What is now Ventnor Botanic Garden was once the Royal National Hospital for Diseases of the Chest for close to a century.
The hospital was the brainchild of Dr Arthur Hill Hassall – who suffered from tuberculosis himself – and had moved to Ventnor to take advantage of the comparatively warm micro-climate of the Undercliff.
The hospital was built between 1869 and 1878. Its architect was Thomas Hellyer of Ryde. Patients came from all over the UK and abroad. Royalty patronised the institution, with the first foundation stone laid by Princess Louise, Queen Victoria visiting the hospital in 1888 and King Edward VII in 1902.
A separate bedroom was provided for each patient, with a series of 8 blocks divided into 2 ‘cottages’. By the start of World War II, 38,000 patients had been treated there.
The hospital became a massive establishment, which even included its own chapel, complete with stained glass windows designed by the famous pre-Raphaelite painters Burne-Jones and Ford Maddox-Browne (which are now situated in the parish church of St Lawrence).
The institution even produced its own food, having its own horticultural garden and piggery. The pigs were fed on hospital waste and there was a great deal of it as the appetite of the sicker patients was inevitably poor.
The Royal National Hospital was much admired. A visit by the British Medical Association (BMA) declared in 1881:
“The Ventnor Hospital is universally admired, indeed no other in Europe can compare with its completeness and for the combination of comfort and scientific purpose.”
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What was life like for patients there? Treatment was in a series of ‘grades’. The lowest meant you spent all day in bed. Advancing to the next grade allowed you to get up and dressed for 2 hours and sitting on the balcony. You were then allowed out and about in the hospital gardens for increasingly longer spells.
Before the advent of antibiotics and modern medicines, fresh air was believed to be the best cure for lung complaints. There was no heating in the bedrooms, and the French doors were kept open night and day. Patients would have a hot water bottle and as many as seven blankets on their beds at night and would wear thick jumpers and mittens in the daytime during winter.
Nurses constantly battled to keep the hospital germ free. The rooms were sparsely furnished with the walls white painted to allow easy disinfecting. There were only bare boards on the floor as carpets might become a source of infection. Every morning, orderlies would appear to disinfect everything in sight.
The battle against bacteria was taken to extreme lengths. Cloth handkerchiefs were forbidden, with only paper ones allowed that were burnt after use. Books and magazines were incinerated after being read.
The advent of World War II led to many patients being evacuated from the hospital to make way for what were expected to be a considerable number of war casualties. 180 TB sufferers were sent to holiday camps in Bembridge.
Conditions at the camps were spartan with initially only one bathroom for men and another for women. Patients spent the winter of 1939 in accommodation designed solely for summer use.
Remarkably, tuberculosis victims thrived in the camps. Relapses were rare, most gained weight and only 6 were required to return to hospital. Many protested vigorously when their discharge was selected.
Following World War II, the wheels of the Royal National Hospital were kept running by an ‘army’ of displaced citizens – refugees from continental Europe – who performed the tasks of ward orderlies: cleaning, bringing round meals and collecting dirty dishes. Unfortunately, many had poor command of the English language, frequently responding to requests with ‘no understand’.
During the 50s, the increasing effectiveness of anti-tuberculous drugs led to far fewer patients being treated at the RNH. By 1958, there were 100 empty beds. The hospital closed for good in 1964.
After 5 years of the buildings and grounds falling into increasing dereliction and disrepair, the RNH was demolished in 1969. Happily, Ventnor Urban District Council rejected calls for the site to be turned into homes or a holiday camp and Ventnor Botanic Gardens were created.
However, some claim that former patients and hospital staff remain in situ. Visitors to the site of the former hospital have claimed to have seen apparitions of doctors in white coats, patients in slippers and dressing gowns, and the moans and screams of patients being operated on.
Tales of psychic sightings hit national news headlines during the demolition of the RNH. It was claimed that supernatural activity was centred around the former operating theatre, which resisted all attempts to tear it down, apparently wrecking four tractors, an excavator and a ball crane tasked with its demolition. Nervous workmen complained of the smell of ether from the long disused building, and two sledgehammer wielding construction workers claimed to have been confronted by an enraged phantom in its doorway…
Do you remember the Royal National Hospital? Did you work there or have a relative treated there? Did you witness its demolition or experience any of the ghostly sightings subsequently associated with it? Let us know in the comments…
Very interesting reading.
Very interesting article, such a shame they didn’t
restore more of the old buildings.
Too think thosedays patients had to work, the NHS
Is so different nowdays.
My Mum worked in Steephill Residential Home, once the nurses home for the hospital. A tunnel ran beneath the road linking the two buildings to allow the nurses to travel to and from at night. The entrance to the tunnel was extremely creepy and there were lots of stories of objects moving on their own and apparitions; some she witnessed herself. My Dad also helped with the demolition and told stories of everything breaking down.
Coming home from the pictures at the rex cinema in Ventnor on the bus on Sunday night in the early fifty’s there would be light’s on in most windows the whole length of the hospital we often wondered how much the electricity bill would be
When we were kids in the 1950s, the hospital was always pointed out to us whenever we were driven past, but my aunts etc. never dwelt on the nature of the illness its inmates were suffering and hopefully recovering from. By coincidence, I’ve just spent 3 days staying in the hotel accommodation housed in part of Finland’s best-known historical TB sanatorium (at Paimio), preserved forever because of its architect, Alvar Aalto, as a living museum — the beds are revamped hospital beds, and the rooms are kept quite spartan. It is indeed a beautiful modernist building complex — check it out online!