins (behind), Davison, Pons, Trips, Trevithick, Townsend, Pourlesland and Woodward
We have made two other important acquisitions. The first is a commemorative tankard presented to Sir Harold Gillies by the British Association of Plastic Surgeons in 1953. The BAPS minutes record that the Association paid £45 for it, and that Gillies did not want it! I am grateful to Brian Morgan for this information.
Made in 1729 by Richard Bailey, the 2 pint tankard was bought in an Oxford auction room by Dr Duncan Thomas, who offered it to the archive. The tankard is illustrated below.
The second is a remarkable collection of images sent to us through the kind offices of Geoffrey Miller from Gill Martin, daughter of Captain Rhind, who was attached to the New Zealand Section at the Queen's Hospital. His notes and photographs were handed down to Gill, who copied them all, and we now have a full digital set. It is of interest to note that several of our incomplete sets of notes can have their gaps filled in by this new collection.
Many soldiers collected cigarette cards - indeed, the Australian War Memorial has a large number of complete sets in its archives. One set produced by Carreras and included with "Black Cat" cigarettes was "Types of London", which appeared in 1919. One of the set depicts a VAD and one a wounded soldier, shown below.
Harold Gillies himself featured on a card - one of a series produced in 1930 of famous golfers, including many Ryder Cup players. There cannot be many surgeons with that distinction!
My attention has been drawn to a fascinating website of nursing postcards constructed by Michael Zwerdling and based on a comprehensive study now published as a book ("Postcards of Nursing": Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins 2004) . Two images of WW1 vintage are reproduced below by kind permission.
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Hand-drawn card c.1916 |
Italian card, 1916 |
A selection of images about which more information would be helpful and some of the images which have appeared in "Picture of the Week".
The Queen's Hospital/Queen Mary's postcard collection
This link allows access to the postcards produced for, or by the hospital between 1917 and 1940. The numbers refer to the different sets, which have varying borders and caption fonts. A prefix "qh" denotes a card prior to 1929; "qm" is for cards after the renaming of the hospital when it was taken over by the London County Council.
The Gillies Archives' first major aquisition of notes from the New Zealand Section at the Queen's Hospital included a collection of watercolour paintings, 84 in number, with a few "before" and "after" pairs.
The paintings were made by a number of artists of whom Daryl Lindsay is the best known and the most proficient. They are largely on Whatman board, quarto size, and some have been pinned up for display and have suffered some colour changes, in particular yellowing and loss of the blue tones. The image pages here have been edited with Paint Shop Pro v7 and the colour balance adjusted.
These images are not for the squeamish!
We have recently learned that, in addition to the 15 additional watercolours recently aquired from the Macalister family, another 16 have surfaced in New Zealand and are now in the possession of the Hocken Library, Dunedin. Among these may be the four shown below, which make up the frontispiece of the textbook by H.P. Pickerill, head of the New Zealand Section. In addition it appears that a large collection of Pickerill's papers include a substantial number of WW1 records; we await further details, but it would appear that the case files were "filletted" for Pickerill's book and that the Library collection comprise those parts that are missing from the Macalister notes.
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Frontispiece of Pickerill's text on facial surgery, produced on the basis of his M.S. thesis to the University of Birmingham |
New discoveries...
It's curious how long things can remain concealed from even the most vigorous researcher! The Imperial War Museum possesses, it turns out, several paintings of the Queen's Hospital, by J Hodgson Lobley and Walter Spradbery DCM. Two are reproduced, with permission, below. They show the Occupational Therapy side of life at the hospital; men required things to do to fill the long days and weeks between operations, and were also trained for life outside. Toys made at Sidcup were advertised by the London "Evening Standard" and were judged to be of very fine quality. I have yet to see a Sidcup toy!
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Hodgson Lobley: The Toymakers' shop. IWM 3756 |
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Hodgson Lobley: The Carpenters' shop. IWM 3728 |
Tunbridge Wells and the Kent VAD
We possess a photograph album composed by an inmate of Kingswood Park Hospital, Tunbridge Wells and inscribed "To Nurse Turner, With the Season's best Wishes, and in gratefull remembrance, from Pte J.S McBride (24th Canadians)".
The album is online; use the link above.
The compiler lived only 6 months. John Santo McBride, from Calgary, died on Saturday 3rd June 1916, aged 24 and is buried in Dickebusch New Cemetery near Ypres.