Description:These minutes record the management of the two Birmingham War Hospitals at Rubery Hill and Hollymoor between 1916 and 1922. During 1914 it became clear that many more beds would be needed than the existing twenty-three military hospitals could supply. The Board of Control resolved to increase capacity by repurposing asylums, transferring inmates to local institutions.<small><sup>1</sup></small> Nine areas were identified each with at least one asylum conversion based on medical suitability and rail accessibility. These twenty-four hospitals would accommodate over 31,000 patients, treating almost 500,000 men (approximately 18% of all sick and wounded from all fronts).
In 1915 Birmingham City Council formed a War Hospitals Committee and with the assistance of the City Architect and Surveyor altered the buildings, the rail station and approach roads at Rubery to enable ambulance access. To maximise patient beds, ‘hutments to accommodate 70 nurses, including sleeping accommodation, recreation room, baths etc.’ were ordered. It was agreed that ‘all the Orderlies (about 250 in number) shall be accommodated in tents’,<small><sup>2</sup></small> although they were first installed in hutments.
Birmingham City Asylum, Rubery Hill and Hollymoor Hospital, Northfield became first and second Birmingham War Hospitals, receiving their first patients in June and July 1915. Most of the nursing staff was retained, with 276 additions, including forty-seven fully trained sisters and new appointments of the best available local medical specialists. Frontline demand for medical expertise produced widespread retention problems in domestic hospitals, often solved by employing qualified American and other allies, or occasionally women.
Initially Rubery had 630 beds but early in 1916 the War Office warned that substantial expansion was necessary ‘in view of the possibility arising which the permanent beds in all the hospitals in the country might not, for a short time, be sufficient to meet’. Dismissing a £30,000 proposal to accommodate 728 additional beds and extra staff, the Board of Control recommended the conversion of all available rooms to wards and that ‘a number of temporary beds might be made up on the floor in the recreation room and corridors’ for convalescents to be supplied ‘with two mattresses, one straw palliasse and the other composed of fibre or flock’. Rubery increased to a thousand beds ‘by allowing less sleeping place per patient, and later to 1,100 by accommodating men ‘under canvas in camps (or in billets)’. Hollymoor increased capacity to 930: seventy through space-saving, one hundred in tents and 130 in emergency beds. The ‘possibility’ anticipated by the War Office was the Battle of the Somme. All the beds were needed.
<font color="#666633"><small><sup>1</sup> Sir Marriott Cooke and Hubert Bond, 'History of the Asylum War Hospitals in England and Wales: Report to the Secretary of State for the Home Office', (London: H.M.S.O., 1920) Cmnd 899, p.47
<sup>2</sup> War Hospital Committee Minutes, 15 April 1915</small></font>