![valley of war hospital valley of war hospital](http://explorepahistory.com/kora/files/1/2/1-2-EE5-25-ExplorePAHistory-a0k0r8-a_349.jpg)
Before it reopened as a museum, the heritage building performed some more essential work. "The dramas, not always grasped so well as the comics, are received with questioning whispers, though evident enjoyment, from which one concludes that Indian troops would be content to leave the dignity and complexity of the drama to their Western brethren," signed off a TOI report about the evenings at the hospital which-20,000 patients and 1200 surgeries later-closed in 1919.
#Valley of war hospital movie#
Besides, six "entertainments committee" members from the Red Cross and the Young Men's Christian Association would put up regular shows at the hospital including movie screenings, concerts, comics, dramas and the playing of the Pathe's Gazette, the first British newsreel. Curiously, among the "comforts" provided to the hospital were packs of cards, cheroots and cigarettes. Dr Row and Dr Bhajekar became colonels while the other staff members received rank as majors. In 1917, the government took over the administration of war hospitals and the hospital became a military institution. When the then viceroy of India, Lord Hardinge, visited the two airy ground floor wards and the firstfloor officers' wards in 1916, o ne soldier, who had lost his speech as a result of the bullet wound in his head, tried to shake hands with him "although it was some time before he could make himself understood" stated a TOI report.
#Valley of war hospital for free#
Well-known practitioners including Dr Row, Dr Bhajekar, Dr Deshmukh and Dr Shirgaonkar, worked for free at the hospital which saw 200 more beds in 1915. While the British soldiers were taken to a military hospital in Colaba, seven of 292 Indian soldiers were ferried in special motor cars and motor lorries to the Lady Hardinge Hospital. They came as part of a nearly-300-strong army smoking bidis on a steamer from Basra that also carried cigar-toting British soldiers apart from a few Turkish and German prisoners. Among the first users of the caps and flannel garments made by Parsi women, the pillow cases made by Hindu women and the sleeping suits made by Muslim women of the city were seven Indian soldiers who had returned wounded from the fighting around the Persian Gulf in December 1914. Built at an initial cost of Rs 1 lakh, the hospital started out with 108 beds whose linen came from the women's branch of the Bombay Presidency War and Relief Fund.
![valley of war hospital valley of war hospital](https://live.staticflickr.com/2843/13854447955_9a87783038_b.jpg)
Made of asbestos to keep out the heat, the operation theatre was connected to the museum structure by a covered passage. Temporary buildings were erected in the compound to be used as operating theatre, dispensary, quarters and administrative offices. Within a month, G Wittet, consulting architect of the then Government of Bombay, turned the unfinished galleries into medical wards. With its high ceilings and ample ventilation, the building was deemed healthy enough to nurse wounded Indian army men returning from various postings away from the main theatre of war by the general committee of the Bombay Presidency Branch of the Imperial Indian War Fund. The building was nearing completion when the world teetered on the brink of the Great War in November 1914. Antiques from the Buddhist site of Mirpurkhas, excavated by renowned archeologist Henry Cousens in 1909, were among the other prized possessions of the "King's Museum building", as it was called then. A plaster cast head of the Buddha created and donated by Lockwood Kipling, father of author Rudyard Kipling, in1906 was the museum's first artefact. Exhibits came in even before the formal inauguration. A foundation stone was laid by the Prince of Wales on Novemand the museum was named the Prince of Wales Museum of Western India. Later, it was resolved that a public museum and library would be built to commemorate the visit of the Prince of Wales to Bombay for which the government provided a semi-circular plot of land called the 'Crescent site' on the condition that the citizens of Bombay create an autonomous body and undertake the responsibility of running the museum. While the museum formally opened to the public on January10, 1922, it was in 1904 that a committee including Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, Sir Ibrahim Rahimtulla and Sir Vithaldas Thackersey, was formed to determine the feasibility of a museum. That the museum building served as a military hospital during World War I, is one of many colourful pieces of trivia that jump at you from the highlight reel of this privately-funded portal to the past that completed a century last week. Inside the airy galleries of Fort's Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) building back in1915, you would've found live horizontal soldiers instead of dead vertical warriors. Neither Indus Valley relics nor the Ashoka edicts. Neither Assyrian reliefs nor Japanese carvings. Neither Chinese ceramics nor European paintings.