No one knew how long the epidemic would continue. The newspapers, worn out with sustained stories of death over the last four years, seemed barely able to acknowledge what was happening. Reports of the advance of the disease appeared well down the page and deep within the body of the newspapers. On 3 January 1919 Mrs Susannah Jones, wife of ‘Stoker’ Jones, an officer in the Royal Navy, died from influenza in her eighteenth year. Mr and Mrs Jones had been married for one day. There was an air of resignation in the reports. The Times suggested that the swift spread of the epidemic might have been a result of ‘the general weakness of nerve-power known as war-weariness’.
James Shaw of Worcester Road, Manor Park, a crane driver at the docks, recognised the flu symptoms while going to work. Without his wage there would be no money to look after his two daughters, Lucy aged seven and Edith May aged two and a half. So he took his safety razor and cut Edith May’s throat. Lucy wriggled from under him as he was halfway through the job and ran bleeding from him. Exhausted by a war that he had thought would never end and with all hope for a happy future destroyed by an illness that had almost certainly come to claim him, he put the razor to his own throat. The poor suffered no more than the rich. The mortality rate in Chelsea and Westminster was 6.1 per thousand and 5.2 per thousand, while in Bermondsey and Bethnal Green it was 5.6 and 5.1. No one was exempt.
Sudden death was not unfamiliar to the English, accustomed as they were to the alarming rate of infant mortality. Scarlet fever, pneumonia, tuberculosis, diphtheria, appendicitis and septicaemia carried children off with accepted regularity. Nor were flu epidemics an unusual occurrence. There had been serious and fatal outbreaks in 1900, 1908 and 1915, and the very familiarity of the condition meant that the eruption of the illness that began in 1918 was all but ignored at the beginning.
The origins of the 1918 strain of flu were unclear. It was thought that animals or perhaps chickens or birds had passed the virus through to pigs before it had emerged in its final dreadful mutation in humans. Occasionally both adult and child managed to survive the infection. In March 1919 Winston Churchill, the newly appointed Secretary of State for War and Air, was in Paris for the Peace Conference. His wife Clemmie had given birth to Marigold, their fourth child, four days after the Armistice and Churchill was content to think of his family back in England, the baby under the dedicated care of their Scottish nanny Isabelle.
But Isabelle had come down with the flu, and in her delirious state had taken the four-month-old baby into her bed. Clemmie found nanny and child tucked up together with the Scottish woman talking ‘fast and loud in an unearthly voice like a chant for several hours’. There were still few doctors available. Many of them had not returned from their war duties and Clemmie’s own attempts to nurse Isabelle failed. The nanny died at 5.30 the following morning after catching the disease. Clemmie was terrified. Her own temperature hovered at a dangerous 102 degrees. ‘I long to see you,’ she wrote to her husband, ‘I am unhappy.’
While Marigold and Clemmie began to recover, another anxious mother in Sidcup, Ethel Parish, began to feel the extremes of hot and cold. She went shivering and alone to her bed but when her own child, Pam, began showing signs of the illness, the three-year-old baby of the family was carried in the arms of her aunt into the darkened room to join her mother. Delighted to be reunited with her adored mother they were left alone. Against the odds they both survived.
Joanna Selby-Bigge was a year older than Pam and less fortunate. At the age of four she was not as robust as Pam. Joanna was the adored child of her parents, Rachel and John, both former students at the Slade. After serving in the ranks in the Macedonian Mule Corps, John had begun a new life as a chicken farmer at King’s Sutton in Northamptonshire. When Joanna died shortly after her fourth birthday, the use of superlatives seemed to be the only way to remember her by. On the beautifully carved headstone her parents chose the few and the best words they knew to describe their daughter.
Joanna Annabella Lewis Selby-Bigge
Jocundissima
Dilectissima
Amantissima
Born May 1915
Died July 1919
Two days after Maude Onions had sent out her signal, the British Medical Council held a conference to discuss how to respond to public anxiety about this new threat. The conference’s conclusion was that ‘carrying on’ was the best possible course. The medical establishment could offer little alternative, except the customary recommended salvation for everything, including fear: a good tot of whisky. Doctors were not the only scarce medical resource. An estimated three fully trained nurses (as distinct from volunteers) were available to help treat every million people in England and nurses themselves were not immune to the disease. Six nurses at Great Ormond Street Hospital alone had died of the virus in the last few months. And as the influenza victims took second place to the 10,000 wounded and shell-shocked men still lying in hospital six months after the ceasefire, the suffering public felt themselves to be very much reliant on their own resources at home.
The depleted medical team did their best to try and contain the crisis. The Government’s Chief Medical Officer issued some precautions. People were advised to wear a small gauze mask across their mouth, to eat well and to try drinking half a bottle of light wine or taking a glass of port after dinner. Hot baths were thought to help and a decrease in the use of tobacco seemed to have some beneficial effect. Older people were accustomed to warding off illness and used their own remedies. Opium, rhubarb, treacle, laudanum, vinegar and quinine were all thought to have their own special curative powers.
In February 1919 Robert Graves was finally given his demobilisation papers. Aware that he was going down with the new killer flu he went as soon as he could to join his new wife and baby at Hove in Sussex where the Welsh maid was enjoying noticeably robust health, due she swore to the leg of a lizard tied in a little bag round her neck. The nurse who looked after Graves during the worst of his infection spent much of her time staring at the waves crying, ‘Sea, sea, give my husband back to me’, even though the missing husband had not been shot or even drowned, but simply unfaithful.
Oxo spent millions on advertising their meaty drink supplement as a good way of increasing nutrition and ‘fortifying the system’. Healthy sceptics thought the illness psychosomatic. Fear itself was felt to be a possible predisposing agent of infection, so doctors discouraged people from dwelling on the subject, or even using the word ‘pandemic’ which itself might induce panic.
For the first time since records began, the death rate had been overtaking that of births. Just before the 1918 Armistice one third of the police force had become ill simultaneously. Sober-suited council employees took off their ties and became gravediggers. Coffins that had been stockpiled during the war, as there were no bodies to put in them, were suddenly in short supply. The Leicester railway workshops turned to coffin manufacturing and Red Cross ambulances were employed as hearses.
The Savoy Hotel had announced that it also was in the grip of the euphemistically named ‘Big Sneeze’, reporting that at a recent lunch party of five millionaires only two had turned up. The chemist in the Strand opposite the hotel had sold more quinine in one day than their total sale of the last three years. The barman at the hotel, always up for a challenge, invented a cheery new cocktail based on whisky and rum combined called a Corpse Reviver. Children began to sing a song in the playground,
I had a little bird
Its name was Enza
I opened the window
And in-flew Enza
Across the world reports spread of the methods adopted in different countries for tackling this new plague. The killer bug made its silent way through North America, Asia, Africa, South America and the South Pacific. Arizona made handshaking illegal; in France you were arrested for spitting. The cruellest aspect of the disease was its targeting of young adults who were neither old enough to have built up a resistance during earlier epidemics, nor young enough to benefit from the intro
duction of improved school meals for children. The most vulnerable were those very men who had survived the war. And young women, having endured rationing and a recent cold winter, seemed to be at even higher risk, prompting the Hackney Gazette to comment in January 1919: ‘This adds a new danger to life. One is never safe in this world.’
Cinemas provided a place to take the mind off death. People remained inside the building watching reel after reel, never leaving their seats and breathing the unventilated contaminated air. Kensington Borough Council insisted that cinemas should be emptied every four hours to allow windows to be opened and the bugs let out. The manager of the Coronet at Notting Hill refused to disturb his customers, claiming that he had an effective aerating machine that worked while the audience remained in their seats, twirling the air and neatly redistributing the infection around the auditorium.
The epidemic had several national identities. In Britain it was known as ‘Flanders Grippe’; the Spanish called it ‘Naples Soldier’; in Persia it was referred to in almost lyrical terms as ‘The Disease of the Wind’. But most people talked about the Spanish flu.
As early as 2 January 1919 The Times was reporting somewhat optimistically that ‘the influenza scourge seems to have run its course’ and that the death rate had dropped by almost half since the preceding week, with only 581 casualties recorded. But in the late spring of 1919 as the epidemic gradually slackened, the appalling casualty rate became clear. Four per cent of the population of India had died; in the United States five times as many lost their lives to it as had perished in the Great War, and in Europe a further two million joined the dreadful statistics. It was estimated that in total forty to fifty million people had died. Although the infection lingered on until the summer, taking Joanna Selby-Bigge with it, the cases had at last become less frequent.
The flu epidemic had contributed to a dwindling lapse of confidence in any all-powerful Divinity that might claim to nurture and protect mankind. Organised Christianity in particular had suffered a slump in popularity. The three cornerstones that anchored a churchgoer to his church had been eroded and in some cases had disappeared altogether. With no funerals to put the official marker down at the end of a life, fewer marriages owing to the scarcity of men to marry, and a related drop in the number of christenings, the frequency of church rituals had been significantly reduced. The local Gazette in Bakewell, Derbyshire, ran an angry editorial three days before the anniversary of the ceasefire. Churches were never full. Part of the reason, said the Gazette, was because they were ‘cold, draughty, unclean and poorly lit’. What is more, it continued, hungry parishioners felt Matins took place too late to cook lunch and Evensong interrupted tea.
But deprivation of warmth in body and stomach was not all. There was a further reason. People felt that the Church, and by association God, had let them down. During the course of the preceding five years, ‘when every family in the land has known suffering, pain and death, our churches even in remote villages became recruiting agencies, our pulpits were used as political booths’. People began to stay at home rather than go to church, let down by the holy men themselves who clearly ‘do not believe what they preach’. One woman told the Gazette: ‘I went for a walk last night instead of going to church: I felt it would do me more good,’ she explained, frustrated at the way the clergy seemed so out of touch. ‘I often think if they’d let me get up in the pulpit I could tell ‘em something to help ‘em.’ A conspiracy not to speak the truth about the terrible reality of war had grown up even within the Church and people had stopped listening. Words from the pulpit floated down on silent, empty pews.
Instead a growing belief in the power of the self was taking hold. Spiritualist societies, already popular before the war, doubled in number. The relaying of comforting messages of reassurance from loved ones reaching out to their families from beyond the grave were seized on in particular by the middle and upper classes who could afford the expensive connections to the spirit world. ‘Mysticism’ became a household word in salons of grand houses. But as in the Ancient Greek kingdom of death, the Hades of Homer’s poetry, the spirits had no substance and a reaching out to their elusive nothingness simply increased the hopelessness of the mourner.
An obsession grew for physical proof of the paranormal. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, popular creator of Sherlock Holmes, had developed a growing fascination for the occult. The death of his first wife Louisa in 1906 was followed during the war by that of a brother, two brothers-in-law and two nephews. The final blow came when his son Kingsley contracted an infection from war wounds and died of the Spanish flu in 1918, triggering Conan Doyle’s fixation with the spirit world. He would lecture to packed theatres in his authoritative and rhythmical Scottish accent about how he now regarded communication with the dead as more important than his writing. For a brief time the famous contortionist Houdini came under Conan Doyle’s influence. But after the novelist-turned-spiritualist took Houdini to see Eva, a bosomy blonde clairvoyant apparently capable of bringing the dead to life, the magician returned to America unconvinced. Eva had managed to produce nothing more lifelike than a huge inflatable rubber doll.
An ingenious artist working on the beach at Brighton between the town’s eastern boundary, Black Rock, and the Palace Pier had hit upon a clever way of giving substance back to the missing soldier. Abandoning his pre-war speciality of drawing likenesses of stately homes, the sand artist would fashion from the grains an alarmingly lifelike relief form of a wounded soldier lying down. Every morning in the balmy springtime sun, he would make repairs to the damage caused in the night by wind and wave, and sitting beside his empty cap he would wait for his appreciative audience to pass by. Beside the soldier he scratched the words ‘Some carve their name in stone, I carve mine in sand/And I hope to carve my dinner with the aid of a generous hand’. His cap was full and his stomach grew rounder by the day.
Faith was tested and stretched as equally imaginative mediums went to great lengths and disgraceful strategies to persuade their audiences of the human reality of the spirit world. Barbara Cartland was less than convinced by a medium who announced that she was an incarnation of an Egyptian princess and arrived dressed in a chiffon scarf wrapped round her breasts demanding a large flask of brandy before beginning work.
If tangible evidence of the presence of the dead was difficult to find, reminders of their existence became important. One young woman would sprinkle Ajax, a man’s hairwash, on to her pillow each night. Another dressed a tailor’s dummy in the full uniform of her dead Grenadier Guards husband and slept with it every night beside her bed. The clothes carried his smell and for a brief waking moment she could imagine her husband had returned. The widowed Lady Ailesbury would only allow herself to be kissed on the left cheek, the other remaining ‘sacred to the memory of my dear Lord Ailesbury’.
The sense of free-falling chaos prompted by uncontrollable and persistent grief could sometimes be steadied by a determined control of the mind, and the practice of the highly fashionable mind-training programme of Pelmanism came to be adopted as a solution by some. Pelmanism was a purely secular philosophical activity whose popularity had spread quickly at the end of the preceding century. The idea for Pelmanism had come from William Joseph Ennever, a 29-year-old British journalist, son of a piano manufacturer. Its advocates claimed that it could ‘soundly strengthen and develop a person’s mind and character while removing those barriers that led to inefficiencies and no growth as an individual’.
The Times wrote of the potential benefits the programme could offer to thousands of people who felt themselves overcome by mental lethargy. A suggested schedule of reading and physical exercise before breakfast would set in motion a habit for the day that discouraged the temptations of inertia, over-indulgence and excessive consumption of alcohol. The former prime minister Herbert Asquith, still suffering from the death of his son Raymond, had recommended the practice of Pelmanism as a way of holding emotions in check. Other well-known individuals including Sir Rob
ert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout movement, the novelist Sir Rider Haggard, playwright Jerome K. Jerome and the composer Ethel Smyth were devotees of the movement, along with thousands of bankers, journalists, doctors and - interestingly - a large number of clergymen. A change in outlook on life, the growth of optimism and self-belief came as a relief to those who followed the guidelines. A clarity of purpose came to Pelmanists, they claimed, as well as an increased ability to see things more brightly, and ‘to hear meaningful sounds where there had only been a rumble’.
There were other ways to raise oneself from the stupor induced by the ending of the war. Long before the war was over an urgent need had developed to establish the precise manner and exact place of death of those lost on the battlefields of France. Many wished to see these alien, other-worldly sights before they were covered over. Personal columns ran advertisements offering photographs of individual war graves in France and Flanders costing thirty shillings for three prints. Enterprising companies accepted commissions for placing flowers and wreaths on graves. The French Government announced that widows, children and parents of French soldiers who had given their life for their country would be offered a day’s free excursion to visit the graves of those they loved. Pilgrimage trains left Paris each morning for Albert, Arras and Rheims.
In England newspapers carried advertisements for guided tours to the battlefields much as pre-war tourists had been enticed by special deals to seaside towns. Prices for package trips to the ‘Devastated Areas’ included hotels and cars and even an officer guide, if so desired, promoting an eerie holiday atmosphere. Visitors were recommended to bring their own food and to ensure they were dressed for the cold, while ammunition boxes that lay discarded everywhere conveniently suggested themselves as picnic tables, upended and laid with sandwiches, in the middle of this silent wasteland.
The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age Page 12