Louise Margaret Military Hospital

The Louise Margaret Hospital was opened in 1898 to cater for British Army soldiers' wives and children in the military town of Aldershot Garrison. It started with fifty-three beds and about half of its cases were maternity patients. In 1958 it became the Louise Margaret Maternity Hospital, and closed in 1995. The old hospital is part of a group of historic buildings with legal protection and, as of 2016, is expected to be used in a redevelopment project.

The Duchess of Connaught, formerly Princess Louise Margaret, laid the foundation stone for the hospital bearing her name on 1 March 1897, just as her husband, the Duke of Connaught, was taking over Aldershot Command. She declared the new building open on 25 July 1898 in a ceremony with a military band, guard of honour and a service with three clergymen. A bouquet of pink roses was presented by an officer's daughter before the Matron, Miss Hodgson, and the Commanding Officer, William Watson Pike, a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps, showed her round.

The new yellow-brick building with slate roofs echoed the construction materials used by its larger neighbour, the Cambridge Military Hospital. It cost £12,600 to build and had "sanitary blocks" incorporated in "Italianate" corner towers towards the back. There were fifty-three beds arranged in eleven wards of different sizes, including wards named for Queen Victoria, the Duke of Connaught and Lord Lansdowne. The staircases had shallow steps, supposed to help nurses in long dresses run up and down. A "fine" tiled operating theatre was added in 1908 and officially opened by the Duchess in 1909. It had a new sort of "brilliant light" and Doulton basins and sinks "fitted with the latest kind of mixing valves for hot and cold water with elbow-action and sprays". Within a couple of years the hospital was treating around 1000 cases annually: about half in its General Division and half in its Maternity Division which had twenty-five "swing cots" along with twenty-five beds.

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Wikipedia