A New Museum Salutes the Chelsea Pensioners

T hough I write a lot about museum anniversaries, I don’t often get a chance to write about just-opened museums. A few days after London’s newest museum opened on October 1, though, I happened to be on the spot. It’s the Chelsea Pensioners Museum and a big part of the £12.2 million ($16.9 million) refurbishment of the old stables at the Royal Hospital Chelsea. Both the hospital and the Chelsea Pensioners are famous, legendary, mythic, and, until now, mostly unseen.

The new museum is small, beautifully presented, and inspirational. What a lovely treat. Chelsea is exceedingly chichi, with plenty of old money as well as Russian, Arab, and Chinese zillionaires. The museum, in the middle of this, salutes British patriotism in the form of a bunch of jolly old guys who’ve come and gone for close to 350 years, living their last days on the grounds.

In olden days, the monasteries provided for poor, elderly ex-soldiers as they faded away, but after Henry VIII’s dissolution and plunder of them in the 1530s, a gap in care existed well into the next century. In the 1670s, Charles II, looking at Paris’s Invalides retirement home for soldiers, pushed for something similar. Nell Gwynn, the actress and celebrity, and Charles’s mistress, might have first suggested it. Thus the Royal Hospital was born.

The Chelsea Pensioners, and there are about 280 of them now, all army veterans, are easily distinguished by their famous scarlet coats. The Royal Hospital does indeed include a hospital, but it’s a retirement home for army veterans, men and, since 2009, women, who have no spouses or children to support. They surrender their pensions and live full time, three meals a day, on what looks like a college campus on the Thames, and one designed by Christopher Wren and, later, John Soane.

The term “Chelsea Pensioner” for years defined anyone who got an army pension, but now it’s almost entirely the men and women who actually live here. It’s an enclosed community and not for everyone.

The museum is located in the old stable yard designed by Soane between 1814 and 1817. Soane is, like Wren, the ubiquitous architect best known today for his own house museum, which every accomplished London visitor needs to not only see but luxuriate in. Among Soane’s many gigs was his 30-year term as house architect at the Royal Hospital. The stable yard was for horses and carriages and looks practical, but that’s good. It’s been remade into a museum, with a very nice, casual café, gift shop, and Royal Hospital post office.

Laura Morgante, from Peregrine Bryant, a firm specializing in historic preservation, renovated the stable yard. She delivered straightforward spaces that put the premium on the objects and the public’s understanding of the historical themes.

A panel succinctly explains who is a Chelsea Pensioner and when the Royal Hospital started. Since visitors enter the museum through the café, it’s exactly right for the first gallery of the museum to address the obvious question prospective Pensioners want to know: “How’s the food?” And, since it’s a museum, how was it through the centuries?

Table murals imagine a history. In the 1700s, it was heavy on meat — twelve ounces a day — cheese, bread, and two quarts of beer. Hydration is so important, and, then, the water would kill you. For decades, there was meat and potatoes, honest English food undisguised by tricky French sauces, and full English breakfasts. Now it’s lean cuisine, a piece of fish and lots of fruit and vegetables. No fish ’n’ chips, but no bugs, either, yet.

Serving pieces from the early days are on display. They’re pewter, English Baroque, so they have flourished handles. There are good profiles of past and present pensioners.

There’s William Hiseland, maybe Haseland, who claimed to have been born in 1620, the year the Mayflower arrived in the New World, and died in 1732 — yes, at 112. He was tossed out of the Royal Hospital when he married at 103, but he’s buried there, commended as “ancient but not superannuated.” He returned after his wife died. He said he fought at Edgehill in 1642, and we know he fought with the Duke of Marlborough 50 years later.

A well-done video shows German bombs hitting parts of the Royal Hospital. The graphically florid founding documents are also on display.

A big part of the museum explains what the hospital does for the men and women who live there. People live longer. Hiseland was, his epitaph tells us, “fresh and florid” and “hale and hearty” until he died, with a memory “exact and ready,” but, today, dementia care is a big priority.

Last year I wrote a story about London’s observance of the 300th anniversary of the death of Wren. Though best known as the architect of St. Paul’s, Wren designed 50 other churches in London following the Great Fire of 1666. I visited a dozen or so in 2023 but until last week didn’t get to the Royal Hospital’s chapel, a sublime Wren creation opened for worship in 1687. It’s prime Wren, typically woodsy, with a balance between austerity and plushness that defines English Baroque style. Sebastiano Ricci painted The Resurrection for the half-dome above the altar in 1714, a gift to the hospital from Queen Anne.

Ricci (1659–1734) is older than Tiepolo but his contemporary and his equal, though Ricci isn’t as various. His religious painting is an early, muscular Rococo, with a Venetian, light-as-air look but commanding serious contemplation. Given its audience, it’s sensual but forward-looking in that it concerns what comes after death.

The Soane stable area aside, the campus, and that includes the Wren-designed dining hall, too, is off-limits unless visitors book a £25-per-head ($33) tour with a Chelsea Pensioner. It’s worth it, for the intellectual content but also to support the Royal Hospital, which is a charity, and to commune with the retired soldiers who understand history and patriotism. The Wren dining hall obviously inspired the dining halls at Andover and Yale and, I think, many other schools. The Duke of Wellington was laid out in the dining hall at the Royal Hospital before his bombastic funeral in 1852. In the park, a bronze sculpture of Charles II glitters. The dining hall has a wall chronology of British wars, some of which have to be classed as useless adventures.

Margaret and Denis Thatcher repose, reduced to ashes, under the concrete walkway leading to the infirmary. The infirmary was named for them when it was built in 2008. The Thatchers went to church at the Wren chapel. Anyone can attend a service on Sunday at the chapel, but the cemetery and the infirmary are for the Pensioners, watched by them.

The museum is well done. Chelsea’s flower show in late May is also wonderful, as are the Chelsea Physic Garden and the Army Museum.