Tiny Histories

by Dixe Wills

  It should not have been so. In the middle of the 6th century, a cleric named Gildas wrote a tract called De Excidio Britanniae (The Ruin of Britain), an excoriating attack on British society which, writing as a former hermit on the spartan island of Steep Holm, he felt had rather gone to the bad. He tells us that after the Battle of Mount Badon, in which the Britons under one Ambrosius Aurelianus (taken by some historians to be none other than King Arthur) scored a famous victory over the invading Angles and Saxons, no foreign attacks occurred for half a century or so. However, the country remained divided into several small competing kingdoms. Gildas also records that in ad 537 a good king (also supposed by some to be King Arthur, though the writer doesn’t name him) was murdered by his evil nephew – a deed that throws southern Britain into a state of turmoil. With the various surviving British kings forever at each other’s throats, the island was enfeebled and ripe for the 6th-century Romans to follow in the footsteps of emperors Julius Caesar and Claudius and land an army on a British shore.

  Justinian clearly felt that this was the case. He was already using Britain as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the Ostrogoths in Italy, claiming that it was in his power to exchange it with them for Sicily. As it happened though, his designs were thwarted by a tiny insect from the order Siphonaptera. The bubonic plague – spread by the bite of fleas carried on the backs of rats – broke out in Egypt in 541. Merchant ships unwittingly ferried the flea-ridden rats around the Mediterranean and inevitably Byzantium was soon wracked by the disease.

  The plague may well have been triggered by an extreme natural disaster that occurred in 536, which brought about what is known as the Late Antique Little Ice Age. This was caused by a blanket of dust in the atmosphere that covered the globe and blocked out a great deal of the Sun’s heat. This, in turn, made the Earth cool dramatically, causing chaotic weather events such as snow in summer. It’s not clear exactly what produced the dust cloud, though the most likely explanation is a catastrophic eruption from a volcano such as Krakatoa, Ilopango or the Rabaul caldera. The historian Procopius, who lived through the event, inevitably saw it as a bad omen. ‘During this year [536], a most dread portent took place,’ he recorded, ‘for the sun gave forth its light without brightness.’

  Although Byzantium was worst hit by the plague (Procopius noted with revulsion that the entire city stank of the dead), it became a true pandemic, wiping out tens of millions of people in countries around the world, including Britain and Ireland. It caused famine in Europe through the wholesale disruption of agriculture and eventually wiped out more than 10 per cent of the world’s population. The disaster became known as the Plague of Justinian, and was a pestilence to which even emperors were not immune, for one day a flea dared to land on Justinian himself and bite into the patrician skin. The emperor came down with the plague. Though he recovered after a few months, his illness threw his plans into disarray and the reconquest of Britain by Rome was never a serious consideration again.

  It’s interesting to speculate what might have occurred had Justinian not been knocked off course by the plague and had succeeded in re-assimilating Britain into the Roman Empire. Although Scotland might well have proved unconquerable again, it’s quite possible that an island once more stabilised by Pax Romana (up to Hadrian’s Wall at least) would not have atomised into the seven English kingdoms (Wessex, Kent, Sussex, Essex, East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria), Cornwall and Wales, as had actually happened by the following century. Had this more united nation been able to see off the many invasions that were to come over the next few hundred years, not only British history but the make-up of its people might be very different today.

  A bacteriologist sneaks off on holiday without doing the washing-up

  Carelessness and untidiness are not the sort of characteristics that most parents try to instil in their offspring. Rather they are apt to warn their children that these are the kind of traits that will inevitably lead to a life of dissipation or, at best, barely managed chaos. However, there are occasions when such habits can actually be advantageous. For example, the most famous happy accident in medical history occurred only because two exceedingly trivial details in a man’s life coincided, neither of which would have happened had it not been for an act of carelessness combined with a little devil-may-care untidiness.

  The man in question was Alexander Fleming. Born in 1881 on a farm in Ayrshire, Fleming studied medicine and became a bacteriologist at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, West London. His research and lecturing were interrupted by World War I, during which he served as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Attending to wounded soldiers in hospitals just behind the lines in France, he witnessed many deaths due to infected wounds. Antiseptics – as pioneered by the surgeon Joseph Lister – were used extensively by British army doctors. However, Fleming noticed that while they were effective when used to treat superficial injuries, they killed more soldiers than they cured when applied to deeper wounds. After the war he returned to St Mary’s with a renewed vigour, determined to find some way of defeating the bacteria that infected these more serious traumas.

  He thought he had made a breakthrough in 1923, when his tests established that nasal mucus slowed down the growth of bacteria. The enzyme responsible, lysozyme, can also be found in saliva, tears, hair and skin as well as in egg whites. It was a previously unknown enzyme and its discovery put Fleming’s name on the map. Unfortunately, it was not the remedy he had hoped for, because it proved effective only against bacteria that were harmless.

  It was five years later, when Fleming was working on the influenza virus, that he took the huge step forward for which he had been striving so long. Ironically, it occurred because he went on a month’s holiday (not a fortnight’s break, as is often erroneously reported). Rather than washing up all his petri dishes (he had been growing the staphylococcus bacteria to use in his experiments) and tidying them away in a cupboard, he left them piled up in the sink. Furthermore, no doubt demob-happy at the thought of his break at his family’s country house near Newmarket in Suffolk, he did not notice that a window to the street had been left open.

  When he came back, on Friday 28 September 1928, he went to the sink to start on the task he should properly have carried out a month beforehand. He might well have cleaned everything up and started back on his work, but he noticed something curious in one of the petri dishes in which he had been growing the bacteria: a sort of blue-green mould had established itself. While Fleming had been sunning himself in Suffolk, it had been busily expanding across the glass, creating a halo that was entirely free of the staphylococcus bacteria. The mould, which had blown in through the window by chance, was Penicillium notatum.

  This did not constitute the discovery of penicillin, as is often reported. Although it’s true that Fleming did coin the word, the penicillium mould had been identified at least 40 years beforehand. Joseph Lister himself had experimented with it on humans with some success, although there’s no evidence that Fleming knew about his fellow scientist’s research. What’s more, although Fleming published his own research the following year and also achieved some favourable outcomes when treating patients, he found the mould very difficult to cultivate in any quantity and his research into penicillin became somewhat fitful.

  It did not help that he was not a great communicator and so had found it difficult to enthuse others with his work. By 1940 he had given up altogether. Thankfully, an Australian pharmacologist called Howard Florey at Oxford University had come across Fleming’s research and decided to carry out his own investigations. He put together a team of scientists that included Ernst Chain – a German Jew who was expert in pathology and had fled Hitler’s Reich – and Norman Heatley, who was greatly skilled in the micro-analysis of organic substances. Florey’s team developed penicillin further, purifying it to such an extent that in 1940 they were able to cure infections in mice. Like Fleming, they also found it difficult to produce the drug in any quantity. Although they had come up wit
h a method of mass-producing it in the laboratory, they still couldn’t manage the sort of yields that would make its use practicable.

  Successful trials followed in 1941 at Oxford’s Radcliffe Infirmary, but these were still very small scale, so Florey and Heatley crossed the Atlantic to attempt to talk pharmaceutical companies into manufacturing the drug. Even though their offer was taken up, by the summer of 1942 there had only been enough penicillin created in the US to treat ten patients. It took a chemical engineer called Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau to break the logjam, developing a process of deep-tank fermentation using corn steep liquor. In 1943, the Northern Regional Research Laboratory at Peoria, Illinois, instigated a global search for the best mould to use in the fermentation process. As it happened, the ideal candidate proved to be close at hand – a rotting cantaloupe melon found in a Peoria market was found to contain an excellent mould for the job. By the time of the Normandy landings, 2.3 million doses of penicillin had been prepared. By the end of the war, this figure had risen to hundreds of billions of doses.

  The introduction of penicillin by the Allies in the latter stages of World War II was very effective in combatting septicaemia and gangrene, both of which could turn a run-of-the-mill wound into a fatal one. The Axis forces did not have access to the drug and, as a consequence, the survival and recovery rates of the latter’s injured troops was markedly lower. In this way, the open window and the dirty petri dish back in 1928 made their contribution to the war effort. Penicillin was also found to work extremely well against bacterial diseases such as typhoid and tuberculosis, which were rife at the time.

  Given the massive and immediate impact penicillin had, it’s unsurprising that Fleming, Florey and Chain did not have long to wait for their efforts to be recognised. The three were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945. Fleming and Florey would both go on to be knighted.

  The wonder drug that saves millions of lives around the world each year is today faced with new challenges. It was as early as the late 1940s that reports started to come in of microbes that had become resistant to its effects. Today, so-called superbugs such as MRSA are proving very difficult to counteract. The work of modifying penicillin (and other antibiotics) continues apace in a grim game of catch-up.

  The very mould that Fleming found that day in 1928 still exists, on account of the fact that he took the trouble to put it in a glass frame and label it. It was sold at auction in London in March 2017 for £24,375. Meanwhile, the open window at St Mary’s through which the mould blithely sailed one September day is commemorated by a purple plaque two storeys below.

  No one remembers to steep some strips of gauze in alum water

  A classic example of the limits of free speech is that no one has the right to shout ‘Fire!’ in a packed theatre if there is no fire. The sad truth is that history is littered with instances in which people in theatres have actually had every reason to cry just that.

  Shakespeare’s Globe was famously lost in a conflagration in 1613, although thankfully there were no casualties. In the 19th century, Glasgow lost no fewer than four Theatre Royals to fire. Exeter, too, was a city where going to see a play was more dangerous than it should have been. One theatre succumbed to flames in 1820, another in 1885. This latter was replaced by the Theatre Royal, which opened in October of the following year at the corner of Longbrook Street and New North Road. This new playhouse had been designed by Charles Phipps, a renowned architect who had been responsible for more than 40 theatres, so hopes were high that it would not meet the same fate as its predecessors.

  Monday 5 September 1887 saw the opening night of Romany Rye, a romantic play by George R. Sims. No one knows exactly how many people were in to see it that evening, but estimates range between 800 and 900, the initial audience swelled by poorer theatre-goers who bought cheaper tickets that permitted them to watch the latter stages of the performance.

  The trouble started at around 10.10P.M., during the fourth act. Romany Rye was a play that required a good many changes of backdrop. Three flymen, so called because they clambered about up in the flies (the space above the stage), were responsible for raising and lowering the painted canvases for each new scene. The illumination that enabled them to perform this task was provided by gaslight.

  The flymen became confused about which backdrop they should lower for a particular scene. As they were struggling to rectify the situation, they realised that one of the backdrops had caught fire. They cut the ropes on the flaming canvas, in the belief that by dropping it to the stage a hose could be brought on to douse the blaze without further ado. It nearly struck the one actor on stage, a Mr Mouillot, who had been in the invidious position of having to ad lib all alone while the crowds before him grew restless. With the burning backdrop now in a crumpled heap on the stage, the curtain was closed. Although iron safety curtains had started to be used in some theatres, Charles Phipps had not considered that one was necessary for the Theatre Royal.

  The fire could have been contained on the stage and the looming disaster averted but for the fact that there wasn’t a hose to hand, or a hydrant. Indeed, there was not even a water bucket. Mouillot is said to have cried out, ‘For heavens’ sake, keep cool!’ but with nothing to fight the fire, any cool heads that might have been kept counted for nothing. Even when the stage manager did manage to bring a hose to the scene, no water came out of it.

  With flammable material all around the burning backdrop, the fire took hold with frightening speed and within three minutes it was out of control. The audience, however, was still unaware of what was happening, beyond the fact that something had gone wrong with the play – the unfortunate Mr Mouillot’s pained improvisations and the impromptu dropping of the curtain were evidence of that.

  A Colonel Freemantle, who was watching from the stalls, declared afterwards that the curtain blew outwards as a result of someone having opened a door backstage, giving the audience its first terrifying view of the blaze. The rush of air through the door also fanned the flames, taking them beyond the stage and into the auditorium. Immediately, panic ensued. Shouts of ‘Fire!’ competed with screams and cries for help as a stampede towards the exits began.

  Those seated in the stalls, the dress circle, the boxes and the pit were able to get out of the theatre with relative ease. However, those in the cheaper seats of the upper circle and the gallery – who between them may have numbered between 300 and 400 – were obliged to use a single exit. It was this group who provided the vast majority of casualties.

  A broadsheet published by H. P. Such of London the following day carries a reasonably accurate report of the disaster, including the terrible scenes that occurred in the auditorium:

  Flames shot up through the roof over the stage and dense smoke poured forth from every window…

  It is almost needless to say that the utmost panic prevailed throughout the theatre, and the terror and bewilderment was intensified a hundredfold at those points where egress seemed impossible. To gain anything like a fair conception of the dreadful struggle for life which took place in the gallery, one has to picture a panic-stricken throng of men, women, and children pushing or forcibly impelled towards the single doorway – the only exit the gallery seemed to have – and followed by the tongues of flame, momentarily increasing until at last the outer fringe of the mass was overtaken by it…

  As for those who escaped from this furnace they did so either over the bodies of their more unfortunate companions or through the windows. When the latter alternative was adopted the jumpers often flew from one death to another almost equally horrible whilst others sustained fractures to their limbs. The great mass of men, women and children in the gallery were, however, wedged into an almost immovable mass and the advancing flames roasted them to death…

  Soon after the outbreak the City Fire Brigade were on the spot, but the water they poured on the fire was absolutely without effect.

  As poignantly captured in Trapped, Martin Sorrell’s radio play abo
ut the catastrophe, there were many heroes and heroines that night, some of whom lost their lives while saving others. The lion-hearts included a Mr and Mrs Thorne, who helped pull two women out through a lavatory window and onto a parapet from where they were eventually saved when a ladder was put up to them. Mary-Anne Dyke ushered groups of theatre-goers out through an exit and managed to open the gate to the pit which, if closed, would have trapped scores of people. Passerby William Tremaine, a 19-year-old artilleryman, rushed into the theatre several times to rescue those inside who had fallen unconscious. The young bombardier Francis Scattergood showed extraordinary courage. Time and again he braved the flames to haul bodies from the theatre in the hope that some might still be brought back from unconsciousness. He failed to emerge from his final foray into the inferno and was in turn saved by able seaman William Hunt, who found him lying unconscious on the floor inside. Hunt saved a good many others that night, climbing repeatedly up a pillar at the entrance to enter the theatre. Curiously, he was unable to repeat this feat of gymnastics when asked to do so in the days after the fire. Sadly, Scattergood died on his way to hospital.

  An inquest into the disaster opened the following morning, presided over by the city coroner. It found that the fire had started because one of the calico mediums – blue, red and yellow strips of gauze about two feet wide that determined the colour of the light thrown onto the stage – had been set alight by a naked flame from the gas lamp it was masking. In those theatres where they were still used, calico mediums were soaked in alum water. This is a solution of sodium (or potassium or ammonium) aluminium sulphate that was customarily used to prevent the mediums from catching light. No one had remembered to carry out this procedure during the preparations for the opening night at the Theatre Royal, making a fire almost inevitable.