Monthly Archives: May 2026

May 30 2026

C S LEWIS AND THE RECOVERY FROM WAR (PART 2)

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ENDSLEIGH PALACE HOTEL AS MILITARY HOSPITAL

In this second part, I am now turning to my exploration inside the building that was converted from the very smart Endsleigh Palace Hotel into a Red Cross Military Hospital in the London of 1915.   It has recently become the Student Union for University College London (UCL).  What would be left of the original building as the injured officer C S Lewis would have seen it?  Or would everything from the First World War era have been removed or painted over?  And what state was Lewis in when he arrived there, at that point not world famous but just an ‘Everyman’, an injured soldier trying to survive, although perhaps not heal so well he’d be sent back to the Front Line in France?  Meanwhile there were still lots of Everyman editions of classic books for him to read…

MY TOUR OF THE BUILDING

Fortunately I had phoned ahead to make sure that it was OK for me as an alumna of UCL to tour the building, so I had no problem with the uniformed security guard inside the entrance. 

On his left was a shop with the usual student union goods for sale, including sweatshirts and hoodies, 

and to the right was Gordon’s Café, the student union place for hot drinks and sandwiches, crisps, and all the usual chocolate and snack bars without which enduring the next lecture, for most, would feel an impossibility. 

I decided to take advantage of this facility and so had a quick early lunch, all the time feeling like a middle-aged imposter amongst all the young faces.

 I did feel as though I was on a secret mission and that at any moment the security guard would change his mind and haul me out!  Although that’s probably taking ‘imposter syndrome’ a bit far.

I tried to concentrate on the building’s interior, but so far there was nothing very inspiring under all the white paint.  Definitely a utilitarian ‘health and safety’ vibe up to this point.

 But it was more important to me to see the upper floors where Lewis would have stayed.  There was a very small lift. so I thought I would go to the top floor first and work my way down by the stairs, looking in at each floor as I went.  Would the lift have been there in Lewis’ day? Quite possibly, as there were several lifts back then, including one that was large enough for stretcher cases.

EARLY FIELD HOSPITAL TREATMENT IN FRANCE

But just to backtrack a bit, Lewis had already needed hospital treatment before the more severe wounds that brought him back to England.

CSL had written to his great friend Arthur Greeves on 2 February 1918 that he had been admitted to No 10 British Red Cross Hospital at Le Tréport in France.  This was with a bout of Pyrexia or ‘trench fever’, and he was very glad to be away from the Front Line [1].   He then reassured his father that the illness wasn’t much worse than ‘flu [2].  In his next letter to Arthur, he mentions reading Boswell on Johnson and the Everyman copy he bought in Oxford.

How he longs to ramble in the bookshops in ‘The Broad’ in Oxford! (Presumably he’s referring to Blackwell’s, but perhaps also Thornton’s which I remember before it closed in 2002).  He has ordered the Everyman copy of ‘The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini’ from a bookshop in London. 

He describes to his father Le Tréport as a little fishing village with cliffs and a grey sea.  He was still in the hospital on the 18th of February because, after recovering once, he then had a relapse.  He asks his father to get him a cheap edition of Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’ which he’s wanted to read for a time [3]

To Arthur Greeves he writes that he is hoping for another relapse so he can stay in the hospital, but it probably won’t happen because “the gods hate me” [4].  One is tempted to think “Be careful what you wish for.”  He recommends a bookshop called ‘Ovenell’s’ on Broad Street, Oxford, where they do a good job of binding books.  He sings the praises of his Everyman version of Cellini, the thinness and crispness of the paper and the ideal size of the font and margins.

We can tell that Lewis liked a physical copy of a book that fed his senses as well as his mind.  He’s not impressed with the “piles of trash” in the hospital library but has settled on George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’ for bedtime reading [5]. He is also reading and speaking as much French as he can.

LEWIS’ WOUNDS

Lewis did his best to reassure his father that he was safe when he was returned to the Front.  But then a note arrived in Belfast for his ‘Papy’ and not in Lewis’s hand, the sort of note every parent of a soldier was dreading. It was dated 16 April 1918 and said ‘Jack’ had been “slightly wounded” and was in hospital again.  The address was the Liverpool Merchants Mobile Hospital in Étaples.  As part of the Somerset Light Infantry at the Battle of Arras, centred on Riez de Vinage, Lewis was wounded in the chest, hand and leg on the 15th April.

What were these field hospitals like?

First the wounded would be taken to a Clearing Station before being moved to a base hospital.  The wounded had a label tied to their coat with details of their injuries.  Those in danger had a red border round the label.  They also were given a small bag for any belongings [6].  Lewis complains in a letter to his father about having his uniform cut off him, which he thought was excessive but seemed common practice [7]. 

An article in The British Nursing Journal gives a summary of conditions in the Étaples field hospitals, from a report by Miss Swift, Matron-in-Chief under the Joint War Committee in 1915:

“At Étaples, St John’s Brigade Hospital, which is well-arranged in huts, with a perfect equipment, theatre, electrical department, and every modern appliance.  The wards are large and airy.  Also the Liverpool Merchants’ Hospital, which is beautifully equipped and arranged…”  [8]

There is also an article in the British Nursing Journal that describes a train journey on the ‘Rapide’ passing Étaples with a view of the immense field hospital and the new ‘game’ played by the passengers of flinging cigarettes and newspapers, chocolate and other gifts out of the windows for the medics and patients there [9].

Ironically, Lewis’ wounds were caused by his own side, a case of “friendly fire”, from a shell burst.  His brother Warren visited him, worried that the wounds were severe, so was greatly relieved to find Jack in relatively good spirits.  He found out that Jack had narrowly escaped death – the sergeant next to him had been killed.   After losing consciousness for a while, Jack had managed to crawl back to safety and was carried the rest of the way by stretcher bearers [10]. 

 But he was unconscious again by the time his uniform had been cut off by medical staff.

The BJN quotes Colonel Sir J Cantlie saying that “a soldier’s chances of recovery from wounds are usually determined by his treatment during the first half hour in which he is brought from the trenches.” [11]

Lewis writes to his father that he was hit in the back of the left hand, just above the left knee and in the left side which meant he couldn’t lie on his side.  He eye was closed from dirt for a few days but thankfully recovered [12]. The shrapnel that went into his chest worked its way further in, but he was told it could stay there for the rest of his life if need be. 

A Nursing Sister on the Western Front, at the very place where Lewis was taken to a field hospital, fills in some of the detail and atmosphere for us in May 1918:

“You would like to know how we passed through this crisis.  I hardly know where to begin to tell you of that week, when, for the first time, we saw the war, we felt the war, and we lived at the war.  The impression that it left is a numbed, indescribable feeling, a depth of sorrow, an accumulation of fury that such things are possible; a heart-breaking pity for all who have suffered and an infinite regret that we could not do more.  I see the broken, bleeding men lying in long rows, with red-dyed bandages and whitening faces, waiting to be taken into the operating room.  Magnificent heroes, every man of them, both English and French.  I saw them being rushed into battle.  I saw them brought back on stretchers.  I saw some of them ‘die for their country’, always with the same high courage…. Every day the cannons became louder and the enemy came nearer, and the thunder of them seemed to become part of ourselves; it entered our brains, and because our heads did not open, it stayed there; and even yet there are days when I hear those awful crashes, an appalling sound.  We did not go to bed; we just lay down for half an hour, when we felt too exhausted to do any more.”  [13] 

This Nurse goes on to say that she watched so many men going up to the Front Line, who might die that night, she felt she had to smile for them:

“I had a curious feeling that I was smiling at men who were going to fight and die that night, and perhaps it was the last woman’s smile some of them would see….the frightfulness of the sacrifice of their young lives is sad, sad beyond words…  Have I not seen and heard real warriors going forth to battle?”

This helps to fill in some of the emotional impact of the battle lines and the difficulties of care for the wounded, detail that we do not see in Lewis’ letters.  Public school trained boys and soldiers did not show their emotion or vulnerability if they could possibly help it [14]. But the women who shared many of the same experiences with these male combatants can fill in some of the blanks for us.  The experiences of women as nurses in such dire circumstances went on to inform political and literary life, just as much as male experience. (One example that springs to mind is from the writing of Dorothy L Sayers – not only did her character Lord Peter Wimsey suffer shell-shock from his experience at the Front, but his sister Lady Mary spent time nursing in London in the War and got personally involved in political agitation there.)   Gilchrist argues: “Larger contexts than have so far been constructed in studying Lewis need to be considered in order to understand his experiences and his response to them.” [15]  I hope this is what I’m doing to some extent by introducing the perspectives in the British Nursing Journal into the picture.  Sometimes the nurses could speak when the men couldn’t.

But even for those wounded soldiers now ‘safely’ in a field hospital, the danger was by no means over.  There is a saying ‘Out of the frying pan, into the fire’.  Well, that certainly applies to the situation of any one being moved from the Front to the field hospitals at Étaples.   The field hospitals themselves were bombed!  Plus there was the dangerous sea crossing over to England.

Reference to the bombing of the field hospitals in Étaples was made by Bonar Law, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the House of Commons.

He states that there were over 300 casualties [16]. 

The German bombers returned a week later to cause “a martyrdom of women and wounded men and hospital attendants” on Corpus Christi day when the Allies had agreed not to do any bombing [17]. 

In the House of Commons in June the numbers were given for the German attacks on our hospitals on the north coast of France from 15 May to 1 June 1918. The terrible total was that 248 had been killed and 593 wounded. [18]

Many medical staff gave their lives in order to stay with their patients who could not be moved.  They were like sitting ducks for the bombers.  Lewis himself wrote to Arthur Greeves that he was more afraid in this situation in the field hospitals when he couldn’t walk than he was in the trenches [19].

Part 3 will deal with Lewis’ experience in the Endsleigh military hospital and the surrounding area during his stay.

NOTES

1]  CSL, Collected Letters, Vol 1, edited by Walter Hooper, p352.

2]  CSL, ibid., p354.

3]  ibid., p358.

4]  ibid.

5]  ibid., p360.

6]  “Take In” Day at a Casualty Clearing Station, The British Nursing Journal, Vol 55, Oct 30, 1915, p353.

7]  CSL, Collected Letters, Vol 1, 14 May 1918, p368.

8]  British Nursing Journal, Vol 55, 30 October 1915, p357.

9]  BNJ Vol 55, 18 September 1915, p230.

10]  CSL, Collected Letters, Vol !, 14 May 1918, p366.

11]  BNJ, Vol 60, 15 June 1918, p418.

12]  CSL, Collected Letters, Vol !, 4 May 1918, p367.

13]  BNJ, Vol 60, May 1918, p348.

14]  K J Gilchrist begins his book A Morning After War: C S Lewis and World War 1 (Peter Lang, New York, 2005, p1) in the very first paragraph by stating that Lewis “obscured facts about his war service and its lingering effects”, and that Prof Don King has also pointed this out concerning Lewis’ early poetry – the main reason for this being the trauma itself and the “renewal of trauma by remembering.” (ibid., p2).

15]  ibid., p6.

16]  BNJ, Vol 60, 1 June 1918, p382.

17]  BNJ, Vol 60, 30 May, 1918, p399.

18]  BNJ, Vol 60, 15 June, 1918, p419. 

19]  CSL, Collected Letters Vol 1, 23 May 1918, p370.

May 25 2026

C S LEWIS AND THE RECOVERY FROM WAR (PART 1)

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C S LEWIS AND THE RECOVERY FROM WAR (Part 1)

The Endsleigh Palace Hotel, London

INTRODUCTION

This is the beginning of a photo journey exploring the places where C S Lewis recovered from his war wounds, involving hospitals and private houses, gardens and parkland, humble terrace houses and even a stately home.  It spans the years 1918 to the early 1920s and will take us from the centre of London to the outskirts of Bristol, and finally to Oxford where Lewis was to make his career and reputation.

When I was looking through all my material again recently, one theme kept cropping up.  And that was of C S Lewis as ‘Everyman’.  I had used a photo of a book of Christmas stories from the Everyman series of little hardbacks for my digital Christmas card one year, and so had several people asking what the book was and who was its publisher, so I was typing the word ‘Everyman’ quite a lot. 

 At the same time it seemed as though every book about Lewis that I picked up, especially his early letters, had Lewis referring to Everyman books – seeing them, wanting to buy them – calling them in the plural ‘Everymen’.

This made me think of a focus for my research into this period of Lewis’ life – Lewis as Everyman in the First World War and its aftermath, as he went through the same gruelling experiences and tragic loss and injury as the other men of his generation.  He was far from the great writer and Christian apologist to be known and hailed by future generations.  2nd Lieutenant ‘Jack’ Lewis was trying to be a published poet, like so many other young war poets, was not a confessing Christian, and his immediate task was just to stay alive after the brutalities of trench warfare.

‘PILGRIMAGE’

I thought I would present this research as a series of blogs, covering places where I had personal contacts who would let me photograph the interiors of buildings not usually accessible to outsiders, and therefore hopefully of great interest to students of C S Lewis  – photos never seen before, of places not normally seen.  It would also be something of a ‘pilgrimage’ and adventure for me.  Others had been to the sites of the First World War battlefields in France, but I could hopefully have an equivalent experience with the places in the UK where Lewis went to recover from the war, both in medical and personal terms.  So, places where I had contacts or unique access included the Endsleigh Palace Hotel in London, Ashton Court in Bristol, Ravenswood Road and Clifton College in Bristol, and the house called ‘Hillsboro’ in Oxford.

This meant that I would start with

Endsleigh Palace Hotel, London – sometime Red Cross Hospital, now the Student Union of University College London.  Its address is 25 Gordon Street, London WC1H 0AY in the London Borough of Camden.

I see with amazement that the photos from this journey are time-stamped 10th August 2016.  Was it really that long ago?  I had been staying in Oxford, to do some work at the Bodleian Library, so the bus ride to London didn’t take long. 

 Most bus journeys blend in the mind into an amorphous cloud, but this one I remember more than others as I was really excited.  I had two reasons for my journey, and both were in the nature of semi-pilgrimage: firstly to examine the environs of the former Endsleigh Palace Hotel, which had been the first hospital in England to receive the wounded Lewis, and to explore inside.  Secondly, to re-visit my old haunts in Hampstead in north London, where I lived in the early 1980s, to soak in the atmosphere for a novel I was near completing concerning that time in my life.  It was a mixture guaranteed to bring on a major attack of nostalgia.

The nostalgia was also because in the mid-1980s I had been a student at London University’s Institute of Education, to do a year of teacher-training after my PhD, to make sure I was employable in case my academic dreams failed to materialise. 

This meant I travelled from Hampstead to Bloomsbury weekdays, to the very modern building on Bedford Row, and had become familiar with the names of the streets and squares round about, often called ‘Bedford’, ‘Gordon’, ‘Gower’, ‘Tavistock’, ‘Woburn’, or ‘Russell’ after aristocrats who owned the land and property. 

 I had done most of the work for my PhD in the British Library when it resided in the British Museum on Great Russell Street, also in Bloomsbury, so it definitely felt like home ground.

So all those years before I had regularly been just a couple of streets away from what had been the Endsleigh Palace Hotel.  This had been on the south side of Endsleigh Gardens, on the corner of Gordon Street, now the Student Union of University College London (UCL).  As some of you may know, the University of London consists of colleges in the same way as the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.  And so University College in London is just one of the university’s many colleges, as University College Oxford is one of Oxford University’s many colleges.  They probably did it to confuse tourists. 

Anyway, why am I telling you this?  Because a few years ago London University’s Institute of Education, which had always been treated like a college in its own right, was for some reason subsumed under the umbrella of UCL, which meant I was now an alumna of a college I had never visited in my life, with the possibility now of blagging my way into one of their buildings.

I had done my research online, studiously examined an A-Z, and thought I knew where I was going as I emerged from the nearest tube station into the warmth of an August morning.  It was good to be back in London.  I always feel the proverbial ‘buzz’ when I’m there, and my memories of living in that great city are virtually all extremely pleasant.  And Bloomsbury is definitely one of the more interesting sections, with its concentration of educational establishments and blue plaques commemorating the habitations of some of the most famous people in literary history – oh, and the odd economist and scientist, but I wasn’t as interested in them that day. 

ENDSLEIGH BUILDING

And there it was, the building itself, visited by thousands of students each year that probably would have no idea of the building’s history of care for the wounded after a terrible war a hundred years before, and that a world famous writer had been one of them.

Its appearance on the outside has not changed much from the days of the First World War when it was offered to the Red Cross as a hospital for wounded officers, then a research hospital for tropical diseases.

HOSPITAL SET UP (& 1915 SCANDAL)

As such, it was opened in 1915 with a hundred available beds.  It had its own operating theatre and X-Ray room. The War Office appointed Major L Haden Guest from the Royal Army Medical Corps as resident Military Commander.  At first all the nurses were trained professionals but that changed as the war went on.  There were also male medical orderlies who would valet the patients.  It was seen as important that those of officer status would not have “inexperienced girls” nursing them, perhaps young women of their own class that they might have to partner at future dances (this was literally the reason given)!  It  was a decision taken by a small non-medical organising committee led by Lord and Lady Williamson.

The fact that those making policy decisions for the hospital were not medically trained led to a huge scandal in 1915 when the committee sacked Miss Florence Tubbs the Head Matron, with no warning and no adequate explanation as to why.  All the nursing staff then left with her in protest and it took a while for the hospital to get back on an even keel.

It seems as though the committee viewed the level of discipline as too lax.  But my novelist’s mind is imagining all sorts or jealousies, romances, and intrigues beneath the surface!  However there was no stopping Miss Tubbs, who continued to gain support and obtained a role a mere two weeks later, running a hospital out in France, God bless her.

But all of this searching through the British Nursing Journal of 1915 certainly wasn’t a waste of time, even though C S Lewis wasn’t involved with the hospital yet.  I found myself fascinated by many of the articles for 1915, edited by Mrs Bedford Fenwick, and was astonished to read a news item about a nurse helping a man who had tried to commit suicide (by jumping out of a window – she had held onto his legs until help arrived!).  Attempted suicide was a crime then and so the poor man was being tried in the police court in Belfast.  But it was the name of the prosecuting solicitor that made me look twice.  It was none other than Mr A J Lewis, in other words, Albert James Lewis, C S Lewis’ father!  How amazing to find a link with Lewis when I wasn’t even expecting it! [1]

The Endsleigh Palace Hospital remained under the Red Cross until 1919 when it became a specialised research and treatment centre for Tropical Diseases. This was an extension of the treatment that had already been going on there during the War, especially with many soldiers returning from far flung posts in the British Empire.  So there were officers who had to be quarantined, even in Lewis’ time. [2]

NOTES

[1]  British Journal of Nursing, Vol 55, p75, 24 July 1915.

[2]  To see photos of another officer, 2nd Lieutenant Cyril Edwards, who was recovering from his wounds at the same hospital as Lewis, and who made a photographic record of his time there, see The National Army Museum website.  It includes a photo of the officer in a wheelchair in Endsleigh Gardens:  https://ww1.nam.ac.uk/stories/second-lieutenant-cyril-edwards/

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Part 2 of this study will begin with my tour and photos of the Endsleigh building itself.

May 18 2026

DEATH IN HIGH HEELS

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Christianna Brand

This is a highly enjoyable book, especially considering it is the author’s first attempt at a crime novel (1941).  I loved the way Christianna Brand (1907-88) employed a setting that she knew well from her early job in the West End of London, using retail as the launch pad for the story, just as Dorothy L Sayers had earlier used her experience of an advertising agency to such good effect in Murder Must Advertise (1933).

I really felt as though I was ‘there’ in the snazzy dress shop and knew the characters well – an absolute must for a good novel.  It also meant that one cared more about the person who was murdered and the suspects left behind.  It was obviously a woman author writing about the sort of women she knew well, and you could tell.

The only issues for me from the word go were in the nature of spoilers.  First was the fact that I had already read a later book of Brand’s (Tour de Force, 1955) in which one of the main characters makes a reappearance, which of course meant that it was highly unlikely they were the murderer in this story, unless the person concerned was to escape conviction and pop up on a foreign island to kill again.  So I counted that character out straightaway.  I had also unfortunately read a spoiler at some point in the past which had said how Brand used a particularly mean co-worker from her own retail experience as a murderer in her first novel.  So it was a shame to instantly be able to identify the culprit!

Which should have spoiled it for me.  But it didn’t.

I soon felt so engrossed in the story and engaged with the characters that I was quite willing to suspend my disbelief and go on the merry-go-round of all the available suspects in their many interviews and adventures concerning the poisoning by oxalic acid of Miss  Doon one lunchtime.  The fact that the girls were eating rabbit curry was both a sign of wartime deprivation but also a handy way to disguise the taste of a poison.

Perhaps my enjoyment was also partly due to the main detective, Inspector Charlesworth, and his sidekick Sergeant Bedd, who were very entertaining characters.  The only disadvantage was that when Brand introduced the two policeman and gave their physical description, she wrote it in such a way that I got them the wrong way round!  

“Sergeant Bedd met him [Charlesworth] outside and they stood together on the steps of the mortuary, poring over the notes, a tall, fair, smiling young man and a grizzled, thick-set middle-aged one.  Charlesworth’s eyes are an honest and friendly grey; but Bedd’s are as blue as the summer skies, set deeply in his square, brown face.” (p40)

See what I mean? With her mentioning Bedd first, you expect his description to be first.

This was particularly confusing when Charlesworth began to fall in love with Victoria  David, a salesgirl at the shop and the wife of an artist, and I was visualising an unattractive middle-aged man in the role instead of the attractive young one.  But I got them sorted out about half way through the book, so then the Inspector’s vulnerability to a lovely young woman seemed more of a pleasing characteristic than a creepy one!  I do think, however that the police should have been quicker in checking other local chemists concerning their recent sales of oxalic acid, and to ponder much earlier the idea of whether Miss Gregory, in all the mix up over the lunches, could have been the original intended victim.

I think the word ‘merry-go-round’ is an appropriate one for the way we were ‘played’ as an audience – now suspecting one of the workers at the dress shop ‘Christophe et Cie’, and now another.  This was especially the case because the camaraderie of the women who worked there –  the shielding of each other, the unwillingness the think badly of their friends, the many secret ways they had supported each other in the past – all of this meant that there were many layers of deception and guilt.  I must admit, I did find the endless discussion of where the oxalic acid crystals had got to rather wearing at times.  And the possible motivation for the murder – the prospect of a promotion to run a shop in Deauville, combined with the complication of past and present relationships with the repellent boss Bevan – meant that the police were led astray multiple times in their calculations.  In fact, suspicion was piled on each character so many times that I began to wonder if it was to be another ‘Orient Express’ scenario in which everyone did it! 

The ending is indeed a bit Poirot-esque as Charlesworth again takes us through each of the possible suspects, this time as a way, a rather macabre way, of teasing Victoria.  It’s then quite a relief to have a final page that shows the Inspector some time later has recovered from his crush and is still friends with both Victoria and her husband the ‘Bobby Dazzler’.  But after a case involving such an exhausting number of beautiful women, he declares to his boss: “‘Honestly, sir, I don’t care if I never set eyes on another girl for the rest of my life!’“ (p253)

I would give this book 4.5 out of 5 stars.  A great first novel!

(All page numbers are from the British Library Crime Classics edition of 2025.)