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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.

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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.

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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]

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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.