The Connaught Military Hospital

By Paul H. Vickers, Friends of the Aldershot Military Museum

Although the Cambridge Military Hospital remains an iconic building and is justly famous for the excellence of its treatment and care for patients, Aldershot’s other great military hospital, the Connaught, is often unfairly overlooked.

In the nineteenth century Aldershot had two distinct camps, North Camp and South Camp, divided by the Basingstoke Canal. In South Camp the Army used Union Buildings as its hospital until the opening of the Cambridge in 1879. North Camp had no permanent buildings, either for barracks or medical facilities, so a number of huts were taken over for use as hospital accommodation. The 1885 edition of “Sheldrake’s Guide to Aldershot” noted that the hospital huts were O and P Lines and part of Q Lines, “appropriated as wards, surgery, stores, etc.” They provided accommodation for up to 470 patients, 12 to a hut, plus quarters for the Surgeon-Major, four Medical Officers and 12 Staff-Sergeants of the Army Hospital Corps. By the late 1880s the wooden huts had been in use for over 30 years and were in very poor condition, but it was not until funds were made available by the Barracks Act of 1890 that they could be replaced by a new, permanent, purpose-built hospital.

The building contract was awarded to the local Aldershot firm of Martin, Wells and Company, who had also constructed the Cambridge. Building work began on 9 September 1895 and was completed on 9 June 1897. The 1902 official report on expenditure under the Barracks Act reported that the hospital in North Camp “providing accommodation for 251 patients, and Army Service Corps and Quarters for 1 Quarter-Master and 4 nursing sisters” had cost a total of £45,514. Unfortunately the hospital could not admit patients immediately as there were problems with the condition of the nearby camp sewage farm, which rendered the whole area too insanitary for the hospital to open. Eventually improvements were made to the sewage farm and the new hospital opened at the beginning of March 1898. A month later, the “Aldershot News” for 16 April 1898 announced that “The new hospital in Marlborough Lines is to be known as the Connaught Hospital” in honour of the Duke of Connaught, who served as the General Officer Commanding in Aldershot from 1893 to 1898.

The first major incident handled by the Connaught was on Easter Monday (11 April) 1898 when the 15th Middlesex Volunteer Rifle Corps were involved in a railway accident at Bisley, and over 20 of the casualties were taken to the new hospital. Shortly afterwards the Connaught took patients recovering from wounds received in South Africa during the Second Boer War (1899-1902).

From the start of the First World War the Aldershot hospitals treated soldiers wounded in action. On 30 August 1914 hospital trains brought the first 200 casualties from the battle of Mons into Government Sidings, and equal numbers were sent to the Cambridge and the Connaught. These were followed by wounded from the battles of the Marne and Aisne, and in just one month alone, October 1914, the Connaught admitted 380 casualties from the Western Front. Throughout the war the Connaught dealt with a continuing stream of wounded, including casualties from the battles of Arras, Cambrai, Passchendaele, and from as far away as the Dardanelles. In addition to physical injuries, soldiers suffering from what was then called “shell shock” and other mental health conditions were treated at the Connaught.

Likewise during the Second World War the Connaught received casualties sent back from the front, along with routine injuries from the Camp. In 1940 one of the patients was from the Royal Military School of Music, which had temporarily moved to Aldershot from Kneller Hall. A number of his colleagues came to visit and there was an impromptu band concert in the hospital, which was much enjoyed by both staff and patients until it was rudely interrupted by a German air raid. When they emerged from the shelters there were fortunately no casualties among the patients, staff or visiting band members.

In October 1941 the Connaught was handed over to the Canadian Army Medical Corps to treat patients serving with the Canadian Army stationed in Aldershot. The British patients and staff were moved to Brookwood Hospital, near Woking, and from May 1942 the Connaught was taken over by No. 8 Canadian General Hospital (CGH). In August that year the Canadians suffered many casualties in the ill-fated raid on Dieppe, of whom 80 were immediately sent to the Connaught. In 1944 No. 8 CGH was deployed to Normandy to support the D-Day landings, and was replaced at the Connaught by No. 4 CGH. The first D-Day casualties arrived at the Connaught on 8 June 1944, 278 men of whom only three were Canadians. These were the beginning of a great many wounded brought back from the Normandy battles. Denham Meek, a technician at the Connaught, remembered:

“The casualty was grabbed in France, bleeding stopped, given the simplest first-aid treatment and evacuated to an airfield where they were put into quarters with the Red Cross, and there was a steady circuit of Dakotas from France to Farnborough airport. From Farnborough we had a circle of ambulances, they used a different route coming and going, and those casualties reached us. A casualty could reach us within two hours of being wounded, the mud on him was still wet often, and so the degree of medical attention was extremely rapid.”

The dedicated medical staff worked long shifts, often to the point of exhaustion, and their prompt and efficient treatment saved many lives.

After the Canadians left in 1946 a report concluded that moving the Connaught patients and staff back from Brookwood was not viable, so the Connaught building ceased to be a hospital and was instead used as accommodation for various minor units.

Eventually the building was declared unsafe and the last units were moved out. An Army report of 1984 noted the building was in “an extremely distressed state. The interior gives a disturbingly clear picture of a century-old building at the end of its useful life, gradually disintegrating under the combined effects of weather, vandals and the prolonged lack of occupancy and maintenance”. After much debate about its future, it was decided that the Connaught was beyond restoration and the majority of the building was demolished in the late 1980s, clearing the area for the new Normandy Barracks. Only the main entrance block was retained and incorporated into the Normandy Officers’ Mess.

Credits

Article originally published in the The Garrison, Spring 2021

Copyright © Paul H. Vickers. This article, including the accompanying pictures, may not be reproduced or republished, in whole or in part, either in print or electronically, including on any websites or social media sites, without the prior permission of the author.