Exeter War Hospitals - WW1
35,000 patients from all over the Empire were treated in Exeter’s Red Cross temporary war hospitals between 1914 and 1919, making it one of the largest voluntary provincial medical centres. The Exeter hospitals were first-line hospitals, taking patients direct from ambulance trains from Southampton, rather than purely caring for convalescents as the majority of Red Cross hospitals did. Patients were treated for all sorts of conditions including the effects of gassing, wounds caused by shells or bullets, loss of limbs, eye injuries and illnesses ranging from mumps to ‘trench fever’ and tuberculosis. The hospitals were equipped with operating theatres, x-ray units, and an electrical treatment unit, and were staffed by local consultant medical and trained nursing staff as well as by hundreds of Red Cross volunteers.
Exeter’s First World War Red Cross Hospitals were amongst the earliest to be commissioned by the War Office after war broke out. Ready by the end of August, they took their first patients at the beginning of October and by Christmas 1914 they provided more Red Cross beds than any other provincial town in Britain. This was a lead they maintained under their redoubtable administrator Georgiana Buller, the only woman to keep her post as Administrator, in defiance of military protocol, under the War Office takeover of large Red Cross hospitals in 1916.
- VA 1 - West of England Eye Hospital - mobilised October 4th 1914
- VA 2 - Modern School (Bishop Blackall) - mobilised October 5th 1914
- VA 3 - The City Hospital / Children's Home, Heavitree - mobilised October 31st 1914
- VA 4 - Topsham Barracks / Stone house - mobilised February 6th 1915
- VA 5 - The College Hostel (Bradninch House)
- VA 6 - Bishop's Palace (from 1917)
- VA 7 - Streatham Hall Temporary Hospital (from 1917)
- VA 8 - Southernhay various houses