Greenwich Hospital next demands our attention, as once the great home and asylum for the seamen of the navy, although now a hospital only. It was founded in the year 1694, in memory of Queen Mary, who had long designed the foundation of such an institution. It was also built as a monument of the great victory of La Hogue. Sir Christopher Wren furnished the designs and plans for the edifice gratuitously—a noble gift from a professional architect, and valuable to boot. The object of the foundation was “to encourage the seamen of this [pg 275]kingdom to continue the industry and skilfulness of their employments, by which they had for a long time distinguished themselves throughout the world;” “to encourage them to continue also their ancient reputation for the courage and constancy manifested in engagements for the defence and honour of their native country;” “to invite greater numbers of his Majesty’s subjects to betake themselves to the sea;” and so forth. In sooth, the condition of the Greenwich pensioner was not, for a long period, particularly enviable. On admission he was required to relinquish any pension he might have gained in the service. Maimed men received only tenpence a day, and a shilling a week, intended for tobacco and the humbler comforts of life. The Commissioners at one time stated that “the wives are wholly ignored, and their circumstances are deplorable.” From the Hospital they received only the broken meat of the hall and the rations of men on leave of absence. The wives were often reduced to the parish. No wonder the poor old veteran used to be so glad for a sixpence or even a “screw” of tobacco in return for his tough yarns!
The system has been entirely changed. At present all are out-pensioners, and when in good health can follow other employments. On the 26th September, 1865, the Greenwich exodus commenced. On that day nearly 200 out of the 900 pensioners of Greenwich Hospital who had accepted the Admiralty offer of pension allowance, in conformity with an Act passed in the previous session of Parliament, left that establishment for the various parts of the country they had selected for their future home. Since that time the whole have left; and the institution which, only a few years ago, had upwards of 2,000 inmates, now contains only a few hundred sick and disabled. Greenwich Hospital is a changed institution, and the system of rewarding those who have spent their lives in the service of their country is made more consistent with humanity, morality, and common sense. Instead of hundreds of elderly but still hale and athletic veterans wandering listlessly about the terraces and colonnades of Greenwich, and, if the truth must be told, sometimes overstepping the bounds of sobriety in the numerous public-houses of the neighbourhood, there are but a limited number of indoor-pensioners, and those are such as may be fittingly provided for in a place bearing the name of a hospital. They are disabled seamen in the strict sense of the term—poor worn-out old fellows who require to be taken care of, and who have, perhaps, no one but the nation to take care of them. The blind, the doting, the crippled, find comfortable board and lodging, and, without doubt, attentive nursing in the national hospital. But, as there are constantly new applications for admission, it is probable that there will always be a few hundreds in the establishment. On the first and third Thursday in each month a board sits at Somerset House to consider the claims of applicants for admission, and those who are passed are sent in an omnibus to the hospital. But for the large body of men who, though too old to reef top-sails and to work guns, are not too old to do something for their own living, and to wish for liberty and domestic life, there is the allowance before mentioned from the funds of the hospital, and the power of living where and how they please.
“What the average pension granted may be,” said a writer in the Cornhill Magazine, “we have no means of knowing, but if some of the men have a larger sum than £36 10s., so also many of them will have much less, and will be unable to command in their homes the standard of living with which the Hospital supplied them. They elect to go, we take it, partly because they know the government of the place is to be changed, that it is to become a [pg 276]hospital in the narrower sense of the word, and that there will be less freedom of ingress and egress for them henceforth; but this is only part of a more general feeling in favour of liberty among them, at which nobody who has inquired into their condition can wonder. The authorities at Greenwich Hospital have contrived to make a palace as dull as a prison. The men have had no amusements but a library inconveniently furnished. They have not been allowed to have flower-pots in their windows, nor to receive friends and visitors in private; and it is not many years ago since they were forbidden to walk on the terraces. Some of the punishments, too—such as being compelled to wear a yellow collar and do scavengers’ work—have been harsh and injudicious. All these things have combined with the monastic character of the place to give a character of ennui and listlessness to the Greenwich pensioner’s life, which must have struck every observing visitor. Dulness has been relieved within the walls chiefly by temptation without.
GREENWICH HOSPITAL.
“Since the age when Queen Mary pictured to herself Greenwich as a place of pious repose, where the sailor might end his days in the fear of God, it has become the favourite haunt of the pleasure-loving cockney—an emporium of shrimps, a reservoir of beer. Those quaint figures—the ‘geese’ and ‘blue-bottles’ of local slang—lounging about under the trees of the park, and loitering through the streets in the dress of another age, have been regarded by the holiday-maker from the metropolis as parts of the amusements of the place. They have been paid for yarns in drink and stray shillings, and have found the doctrine that sailors lived only for grog and tobacco accepted by their admirers as one of the glories of the British navy. It has been well remarked that, as a whole, the old fellows have been more decent in their lives than we had a right to expect under the [pg 277]peculiar circumstances. But a chapter might be written on Greenwich morality and its effects on the parish rates, which nobody would care to bind up with the naval histories of Brenton or James, but which would help to reconcile the reader to the break-up of an institution which has had much in it to kindle the imagination and justify the pride of our countrymen.
GREENWICH PENSIONERS.
“The break-up is, after all, one in which people will acquiesce rather than one at which they will rejoice. It was a noble as well as a pious idea to gather under the roofs of a grand edifice—at once a dwelling-place and a naval monument, and placed on the shores of a river itself one of the chief sources of our maritime strength—the survivors of each generation of warriors against the enemy or the storm. Here the traditions of one age blended gradually with the experience of the next; stories of Shovel were passed on to those who fought under [pg 278]Hawke; the conqueror with Rodney lived to welcome the heroes of Trafalgar—not as bedridden or imbecile men, though they might be somewhat shattered—but still able to enjoy life, and to give the vividness of reality to the narratives of the past. All phases of naval service were represented. One of the ‘saucy Arethusa’s’ smoked his pipe with an old Agamemnon, and men who had first smelt powder on the Canadian lakes listened reverently to the recollections of those who had seen L’Orient explode in thunder at the Nile. Greenwich Hospital will always be a great and useful institution—a mighty boon, whether to the sick nursed within or to the poor pensioned without its walls.”
Before leaving Greenwich we must certainly pay a visit to the Observatory, a building which has such intimate relations with the sea. The account which follows is that of M. Esquiros,[82] who particularly studied all our institutions connected with maritime interests:—