Food For The Ships

Should the ships be supplied locally or centrally? By 1901, at the beginning of the last major smallpox outbreak, there were anomalies arising, no doubt from the problems with central supply. For instance, fish came direct from Grimsby, well wrapped in ice, whereas in 1899 it had come from G Vinten, High Street, Dartford, as also did ice, used therapeutically. Milk, often bad in hot weather, came from Brockley, SE London, but meat and vegetables from Dartford (supplied by the inappropriately named D Bacon).  Coal came from Erith.

Sadly, with the help of the Long Reach gate porter, the rules about entry to the hospitals were broke disastrously by being allowed to take their delivery carts up to the pier head on their verbal assurance that they had been vaccinated. The rules were anyone entering the grounds had to have been vaccinated. 

When delivery man Graham developed smallpox two to three weeks later, starting an outbreak in Erith, Dr Ricketts (Medical Superintendent) had to accept that he had been infected in the hospital compound. After this, he personally vaccinated all the delivery men and took their photographs which were held at the gate lodge for the porters to use for identification purposes.

William C Bates, one of the vaccinated men in the gatehouse book.

Meat was required for beef tea, the main nutritional support for patients, and Dr Ricketts was very particular about its preparation. In 1894 he wrote “according to the dietary scale in force at the hospital till recently soup was allowed for sick patients and beef tea was not specified. A short time back I directed that beef tea prepared according to the recognised formula, should be substituted in the dietary scale for soup, and I pointed out that lean meat should be used instead of shin beef”. Patients were also fed milk puddings. Nutrition was very important to allow your body to fight the disease.