The Savoy Hospital from an eighteenth-century engraving (Wellcome Library, London)
In 1642 Parliament established the first dedicated military hospital in London at the site of the medieval Savoy Palace, at what is now the north end of Waterloo Bridge. Although almost nothing of the building remains the hospital's financial records, held in the National Archives, provide a vivid picture of those who worked and were treated there.
Begun at the end of the 13th century by Peter of Savoy, the uncle of King Henry III's wife, Queen Eleanor, the palace of the Savoy was left semi-derelict for much of the later middle-ages after it was plundered and burned in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. In 1505, Henry VII ordered the palace to be rebuilt as a hospital, providing a night's lodging for up to 100 “pour and nedie” men. The hospital continued to function in its charitable capacity for more than 130 years, until the autumn of 1642 when parliament urgently required beds to accommodate the wounded of the Battle of Edgehill and the fighting at Brentford. On 14 November 1642 parliament established 'The Committee for Sick and Maimed Soldiers', with the power to reorganise the Savoy as a military hospital. The poor and needy that relied on its charity were required to leave - anyone refusing was threatened with arrest for vagrancy. It is probable that those who occupied the Savoy at this time were predominantly homeless men and alcoholics: the area around the Savoy had a reputation for being the haunt of 'loiterers, rogues, idle and drunken persons, vagabonds and strumpets'.
The Hospital Buildings
The main building in which the wounded were to be nursed was the “dorter” or dormitory, a church-like structure some 200 feet in length and 30 feet wide. At the hospital's founding in the Tudor period this had been designed as a single, oblong dormitory with three chapels off its east end. By the end of 1643 the building housed four designated wards: Long Ward sited in original dormitory, Chapel Ward at the east end, and Reading and Newbury wards (named after parliamentarian victories) forming the north and south wings. The interiors were well lit, from the great windows that stood at the far end of each of the old chapels, and from above by an octagonal roof lantern at the centre of the cruciform. Wards were subdivided between nurses, each of whom were responsible for a particular line of beds: there are references to “nurse Jackson['s] side”, “nurse Sharmans side”, and so forth. The total number of available beds was about 150, although this could be expanded. The House of Commons Journal for 10 January 1644 records 200 patients. Average occupancy is thought to have been 92, and it is possible that a number of beds were deliberately kept vacant for use in an emergency. Any over-spill of casualties could be accommodated at London's established hospitals, St Thomas's and St Batholomew's, as well as at Charterhouse school.
Details gleaned from the hospital's surviving accounts reveal much about the workings of the hospital, adding to what we know of its structure from illustrations and plans. For instance, there must have been a range of domestic buildings to use and store the numerous kettles and iron pots which were purchased, and trenchers from which the men ate. Newbury Ward, at least, was furnished with cupboards, shelves and a water tub, and perhaps other wards were the same. We know that a large hall existed, separate to the dormitory, where the more able-bodied would have gathered for prayer, and for which a brass-bound Bible was specially bought. There are references to a wash house, a clerk's office, and a kennel that was home (inexplicably) to a pet fox. Even the colours and textures encountered in the hospital can be discerned from the archives. As Gregory Robinson points out in a 1966 article on London's Civil War hospitals, references to black and brown thread for mending sheets imply that the bed linen was not fine-quality white but an unbleached grey. Bed sheets were “Royal ruld” - ruled with a dark stripe to mark them clearly as hospital property and to dissuade anyone from selling them on. Feather ticks, feather bolsters, blankets and woollen coverlets completed the bedding.
Plan of the Savoy Hospital (via grenwillow.co.uk)
The Staff
The small pile of bills and receipts in the archives allow us to know the hospital workers by name. William Bradley was employed as the hospital's carpenter, and was able to turn his hand to a variety of jobs: mending the window shutters, repairing the floors, mending beds and replacing bed cords. He also crafted wooden legs and crutches for amputees. Though a skilled craftsman he was only semi-literate, signing his name merely with the initials “WB”. Mary Haslam was the “washer”, responsible for the laundry, although to judge from the lucrative amounts she was paid (between £11 and £12 weekly in 1659), she was most likely the head of a large staff. The laundry lists that bear her name were meticulously detailed, with each sheet and every piece of “small linen” itemised against the name of the nurse who had stripped it from bed or patient. This is a testament to the strenuous efforts made to keep the wards hygienic, together with the “searcher” who was employed to scrutinise clothes and bed linen for vermin: any infested cloth was baked in an oven to destroy fleas and lice before washing.
The hospital's senior medical staff comprised a physician, an apothecary and at least two surgeons (Mr Dunn and Mr Lewis), the latter assisted by five surgeons' mates. Naturally, much of the day-to-day work in the wards was undertaken by the dozen-or-so nursing staff. In 1654, the sicked and wounded were tended by nurses Cole, Titus, Sharman, Fletcher, Cooke, Jackson, Balmer (or Palmer), Tims, Blessington, Kich, Hastings and Dyos. Nurses were primarily chosen from among the widows of those soldiers killed in the fighting: familiar, perhaps, with army life and the men who served. There was a belief that such women were dependable in their dealings with the wounded men. Scottish veteran of the Thirty Year's War, General Robert Munro, described army wives in his memoirs: “no women are more faithful, more charitable, more loving, more obedient or more devout than soldiers' wives”. This testament to good behaviour is perhaps undermined when we look at the regulations that had to be introduced to the Savoy to curb poor behaviour of patients and nursing staff alike. In fact the general standard of conduct at the hospital was, to say the least, dubious. Rules were introduced in November 1644 to provide a framework for behaviour and also to ensure a structure and discipline to the patients' day. This included attending morning an evening prayer in the wards and compulsory church attendance on the Lord's Day and fasting days. There was also a set time of day for men's dressings to be changed. Drunkenness was apparently rife among patients and punished by a spell in the stocks. Repeated offences meant expulsion from the hospital. Nurses' behaviour also came under scrutiny, with fines introduced for using profane language, negligence, scolding, brawling or chiding the patients - and this despite the fact that prospective nurses had to be approved of by a least two of the hospital's treasurers. Questions also arose over the relationship between nurses and patients, the rules of the hospital stipulating: “If a soldier marry a nurse they are both to be expelled”.
St Bartholomew's and St Thomas's were both larger in capacity than the Savoy, with 200 and 249 beds respectively. At the Savoy, however, the ratio of nurses to patients was slightly better: one nurse to every twelve or thirteen patients, compared to a ratio of one to fifteen in the civilian hospitals. The Savoy's nurses were also paid 5 shillings a week, more favourable that the 3s 6d that could be earned by nurses elsewhere. Auxiliary staff from outside the nursing profession were employed to carry out menial duties: hospital accounts refer to “Goodey Swaine for emptying close stools, two shillings” and to “Old Bayley [for] bearing coles”. Children (possibly of nurses, but perhaps patients also) were paid to run errands.
Alongside the nurses, patients were tended by four 'sisters', although they do not seem to have been senior the nurses. Their title was an echo of the nuns who had worked at the hospital before the Reformation and who had ministered to the sick when the Savoy had functioned as a charitable refuge. When the hospital had been requisitioned for military use, the sisters were requested to remain and care for the soldiers. In 1649 they were named as Sisters Ann, Collyns, Bird and Maud.
The whole staff worked under the direction of the Master of Hospital, who lived in chambers on the hospital's west side. During the first Civil War the office was held by Samuel Adams, who had replaced Dr Walter Balcanquall in the summer of 1642 when the latter had fled London to join the king. Adams held his appointment until 1648, when he was replaced by Richard Malbon who remained as Overseer until the Restoration.
The ruined interior of the hospital's north wing (either Newbury or Reading Ward), circa 1796.
J. M. W. Turner (Tate Gallery)
J. M. W. Turner (Tate Gallery)
Caring for the Wounded
The Savoy was supported, in part, by donations from London parishes. Just under £200 was received from church collection plates between December 1642 and April 1643, with an additional £700 received directly from Parliament for approximately the same period. Roughly one quarter of the hospital's finances, then, may have come from charity. Material donations were also accepted. In November 1642 the London militia regiments donated bundles of old linen to the Savoy for bandages. In October the following year, the Commons ordered that all places of worship should surrender their (papistical) surplices so they could be made into dressings. Whether this sacrifice was of much practical help to the wounded, or whether (like the cutting down of iron railings for the war-effort in 1940) it was simply a good-will exercise, is uncertain.
Nurses usually only worked during the day, the ward doors being locked at night. Auxiliary staff were paid to watch the sick between dusk and dawn, with nurses only in attendance for urgent cases. It is clear, however, that it was not just for physical ailments that patients were admitted. There are several references to soldiers described as “distracted”, a common seventeenth century term for mentally unbalanced, and it is possible that these patients were suffering from what is now called combat PTSD. There are entries in the accounts of payments for watching these men at night, as well as a receipt for “straps, girts [belts], handcuffs, etc.” for use as restraints. One of the saddest references is that which reads: “a surgeon cal'd up at midnight to a soldier who cut his own throat” and, alongside this entry, a note of ten shillings payment to the surgeon for his trouble.
Further military hospitals were established in London later in the war. In late 1643, or early 1644, at Parsons Green in Fulham, a hospital was established near the bank of the Thames and maintained until the end of hostilities. Later that year a temporary landing stage for wounded soldiers was set up at Queenshithe, just over a mile downstream from the Savoy. The timing of these new establishments would suggest that they were intended to cater for the wounded of the Second Battle of Newbury in late October 1644. A payment at the Savoy in late 1642 of £40 “for the carriage of wounded causalities from Brentford to the Savoy by water” shows how valuable the proximity of the Thames was to the hospitals' ability to bring in wounded. In 1648, the former bishop's residence of Ely House, already requisitioned as a prison for Royalist officers, was converted to take in sick and wounded soldiers from the Second Civil War. Treatments here may have been more advanced than those at the Savoy: there are references to a “hot house”, evidently a kind of sauna where patients would be sent to sweat out their sickness and for which (for the sake of modesty) they received an issue of linen drawers.
Following the Civil War the Savoy's wards were converted into a barracks and military prison, and other buildings converted into private dwellings. Following the Religious Toleration Act of 1689 some of the buildings became places of worship for Nonconformists, such as French Huguenots and German Lutherans. The hospital was formally dissolved in 1702. In the Regency period the (by then derelict) site was cleared to make way for the construction of Waterloo Bridge. The only part of the original structure that remains today is the former chapel of Saint John the Baptist, that stood to the north west of Long Ward and now called The Queen's Chapel of the Savoy. Still the property of the Duchy of Lancaster, it is designated as “a private royal chapel of Her Majesty The Queen”. 380 years ago it is where Parliament's wounded soldiers prayed and gave thanks for their survival in the Civil War.
Robert Hodkinson
April, 2020
(revised January 2022)
April, 2020
(revised January 2022)
Bob Dylan, shooting the promotional film for 'Subterranean Homesick Blues', London, 1965. To his right are his tour manager and poet Allen Ginsberg. The building behind Dylan's left shoulder is the Queen's Chapel of the Savoy, the last remaining part of the Savoy Hospital (image via greenwillow.co.uk)
Sources:
Commonwealth Exchequer Papers, Warrants issued by Army Committees (SP 28/104), The National Archives.
Robinson, G. (1966) “Wounded Sailors and Soldiers in London During the First Dutch War, 1652-1654”, in: History Today, 16 (1)
Von Arni, E. G. (2001) Justice to the Maimed Soldier: Nursing, Medical Care and Welfare for Sick and Wounded Soldiers and their Families during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1642-1660 (London: Routledge).
Weinrib, B. and Hibbert, C. (1983) The London Encyclopedia (London: Macmillan).
British History Online (2019) “House of Commons Journal: 10 January 1644”, in: Journal of the House of Commons, Volume 3, 1643-1644 (London: 1802), pp. 362-363. British History Online [viewed 07 April 2020] Available: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/commons-jrnl/vol3/pp362-363
The Queen's Chapel of the Savoy (2020) Who We Are [online] The Queen's Chapel of the Savoy [viewed 07 April 2020] Available: http://royalchapelsavoy.org/who-we-are
Commonwealth Exchequer Papers, Warrants issued by Army Committees (SP 28/104), The National Archives.
Robinson, G. (1966) “Wounded Sailors and Soldiers in London During the First Dutch War, 1652-1654”, in: History Today, 16 (1)
Von Arni, E. G. (2001) Justice to the Maimed Soldier: Nursing, Medical Care and Welfare for Sick and Wounded Soldiers and their Families during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1642-1660 (London: Routledge).
Weinrib, B. and Hibbert, C. (1983) The London Encyclopedia (London: Macmillan).
British History Online (2019) “House of Commons Journal: 10 January 1644”, in: Journal of the House of Commons, Volume 3, 1643-1644 (London: 1802), pp. 362-363. British History Online [viewed 07 April 2020] Available: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/commons-jrnl/vol3/pp362-363
The Queen's Chapel of the Savoy (2020) Who We Are [online] The Queen's Chapel of the Savoy [viewed 07 April 2020] Available: http://royalchapelsavoy.org/who-we-are