Regimented Rows

It was time for another visit to the Royal Victoria Country Park near Southampton and a blustery but sunny day. 

The park was once the home of the Netley Military Hospital, started in 1856 following a suggestion by Queen Victoria after her visit to a hospital in Chatham where soldiers from the Crimean War were being treated in dire conditions. The newly designed hospital was not with out its critics, including Florence Nightingale, who saw it as lending itself more to the vanity of the architect and how it would "cut a dash" when viewed from the Solent, rather than the comfort and recovery of the patients.

The hospital, whose main building was opened in 1863 served throughout the Boer War, WW1 and WW2 and other conflicts, with additional huts being built in the grounds in WW1 to expand the hospital to 2500 beds. However, after WW2 it fell into decline until 1963 when a large fire destroyed most of the main building.  The hospital was finally demolished in 1966, leaving just the chapel as a memorial. The extra shows an old photo of the chapel towards the end of the demolition superimposed over the view of the chapel I took today, which perhaps gives some idea of the scale of the building which was 1/4 mile long.

My main image is a view across the adjacent cemetery which was primarily for patients of the hospital. Among those buried here are 636 Commonwealth service personnel who died in the First World War and 35 in the Second World War whose graves are maintained and registered by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, who also care for the war graves of 69 Germans and 12 Belgians from the First and of one Polish soldier from the Second war.[

As usual with CWGG cemeteries, the graves are placed in  rows with little regard to rank, regiment or nationality, although apparently there was some segregation in parts of the cemetery in order to honour particular religious beliefs.