Chapter one
The Hydro
Historians surmise that Craiglockhart took its name from the Scots Gaelic Creag Loch Ard-"crag or hill [on] the high lake," although the hill boasts neither lake nor great height. There is a pond, but men dug it long after the outcrop received its name. Its twin peaks, known as Easter and Wester Craiglockhart hills, lay claim to the lowest altitude-a bare two hundred feet above the sea-among seven hills that, like Rome's, defined the topography of Scotland's capital city. A stone castle protruded from the crag until the thirteenth century, but it played no significant role in the country's turbulent history of dynastic and religious wars. It was already rubble when the Act of Union sealed Scotland's connection to England in 1707. By the nineteenth century, a southwestern suburb of Edinburgh, Slateford, had absorbed the crag while retaining it as a rural sanctuary.
The crag's woods and meadows afforded a pastoral retreat from the somber stone mansions, filthy tenements, and notoriously disputatious politics of the city. Craiglockhart boasted unpolluted air, pure underground water, and panoramic views, not only of Edinburgh's spires a mere three miles northeast, but of the Firth of Forth estuary and the twenty-mile ridge of green wilderness known as the Pentland Hills. These natural advantages of curative waters, smokeless skies, invigorating vistas, and proximity to the capital's wealth attracted a company of canny Scots merchants to erect a health spa of gargantuan proportions on thirteen fertile acres.
Expense was the least consideration for investors who engaged two of Scotland's most prestigious architects, John Dick Peddie and Charles George Hood Kinnear, in 1877 to design the extravagant Craiglockhart Hydropathic Institution. This was the era of sumptuous health retreats for beneficiaries of Britain's growing imperial bounty to "take the waters." More than twenty such establishments sprang up in late nineteenth-century Scotland beside the lochs and up the glens, promising respite from counting houses, mills, and coal-infused air. Peddie and Kinnear adopted a design similar to another luxurious spa they were building forty miles northwest of Craiglockhart, near the town of Dunblane. Both hydros would be massive fortresses of fine-cut ashlar sandstone playfully mixing Italian Renaissance motifs with the stolid mass of a Scots baronial manor.
In 1878, workers demolished an old farmhouse, laid foundations, and erected scaffolds on a grassy hillock facing west from Wester Craiglockhart Hill. Over the following months, the villa's imposing 280-foot-wide façade took shape, soaring from deep basements up three stories of bay windows and a classical balustrade to a pitched gray slate roof. Peddie and Kinnear mimicked fashionable styles from Doric columns on second-floor windows to a Japanese pagoda capping the five-story central tower's Italian belvedere. Wings at either end stretched behind and housed four floors of long corridors and multiple bedrooms. Turret-like gables and chimneys at irregular intervals lent the otherwise brooding structure a fairy-tale aura. A 50-by-20-foot swimming pool with Turkish bath in the basement offered, in the promoters' words, "all the varieties of hot and cold plunge, vapour, spray, needle, douche and electric baths."
Outdoors, gardeners cleared pathways through a forest of beech and Scotch pine. The landscape provided acres of lawns for an archery range, bowling greens, tennis courts, and croquet grounds. Harried Scottish burghers could exercise without straining themselves.
The mock classical exterior belied interior conveniences as modern as any in Victorian Britain, including indoor plumbing for water closets, showers, and baths. The Tobin system of interior ventilation, metal tubes within wall cavities to recirculate the air, filtered smoke from the many fireplaces in bedrooms and common rooms alike. Guests could tumble out of bed, step down a marble staircase, and skip along the 140-foot hallway to the dining room for a full breakfast of porridge, eggs, bacon, sausage, black pudding, toast, and tea. From there, they could wander into the billiard room, reading room, or Recreation Hall. Those in need would find the office of the medical superintendent, Dr. Thomas Duddingston Wilson, on the ground floor.
The Craiglockhart Hydropathic's elegant portals opened to Edinburgh's "worried wealthy" in 1880. Carriages and hansom cabs deposited patrons from Edinburgh at the foot of the stone walkway leading up a grass verge to the villa. Guests, while valuing the Hydro's amenities, proved too few to cover the costs of construction, maintenance, staff, and taxes. The owners sold it in 1891 to a fellow Scotsman, fifty-year-old architect James Bell. Bell already managed Peddie and Kinnear's Dunblane Hydro, which he left to live and work at Craiglockhart as principal shareholder and managing director. He renamed it the Edinburgh Hydropathic.
Accompanying Bell to Craiglockhart was Dunblane's head gardener, forty-one-year-old Henry Carmichael. The rugged and conscientious Carmichael brought his wife, Catherine, and their eleven children to live in one of the "Hydro Cottages" on the Craiglockhart property. Two of the older boys assisted their father with the lawns, shrubs, flowers, and woods. Catherine bore two more children, Archibald, known as Archie, and Elizabeth, at Craiglockhart. In tribute to Henry's employer, Elizabeth's middle name was Bell. Soon after the girl's birth, Catherine contracted typhoid. No doubt weakened from bearing and rearing thirteen children, she died on August 1, 1894. Henry cared for the children with the help of his oldest daughter, Janet, until 1897, when he married again. His second wife, Mary Comrie, gave the family one more son, John, and another daughter, Euphemia.
Like the Carmichael family, Craiglockhart's gardens flourished. Henry and his older sons seeded and mowed grass fields for the Hydro to host the Scottish Croquet Championship in July 1897. The precision with which the Carmichaels nurtured the grounds led to the championships' taking place there for seventeen more years. Bell took part in the competitions, and he proudly presented the prizes at the conclusion of each tournament.
Bell's astute management transformed the Hydro's fortunes. Its reputation spread, attracting rich patrons in want of rejuvenating therapies. The kitchen provided hearty Scottish fare, the Carmichaels maintained the grounds, maids kept the bedrooms in good order, and athletic staff guided overweight plutocrats in exercises and games to mitigate the effects of years of indulgence. Craiglockhart's popularity pointed toward good fortune as the new century approached.
Craiglockhart, along with the rest of Britain, mourned the death in 1901 of Queen Victoria, who had popularized holidays in Scotland with her acquisition of Balmoral Castle and her many summers there. The transition from Victorian to Edwardian eras with the accession of King Edward VII continued the Hydro's prosperity, as gentlemen and ladies from England as well as Scotland sought its cures. On Edward's death in 1910, his son George V inherited a kingdom whose subjects envisioned a long reign of peace.
Events in the summer of 1914 dispelled their illusions: the assassination by a Serbian nationalist of the Austrian grand duke at Sarajevo in June, Austria-Hungary's ultimatum to Serbia, the mobilization of continental armies from France to Russia, and, on August 4, Imperial Germany's invasion of Belgium. Britain declared war on Germany the same day, a decision few in Scotland or England questioned. The Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, appealed for volunteers to join his expanding New Army. Young men, among them the Edinburgh Hydropathic's patrons and workers, converged on military enlistment centers throughout the empire. In Scotland, volunteers were so numerous in early August that Edinburgh's recruiting bureau stayed open all night. Two of Henry Carmichael's sons, Archie and Alexander, enlisted in the Royal Scots Regiment in September. One grandson, John Henry Carmichael, also joined the colors in 1914 to serve in the Royal Field Artillery. Soon afterward, Henry's youngest son, John, who had been born at Craiglockhart, became a signaler in the 8th Battalion of the Regiment of Scottish Rifles, popularly called the Cameronians. With three sons, a grandson, and two of his nephews in the armed forces, Henry Carmichael relied on his other boys to help with the backbreaking work of keeping the grounds up to prewar standards. By this time, Carmichael was sixty-four.
The Carmichael boys, like all the other volunteers in the first wave of recruitment, were unprepared for warfare in the modern era. Raised on tales of imperial battles against Indian rebels and Zulu warriors, they harbored the patriotic delusion that battles would be decisive, few would die, and victory would be swift. Lieutenant Bernard Law Montgomery, who would live to command British armies in the Second World War, was not alone when he wrote, "At least the thing will be over in three weeks." The poet Rupert Brooke welcomed the release from peacetime ennui:
Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping.
Cavalry officers carried lances and their infantry counterparts brought swords across the English Channel to face the Germans. They were soon disabused of romantic ideas about gallant battles and a rapid conclusion. By Christmas, when many imagined they would have beaten the "Hun," a million would be dead. More were wounded in body and mind. Horses, swords, and lances proved useless against German firepower. Men were returning to Britain with tales of explosives whose force sucked the air out of their lungs and ripped open their eardrums. A man could die of internal injuries without a projectile touching him. A new kind of war was leaving men with new types of injury. It was enough to drive anyone crazy.
Despite the war, James Bell hosted the Scottish Croquet Championships at Craiglockhart as usual in September 1914. Spectators from Edinburgh and farther afield converged on Henry Carmichael’s immaculately trimmed lawns, while Bell competed against croquet masters from Scotland, England, Ireland, and Wales. Bell awarded the trophy to a twenty-four-year-old Englishman, Gaston Wace. Patriotic disapproval of such frivolity in wartime, however, forced Bell to cancel future competitions for the duration.
The Carmichael boys posted letters from their training camps and the front lines to the family at Craiglockhart. Private Archibald Carmichael, twenty-four years of age and a hearty five foot ten and 154 pounds, wrote to assure them of his good health before he embarked from Liverpool on May 25, 1915, aboard His Majesty's Transport (HMT) Empress of Britain. The ship reached Alexandria, Egypt, on June 1. Eight days later, Archie's 4th Battalion of Royal Scots sailed from Alexandria to reinforce their beleaguered comrades on the beaches of Germany's ally, Ottoman Turkey. Britain had launched an amphibious invasion on April 25 at Gallipoli, where British, Australian, New Zealand, and French troops suffered nine thousand casualties in the first week.
No further letters arrived from Archie, but his platoon commander, Lieutenant R. Mackie, wrote to his twenty-seven-year-old sister, Elizabeth, from Turkey. Mackie's family owned the shop where Elizabeth worked, J. W. Mackie & Sons confectioners, on Edinburgh's elegant Princes Street. "I grieve very much to have to send you such sad tidings of your brother Archie," the letter began. Mackie explained that a shell burst had struck her brother in the head, wounding him too severely for doctors to save him. Archie, he wrote, was "a quiet steady young soldier whom we all liked and now miss." Mackie hoped the family would take consolation knowing that Archie had not suffered. Henry Carmichael continued to tend the gardens, knowing that other sons, nephews, and a grandson faced the same dangers Archie had.
Scotland, unlike England's south coast that reverberated to artillery blasts from the French side of the English Channel, was aloof from the war until Sunday night, April 2, 1916. At 7:00 p.m., Edinburgh police announced that two German Navy zeppelins, the giant dirigibles invented by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin in 1900, were cruising over the North Sea toward the city. Similar airships had already bombed industrial centers and naval bases in England, but this was their first foray so far north. Although Edinburgh lacked air defenses, the fire brigade, Red Cross, and security services mobilized to deal with casualties and fires.
The first zeppelin appeared just before midnight, bombing the docks at Edinburgh's Port of Leith and setting Innes & Grieve's Scotch whisky warehouse on fire. Following the course of the river known as the Water of Leith, it bombarded neighborhoods on both banks. The high explosives and incendiaries devastated two hotels, several houses, and many business premises. One bomb narrowly missed the highest landmark in the city center, Edinburgh Castle.
Soldiers stationed in the castle manned its famed One O'Clock Gun, a 32-pound ceremonial cannon that had fired daily since 1861 for ships' captains to set their clocks. Blank charges, however, did not deter the airships. The second zeppelin trailed the first over the city, releasing most of its explosives on empty fields.
The raid, visible from Craiglockhart, lasted thirty-five minutes. Seventeen German incendiaries and seven high-explosive shells had taken thirteen lives and left twenty-four wounded. Among the dead were a one-year-old baby and a soldier, Private Thomas Donohue of the Royal Scots, on leave from the trenches in France.
The war, which Edinburgh's citizens knew at second hand from newspapers and their sons' letters, had come to Scotland. Its mental victims were not far behind.
chapter two
The War Hospital
At the outbreak of the late European War," wrote British Army psychiatrist Dr. C. Stanford Read, "there was little foresight shown or preparations made for a large influx of mental cases." Dr. Read ran the army's only mental asylum, the Royal Victoria Hospital's D Block in Netley, Hampshire. Founded in 1870, D Block was better suited to locking up the incurably insane than to returning men to normal life. It had only 121 beds for enlisted men and 3 for officers, insufficient for the thousands of mental cases the Great War was turning out every month. The government needed more beds, more hospitals, more psychiatrists, more nurses. It opened psychiatric institutions, starting in November 1914 with a special hospital for officers beside London's Kensington Palace, and Moss Side Red Cross Military Hospital at Maghull near Liverpool. Maghull filled to capacity within two months, forcing the War Office to requisition additional hospitals throughout the British Isles-"hospitals," not "asylums," wrote Dr. Read, "to obviate, if possible, the stigma that might be felt to attach to the name." In 1915 alone, nervous collapse claimed 21,474 officers.
As the Somme bled Britain's armed forces throughout the summer of 1916, the War Office turned to James Bell's Edinburgh Hydropathic. Its swimming pool, Turkish bath, common rooms, and twelve rural acres offered essentials for traumatized officers to begin their recovery. The government requisitioned the Hydro, and Bell moved to another property he owned nearby. The Hydro required little renovation. The massive villa had beds for 174 patients with two or three to a room. Its administrative offices easily converted to psychiatric consulting rooms. It was as if Peddie and Kinnear had designed Craiglockhart for victims of shell shock.
Craiglockhart War Hospital opened in October 1916 for "officers only." Segregating officers from men was common practice in all European armies. No one questioned the separation of officers from "other ranks" in any realm, be it dining, accommodation, or, in this case, mental health treatment. Military necessity provided an additional motive for concentrating medical resources on officers. They were desperately needed at the front, where they were dying and breaking down out of all proportion to their numbers.
Copyright © 2023 by Charles Glass. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
