Форт Питт: Наполеоновский форт в Чатэме и Кенте

Napoleonic fort in Chatham, Kent

Fort Pitt is a Napoleonic era fort on the high ground of the boundary between Chatham and Rochester, Kent. A fort on the site was proposed as early as 1779 by Hugh Debbieg, then Chief Engineer at Chatham. In 1783 the land was purchased by the Board of Ordnance and 4.5 million bricks were deposited there in preparation for construction. (Nothing immediately followed, however, and the bricks were instead used for the rebuilding of the Lines). and, until the opening of Netley Hospital in 1863, it was considered the de facto Headquarters of the Army Medical Department. Fort Pitt Hospital closed in the 1920s, since when the surviving buildings have housed a girls' grammar school.]] In 1793 Chatham was one of five sites selected by the new Army Medical Board for the establishment of a General (as opposed to regimental) Hospital. Two years later, at the start of the Napoleonic Wars, the hospital was finally opened in an attempt to re establish a General Hospital for the army at Chatham; but it did not prove successful (a later report by the Commissioners of Military Enquiry described the facility at that time as being fully equipped with an establishment of 'Officers, Stewards, Nurses, &c.', but 'without a single patient'). Over the next year or so, the hospital was gradually run down and it closed in April 1805; later that same year the building was turned over to barrack accommodation, A further concern (with the potential of invasion in mind) was to guard the approaches to Rochester Bridge, which was a key river crossing on the most direct route from the south east coast to London. By 1813 it was more or less complete (although some works remained to be done). This also functioned as a multi tiered gun platform, and had a flat roof for gun emplacements. the former was linked to the fort by a covered way.</blockquote>

According to the same description the central tower of the fort was described as being <blockquote>'armed at the summit with two long guns to batter in front, and two carronades to protect the gorge. This was at the epoch when the rage for building martello towers had seized the British government [ ] The tower in Fort Pitt is very lofty, and its object is to command at a considerable distance the brow of a hill which raises itself with an insensible slope in front of Fort Pitt'. At the same time, the nearby Fort Clarence was converted into a military lunatic asylum. In around 1820, York Hospital, Chelsea (the Army's last remaining General Hospital) was closed to serving soldiers, and Fort Pitt began to be established as Britain's principal military hospital. In 1822 the casemates were said to be 'at present inhabited by invalids, who compose the only garrison of this fortress'. The H plan hospital building was flanked by smaller blocks to the north and to the south, which served as officers' quarters. Fort Pitt also functioned as the Medical Staff Depôt: 'all candidates for commissions, and young medical officers who had just received commissions, were in the first instance sent down to Fort Pitt; partly in order that, when the exigences of the public service permitted, they might receive a certain amount of training in the special work as army surgeons, and partly also because the Staff Depôt formed a convenient place of residence for them until they could be drafted to their respective destinations'. In 1816 the Director General of the Army Medical Department, James McGrigor, had brought from Chelsea a collection of anatomical specimens and other items of interest with a view to establishing a medical museum at Fort Pitt. At the same time he endowed a library on the site, and issued instructions to the army's medical officers stationed around the globe to send six monthly reports of prevalent diseases, treatments and various treatments which were collated at Fort Pitt and made available for analysis and study. The museum and library expanded prodigiously over the years and Fort Pitt became an important centre for the study of military and tropical medicine. in a former barrack block, (albeit as a place of 'observation and temporary probation' rather than one of ongoing care and treatment). By the 1850s Fort Pitt was a major military hospital, with most of the soldiers invalided to Britain from abroad assessed there prior to their discharge. This included most of the sick and wounded from the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny Florence Nightingale described, at that time, the process whereby 'When a ship arrives with invalids, the bedridden are carried to Fort Pitt, and the convalescents are marched to St Mary's Casemates'. (Those at Fort Pitt were under 'hospital discipline', whereas those at St Mary's were under 'a kind of regimental discipline under the adjutant'.) During the period of the war in Crimea a total of 14,700 soldiers passed through the Central Invalid Depôt of the British Army at Chatham. At some stage the blockhouse at Fort Pitt had been converted into a 'casemate hospital' with five casemated wards. In the 1840 50s two of the casemates were appropriated for the sick women and children of the garrison, for whom it was the only hospital provision available; in the year ending March 1857, 26 sick women (and 7 infectious), 12 sick children (and 31 infectious) and 20 lying in women were treated there. In 1854 psychiatric patients were returned to Fort Pitt from Yarmouth (the hospital there having been requisitioned by the Navy) and housed temporarily 'in the "pit" or casemates', a place described as being 'most unfit': 'even the temporary confinement of a lunatic, in a place so destitute of the means of ameliorating his mental condition, must materially lessen the chance of his recovery'. In 1860 Fort Pitt was selected by Florence Nightingale as the initial site for the new Army Medical School; however, this was only a temporary measure pending the imminent opening of a new General Military Hospital at Netley, near Southampton, which took place in 1863.

The Army Sanitary Commissioners had in 1863 approved a proposal for the facilities at Fort Pitt to be converted into 'a Hospital for the whole of the troops of the garrison, including the Royal Artillery, the Royal Engineers, and the three depots battalions of infantry'. The following year additional buildings were erected 'for the reception of the whole of the troops of the garrison requiring hospital treatment'; at the same time, the old separate Garrison Hospital within the lines at Brompton was closed and its premises converted into barracks. A major expansion of the hospital at Fort Pitt was begun in 1910, necessitating the demolition of the western wings of the old H plan hospital and also the removal of the Napoleonic era tower/keep, to make way for a new central hospital block (which was linked to the old hospital on one side, and a new West Wing on the other). This pavilion plan hospital extension (which contained two new operating theatres, an x ray department and other modern facilities) opened just before the outbreak of war in 1914.

In 1929 the Chatham Education Board bought the vacant Fort Pitt from the War Office, and the site was converted into a Girls' Technical School. The school, now known as Fort Pitt Grammar School, remains on the site and has added a number of new buildings. The neighbouring University for the Creative Arts building occupies the old blockhouse site and some of the original brickwork remains visible at the sides of the building. (the Rochester campus of the University for the Creative Arts now stands on its site). Nevertheless, much of the outer walls of the fort survive including parts of the outer defences which extend into the adjacent recreation grounds to the east and west. Furthermore, several of the old hospital buildings remain in place as part of the school. The Music House (the former 'insane asylum') in the school grounds and the “Crimea Wing” teaching block (the original Napoleonic era hospital) are both listed buildings, and the West Wing of the 1914 extension (its main central block having been destroyed in a fire in 1973).

The Fort Pitt Military Cemetery, created initially to serve the hospital, lies a quarter of a mile to the south of the fort by the A229 road from Rochester to Maidstone. The graves, dating from the mid 19th century onwards, include 290 of Commonwealth service personnel from the World Wars, 265 from World War I, who lie in an extensive plot, and 25 from World War II who are mainly buried in a group north of that plot.

As a boy, Charles Dickens lived at 2 Ordnance Terrace, a quarter of a mile to the east of Fort Pitt, and the fort is the location of the fictional duel between Mr. Nathaniel Winkle and Dr. Slammer in his novel The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.