The best part of this book is its title; the worst, its illustrations, few of which can be made out even with a magnifying glass. It is about Sholing, Netley and the adjacent shores of Southampton Water. The area in which Mr Hoare is interested is not, and never was, an island. It is a peninsula, running north to south. The author goes to great lengths to suggest, nay to prove, that it was called "Spike Island". (He must, to make use of such a good book-title.) There are a lot of spikey gorse-bushes around; "spike" is the local argot for workhouse; there were gypsies who called them selves "pikeys". "It was claimed," writes Mr Hoare, that convicts on their way to Botany Bay were chained by the leg to a spike stuck in the ground. H'm.
The first 30 pages of the book are all about the author's boyhood, mainly at Sholing on the north-tosouth peninsula. He is descended from Catholics who left Ireland because of the Famine. There is a lot - doubtlessly authentic - about the history of Southampton, raided in times-past by Vikings, Genoese pirates and such. In quieter days it attracted visitors for the sea-bathing. On the southern tip of the north-tosouth peninsula, just across the creek from Netley, a fine abbey had been built, which fell into ruin with the Reformation.
In the aftermath of the Crimean War, Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale and others started taking an interest in Netly (conveniently close to the Queen's holiday-home at Osborne), as a possible site for a military hospital. This was eventually built in the l860s, so huge that the postman rode through the wards on a bicycle.
Netley Hospital's provenance was such that it had to employ nurses who were far from satisfactory, falling short of perfection in their work and conspicuously in their morals, so that some of the male staff regarded sex with them as one of the perks of their office. Eventually it was ordained that the nurses should treat only those patients who were too sick to be interested in them.
It was no ordinary hospital. In its very centre stood the skeleton of an elephant, surrounded by dozens of heads of horned creatures and stuffed snakes by the score. There were innumerable surgical implements, as well as "implements by which man ingeniously shortens his neighbour's life and seeks to preserve his own" - a lesson in the survival of the fittest. One of the exhibits was a lance which had passed through the body of a lancer after his horse threw him. The lance had to be sawn in two before it could be withdrawn, but the lancer survived and was perfectly cured. Neatly stacked on shelves was a collection of decapitated and mummified heads of natives of the British Empire scientifically labelled "Kaffir Tumbuki tribe", "Kaffir Amulosali tribe", "Hottentot" or "Maori".
Netley Military Hospital (which included a lunatic asylum and the ghost of a grey lady) was an object of great interest to Queen Victoria who often visited it from Osborne to talk to the brave soldiers from all over her Empire; white, brown and black. Even German prisoners were treated there, guarded lest they be up to no good.
The description of Netley Military Hospital as it was affected by wars great and small from 1870 to 1945 is the most interesting part of this book. But what it has to do with "Spike Island", God only knows.
Charles Chenevix Trench's most recent book is Grace's Card, Irish Catholic Landlords 1690-1800, published by Mercier Press