Historic Southampton

In 1939 she’s still doing the same job, living with her widowed mother. She never married. Flora Baldry died in Norwich on 25 February 1974 at the age of eighty-three.

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Flora was awarded the British War Medal and the Victory Medal for her service during the war and she returned home to Norwich to live with her parents. At the time of the 1921 census she’s working as a fitter in a boot and shoe factory in Norwich.

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The hotel was converted into a Missions to Seamen institute later in 1918. The building no longer exists.

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Early 1900s advert for Flower’s Hotel featuring a picture of the building.

Flora had written it whilst staying at Flower’s Hotel (pictured). Overlooking Queen’s Park on the corner of Queen’s Terrace and Latimer Street, the hotel was being run by James Flower as a temperance establishment as early as 1861.

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… You see they look after us alright. The commandant gave us our pay book and a nice letter from Lady Ampthill.
Best love to you,
Flo’

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Twenty-seven-year-old Flora wrote:

‘Dear Mother,
We have made Southampton but will not set sail until Friday so we are billeted at Flowers Hotel. Am having a little rest before tea so thought I would have the time writing to you…

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Front of postcard, featuring a female postal worker and the text: ‘SOMETHING FOR YOU FROM SOUTHAMPTON’.

Flora’s message on the back.

Flora Baldry was an orderly with the Voluntary Aid Detachment during the First World War, serving in a number of hospitals across France between 1915 and 1919. She sent this postcard to her mother back home in Norwich on 2 May 1918 before sailing back to France from Southampton.

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My pleasure! So glad you find it interesting/useful. Thank you very much.

Great museum.

Thank you!

Street scene with the church spire in the background.

St Mary Street in the late 1920s or early 1930s.

Southampton High Street, early 1900s.

Similar view in 2025.

Looking south down Southampton High Street.

Long corridor with a high ceiling and large windows. A soldier stands in the foreground with his arm in a sling, pipe in his mouth. Nurses stand further down the corridor.

Surgical corridor, Royal Victoria Hospital, Netley.

Since the land was reclaimed in the twentieth century in order to build the Pirelli factory and, later, the Western Docks, the water no longer washes quays at the base of the wall here, and the top of the wall no longer offers the enchanting view of the bay that Jane Austen would have known.

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… and run quite to the wall, commanding an enchanting view of the bay, from the town to the village of Millbrook, and the river beyond it quite to Redbridge.’

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‘The tide washes the whole of this wall… and the ground within is almost level with its top the whole way; so that it forms a most beautiful terrace to the gardens which belong to the houses in the High-street and Castle-square…

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Sir Henry Charles Englefield described this view in 1801 in ‘A Walk Through Southampton’:

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‘My grandmother’s house had a pleasant garden, bounded on one side by the old city walls; the top of this wall was sufficiently wide to afford a pleasant walk, with an extensive view, easily accessible to ladies by steps.’

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Jane’s nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, described the house in his book ‘A Memoir of Jane Austen’, which was published in 1869, some fifty-two years after the death of his aunt. Austen-Leigh, who would have been around eight years old in 1806, wrote:

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Between 1806 and 1809, Jane Austen lived in Southampton with her mother and sister in a ‘commodious old-fashioned house’ in Castle Square, located roughly where the Juniper Berry would later stand.

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The former Juniper Berry pub can be seen on top of the walls in the recent photo. In the older photo, which dates to the early 1900s, the original beer house can be seen, before it was replaced by the mock-Tudor pub in the 1930s. The Juniper Berry closed down in 2023.

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There are vaults behind the wall here. One of them had its own royal quay and belonged to Southampton Castle. It was used to store wine the king had imported from France.

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Early 1900s view of the wall from the road, and the buildings on top, including the beer house that would later become the Juniper Berry pub.

The same view in 2022, with the mock-Tudor former pub on top of the wall.

The western stretch of Southampton’s fourteenth century walls. Water came right up to the base of the wall here until the land was reclaimed in the twentieth century.

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Thanks Dave! Very proud of his Southampton connections.

You’re not wrong. That’s actually where Warrior is buried.

At the theatre, Jellicoe was awarded the Freedom of Southampton and afterwards he was treated to dinner at the South Western Hotel.

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One of the horses in the image is Warrior, the well-known warhorse who was wounded by shrapnel during the First World War before being gifted to the borough police force in 1919. Popular and beloved, Warrior died in 1935 whilst still on duty.

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… members of the Southampton, Shirley, and Woolston branches of the British Legion, ex-servicemen and First World War veterans, cadets, council dignitaries, merchant seamen, firemen, and mounted police.

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During the procession, ‘a long burst of cheering resounded’ which Jellicoe ‘smilingly acknowledged with salutes’. Joining Jellicoe in the procession were a number of bands, boys from the Southampton Seamen’s Orphange,

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From there, Jellicoe was taken to the Audit House on the High Street, and he then embarked upon this procession first to the Cenotaph, where he took part in a memorial service, and then to the Empire Theatre (now the Mayflower Theatre).

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