Prince charming When crowds flocked to see Edward on city visit
A century ago this week, the then Prince of Wales paid a spectacularly successful visit to Bristol. Eugene Byrne looks back on the events of the day, and the legacy of just one of the many engagements he had.
THE weather on Friday, June 10, 1921, was perfect, and, if the gushing coverage in the local press was anything to go by, so was Bristol’s royal visitor.
“The Prince himself was thoroughly attuned to the happy spirit of the occasion, and presented a debonair figure — bronzed, but alert and vivacious even after all the severe exactions of his tour in Wales.
“Bristolians were enabled to see for themselves the Prince’s smile which has become famous throughout two hemispheres … There is nothing trivial or purely whimsical in the idea that ‘the smile’ has become an asset of Imperial value, more especially as is reinforced by all the qualities which go towards the composition of an engaging and persuasive personality.”
And so the leader column in the Western Daily Press went on.
Edward, Prince of Wales, was approaching the height of a popularity which would be sustained up to the point where, as King Edward VIII, he abdicated in 1936.
All that was in the future, though. The Prince was 27 years old, goodlooking and single. The government had been desperate to keep him from front-line service in the First World War, but he had at least contrived to see something of the trenches, which made him popular with war veterans.
His father, King George V, seeing the way things had gone for many of the royal houses of Europe, more or less invented the notion of royal visits both in Britain and the empire and dominions. The young prince was a huge public relations asset, charming all he came into contact with. He would later become bored with his glad-handing duties, positively resentful of them, in fact. But this was all in the future.
His five-hour visit to Bristol was a triumph. In terms of numbers turning out to see him, the welcome he got from Bristol was possibly the most enthusiastic reception any royal has had here before or since.
The Prince arrived at Temple Meads in the uniform of a Colonel of the Welsh Guards. He had recently completed a tour of the Empire and Dominions and was driven ten miles around the streets of the city over five hours with huge crowds cheering themselves hoarse.
He inspected ex-servicemen in Queen Square, shook hands with many of them, watched part of a game between Gloucestershire and
Australia at the County Ground, had lunch with the Society of Merchant Venturers, tea at the Mansion House, and opened the Royal West of England Academy’s School of Architecture. At the Colston Hall he received the honorary freedom of the city and smiled broadly when someone in the audience yelled out the Australian greeting, “Cooee!!”
He also laid the foundation stone of a brand new hospital.
The Homeopathic (or Homoeopathic, or in the usual spelling of the time, Homoeopathic) Hospital on St Michael’s Hill would be a brand new medical facility for Bristol.
Homeopathy had been around since it was devised by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann in the late 1700s, and was certainly being practised in Bristol by the mid-19th century.
It was based on the idea that “like cures like” and that illness can be cured by minuscule, highly diluted substances, often to the point where they barely exist in the solution. Homeopaths believe that the dilution still contains the “vital essence” of the substance.
Then, as now, it was denounced as quackery by some medical professionals, but in an age of less scientific understanding, it had plenty of adherents. Certainly until later Victorian times you could say that homeopathic treatments were often as good as conventional medicine, and usually a lot less drastic.
There was probably a homoeopathic dispensary in Bristol by the 1830s, and we know that in 1852, Dr Francis Black, who had studied under Hahnemann himself, opened a dispensary in Clifton.
While some respected medical men endorsed homeopathy, others dabbled in it, curious to know if there was anything to it. Among the public at large, it was far more respectable than it is nowadays. By the early 1900s, there was even a 12-bed homeopathic hospital in Brunswick Square, supported financially by various philanthropic individuals.
It would be philanthropy on a much bigger scale that would build the hospital in Cotham.
In 1915, Captain Robert Bruce Melville Wills was serving in the Royal Engineers when he was killed on the Western Front. Two years later, his father, Walter Melville Wills, proposed building a brand new hospital for Bristol as a permanent memorial to his son. He acquired the site – Cotham House
and its grounds – for the new building which he intended to present to the city. He could afford it because, of course, he was one of the wealthy Wills tobacco dynasty.
After some political to-ing and fro-ing with the Bristol Royal Infirmary and the General Hospital, neither of which would agree to the terms of their involvement, Wills was approached by Dr Christopher
Bodman, a surgeon at the Brunswick Square hospital who suggested a specifically homeopathic hospital.
Wills agreed and so it was that the Prince attended the ceremony on June 10, 1921. The building was designed by Sir George Oatley and his brother-in-law George Lawrence, and was completed by 1925 when it was officially opened by Princess Helena Victoria, one of Queen Victoria’s numerous grandchildren.
Wills also paid for the creation of the hospital gardens, which would prove hugely popular with patients and staff alike. They included a “physic garden” of medicinal plants.
The extent of homeopathic treatment at the hospital is difficult to pin down, as for much of its history it functioned as a regular hospital in which surgery was carried out and conventional drugs prescribed alongside homoeopathic treatments.
It was incorporated into the National Health Service in 1948 and continued taking in-patients until the mid-1980s but even after this it continued to serve outpatients for some years, even after most of the site was sold in the 1990s to Bristol University by the NHS to become student halls of residence as well as the home of both Bristol universities’ Centre for Child and Adolescent Health.
In the early 2000s it was renovated and has since become Hampton House, a health and counselling centre for university students as well as housing a multifaith chaplaincy. Meanwhile, homeopathic services on the NHS were moved to the new South Bristol Community Hospital.
By now, though, pressure from
the rest of the medical community to end homeopathic treatments, or rather to end NHS funding of homoeopathic treatments, was beginning to grow. Campaigners marshalled a huge amount of evidence demonstrating the limited effectiveness of homeopathy, which they said was little more than a placebo.
Even so, Bristol (being Bristol!) was one of the last places in the country where the NHS continued to pay for such treatments, until this ended in 2018-19.
On June 10, 1921, the Prince’s car made its way to Cotham from the County Ground. The Prince had congratulated Alf Dipper on scoring 40 and had charmed the crowds by stopping to speak to a boy wearing the unusual uniform of a QEH pupil.
As the car was making its way past cheering crowds, Mrs Melville Wills placed a copper box under the foundation stone of the hospital containing that day’s editions of the Western Daily Press, the Bristol Times & Mirror, a programme of the day’s events and some coins dated 1920 and 1921.
The crowds around the hospital site were dense, and many fainted in the hot weather. The band of the South Midland Royal Army Medical Corps played as the car pulled into view.
The Prince had since changed from his army uniform into civilian clothes, complete with bowler hat.
Accompanied by the Lord Mayor and other dignitaries he met Melville Wills who made a short speech and then took the trowel to lay the stone, slapping on the mortar, we are told, with gusto before saying: “I declare this stone well and truly laid.”
The Reverend Doctor Arnold Thomas gave a benediction and all joined in singing the national anthem. The Prince was then introduced to 200 disabled ex-servicemen, who had been invited to the occasion and would be given lunch. He spoke to each one in turn.
He then made his way back towards his car which was taking him to the next engagement, a brief stop at the university. As he was about to get into the car a girl dashed towards him, “obviously with the object of embracing him, but a watchful detective embraced her instead, and her hope was rudely but kindly shattered.”