Despite the shortages, the inmates faired reasonably well in the early years of the war, and an Irish Times editorial praised the zoo for maintaining a collection ‘that boasts a gorilla, a chimpanzee, an orang-utan and a gibbon, and these four types of anthropoid have never been all exhibited together previously in any zoological gardens.’ There was even a little gloating at the next annual general meeting of the society that Dublin Zoo had not had to resort to shooting some of its larger exhibits, such as elephants and bears, because of food shortages, as had happened in the zoos of the Central Powers. Instead the war brought extra business as contingents of wounded soldiers came to enjoy the amenities.
However, the mood of self-congratulation was somewhat dented by the disruption caused by the Easter Rising. Food shortages required some of the smaller inmates to be fed to the larger ones, which was arguably more barbaric than the measures resorted to in the zoos run by the ‘Hun’. Appropriately enough, the lions were among the animals that prospered most in the war years. Not only had the zoo learnt how to breed them successfully in captivity but they required less food than many of the other animals, such as the antelope, bison, chimpanzee or eagle. The sale of lion cubs to other zoos also provided a substantial income—£500 in 1916 alone.
The introduction of a young leopard in January 1917 was less successful. It managed to escape from its cage and killed a duck that was trying to hatch nine eggs. ‘He kicked up quite a fuss before he would let the duck be taken from him,’ the meeting was told, ‘and, being about nine months old, he can make his point of view listened to.’ One prize exhibit that did not survive the war was the gorilla called ‘Empress’. She died of a gastric disorder in May 1917, and was much mourned by the chimpanzee.
Nevertheless, the zoo quickly recovered its fortunes after the war and was able to resume the traditional summer fete in 1919.40
Chapter 14
‘YOU HAVEN’T GOT A REPUBLIC YET, SO GET OUT OF THE WAY!’
On 31 May 1918 reports of ‘mysterious maladies’ in Spain and Sweden vied for attention with news of the great German offensive in France on the leader page of the Irish Times. It was some time before the source of the pandemic was identified as an unusually powerful variant of the H1N1 flu virus that attacked children and healthy young adults. It was first identified in these neutral states because there was no war censorship to suppress the details. After King Alfonso XIII of Spain fell ill with the mystery malady it was dubbed the ‘Spanish flu’.
Dublin was singularly ill prepared to meet the challenge. In the first decade of the twentieth century it had the highest rate of urban mortality in Europe, exceeding those of many Asian cities. James Connolly seared the figures into the collective consciousness of the trade union movement when he quoted them at length in The Re-conquest of Ireland, his most important work after Labour in Irish History. A temporary improvement in 1912 and early 1913 was negated by the suffering inflicted during the lock-out.
Mortality rates provide the simplest criterion of Dubliners’ health. During the First World War they showed an initial deterioration followed by a continuous improvement until the influenza pandemic drove the figure up again in late 1918. However, once the pandemic was over the rate resumed its downward trend, suggesting that, in general, the war had been good for the health of Dubliners.
The figures for the first quarter of every year tend to be the worst, as winter takes its toll, especially on the young, the old and the poor. As can be seen from table 16, the mortality rate in the city in the first quarter of 1913 was 23.3 per thousand; this rose to 25.9 in the first quarter of 1914, when the lock-out had been in force for four months.
Table 16
Mortality rate (per thousand), 1913–20
After recovering somewhat later in 1914 the rate rose again in the first winter of the war. It reached 29.5 per thousand in the first quarter of 1915 for the greater metropolitan area and 31.4 per thousand within the city itself. The main cause appears to have been a rise in the incidence of infectious diseases, particularly for children, with diarrhoea, enteritis and dysentery (DED) and whooping cough featuring prominently. The birth rate also rose temporarily with the onset of the war; but the figure for the first winter of the war is not exceptional in the context of pre-war mortality rates. What is more striking is the general improvement in the mortality rate as the war progressed.
This is not to say that seasonal trends no longer mattered. On the contrary, they continued to assert themselves, but to a less pronounced degree. The Easter Rising also had a small but significant impact on mortality for the second quarter of 1916, which broke with the seasonal trend. However, even within the city boundary the fighting was less lethal than General Winter’s yearly visitation. Once the spring of 1917 arrived, the mortality rate showed a steady improvement on previous years until the third quarter of 1918. This suggests that the reforms adopted by the Public Health Committee of the corporation, under the chairmanship of P. T. Daly, and the work of such bodies as the NSPCC, the Women’s National Health Association and the voluntary bodies running communal kitchens had a beneficial effect, as well as the financial impact of separation allowances to mothers with young families in the tenements.
It was from mid-1918 until the end of March 1919 that Dublin felt the full brunt of the influenza pandemic. There appears to have been an initial surge in deaths in July 1918, followed by a short remission, before the rate soared to 34.1 per thousand in the metropolitan area and 36.1 in the city for the last quarter of 1918. It rose again in the first quarter of 1919, to 35 per thousand in the metropolitan area and 37.7 in the city. These rates were between 75 and 100 per cent more than for comparable quarters in the previous years.1
Figures published in the newspapers suggest that mortality was even higher in some weeks, especially for children, a high proportion of whom had fallen ill in June 1918, leading to the closure of about 120 schools. Sunday schools were cancelled, and ‘a notable falling away at … Church services’ was reported. The effectiveness of these measures was probably limited, as factories, shops, cinemas, pubs and theatres remained open.2 What stayed open and what closed was determined by commercial considerations, not concern for public health.
On 1 July 1918 the Local Government Board placed public notices on the ‘Spanish influenza epidemic’ in the newspapers. These warned readers that the disease was ‘most infectious’ and the symptoms ‘readily recognisable, consisting of extreme lassitude, aching of the limbs and headaches. There is generally but not always nasal catarrh.’ It recommended Formamint tablets (highly dubious throat lozenges made from formaldehyde and lactose), which were used by the Royal Army Medical Corps, the Red Cross Society and hospitals. They cost 2s 2d a bottle—a not inconsiderable sum for tenement-dwellers with large families.
Military censorship prevented full reportage of the pandemic, and considerable discrepancies in the figures provided by different newspapers added to the confusion. For instance, the Irish Independent reported a significantly higher number of deaths in Dublin in the week ending 3 July than the Irish Times. It also stated that almost a third of those who died were children, while the Times quoted the Registrar-General’s returns as containing no child fatalities.3
The reports were too vague to be useful for the purposes of public health or education. A typical example from the Irish Times in July reads: ‘Several fresh cases were reported yesterday, especially among members of the police force and employees of the Dublin United Tramways Company, while the staffs of many commercial firms are being seriously depleted.’ Occasionally the indisposition of a prominent individual, such as the Lord Mayor, Laurence O’Neill, was mentioned because it meant that public engagements had to be cancelled.4 However, all the reports agreed that the infection rate was increasing. Of deaths in the second week of July, 92 were from influenza, compared with 35 the previous week.5 By late November the death rate from influenza had reached 250 a week, seriously disrupting many businesses and services in the city. The Dublin and
South-Eastern Railway, which provided most of the commuter services, complained of significant loss in income because ‘fraudulent passengers’ were taking advantage of sickness among checkers to avoid paying fares.
Dr Kathleen Lynn, who was working as a GP in Rathmines, advised people to avoid overcrowding and to eat nourishing food. Oatmeal porridge would suffice, with milk and eggs ‘for those who could afford it.’ More controversially, she called on soldiers returning from Europe to be quarantined ‘until they were certified all right before being allowed to mix with the population.’ At the very least she believed that uniforms and demob clothes should be thoroughly disinfected.6 There was a lot of sense in what she advocated, and it was probably inevitable, given her politics, that she would hold the British military authorities primarily responsible for the serious threat now posed to the health of Dublin’s civilian population. She would describe the battlefields of Flanders as the ‘factory of fever’; and she had already jointly written a circular in February 1918 with her fellow-director of Sinn Féin’s Public Health Committee, Dr Richard Hayes, warning of the threat that sexually transmitted disease would pose for the civilian population, especially women, when mass demobilisation began.
The same arguments applied, with even greater force, to highly infectious diseases such as influenza and TB. But both positions were charged politically. While the city’s Chief Medical Officer, Sir Charles Cameron, was capable of taking a broad view of the situation, his natural conservatism and desire to avoid unnecessary conflict, which had made him more accommodating than he should have been of vested interests such as slum landlords, now led to procrastination. About the flu virus Lynn wrote in exasperation to Arthur Griffith:
People say it is the work of the Corporation or L.G.B. [Local Government Board]. Well, my experience is that the epidemic will be over before they had done considering the matter.7
She was almost right: it was not until 25 February 1919 that the corporation made influenza and pneumonia notifiable diseases. Even then its powers were limited. It could not force social events to be cancelled, or places of public entertainment to close. The British government, which was quick enough to ban public protests or seditious speeches, could have undertaken such measures, but it failed to do so.
When the Registrar-General’s annual figures for 1918 were finally published in March 1919 they showed that in the Dublin Registration Area, which included the suburban townships and Co. Dublin, there had been 9,008 births and 9,397 deaths, a net excess of 389 deaths over births. The total mortality rate for 1918 had been 23.6 per thousand, compared with an average of 20.6 for the previous ten years.
In the first quarter of 1919 the influenza pandemic reached a peak at 35 deaths per thousand in the metropolitan area and 37.7 in the city. However, in the second week of February the death rate went as high as 44.8 per thousand in the metropolitan area and 50.2 in the city.8 This translates into 2,476 births in the Dublin metropolitan area, offset by 3,544 deaths. In the city there were 2,030 births but 2,923 deaths; in other words, in the first three months of the year 1,961 more people died than were born. As in 1916, severe restrictions were placed on the number of mourners permitted to accompany the dead to the cemetery.
The higher mortality rates are entirely accounted for by the flu pandemic. The number of people dying from influenza in 1918 was 1,506, against a yearly average over the previous decade of 95. Deaths from pneumonia, which also affected many flu victims, tell a similar story: there were 1,140 deaths from pneumonia in 1918, compared with an average of 667 a year in the previous decade.
Hampered by lack of resources, and of adequate statutory powers, Sir Charles Cameron did what he could to meet the crisis through public education, the closing of schools, the disinfection of buildings, including cinemas and theatres, the nightly cleaning and disinfecting of trams, and the spraying of streets and laneways with disinfectant. At one point so much disinfectant was being used that the Street Cleansing Committee wrote to Cameron complaining at the cost. Extra stocks to the value of £64 14s 9d had been purchased in the last quarter of 1918.9
The money was well spent. By contrast to the soaring death rate from influenza and pneumonia, there was a general falling off in cases of other infectious diseases. For instance, there were only 906 deaths from bronchitis in 1918, compared with a yearly average of 1,001 over the previous five years.10
Altogether, deaths from the principal infectious diseases in the metropolitan area fell from 1.4 per thousand in the fourth quarter of 1917 to 1.0 per thousand in the fourth quarter of 1918. The comparable returns for the city show that the rate fell from 1.6 per thousand to 1.1 per thousand. In the first quarter of 1918 the rate of deaths from infectious diseases was 1.7 per thousand; this fell to 0.8 in the first quarter of 1919. The comparable figures for the city were 2.0 in 1918 and 1.0 in 1919.
Another anomaly was that the infant mortality rate, horrifying as it was, at 149 per thousand, was actually lower in 1918 than the rate of 152 in 1917 and 153 in 1916. The big killers of babies were diarrhoea, enteritis and dysentery (DED). These diseases accounted for 148 out of 192 deaths from infectious diseases in the third quarter of 1918, but the figure fell to 51 out of 81 deaths from infectious diseases in the last quarter of 1918. In the first quarter of 1919 the number of deaths from DED fell to 40, and the total number of deaths from infectious diseases was only 74. However, once the public disinfecting campaign ended, mortality from these diseases rose again: by the third quarter of 1919 it was back at 194, and DED accounted for 177 of them.
No doubt some of the other measures taken by Cameron to reduce the transmission of influenza, such as closing schools, also helped reduce the level of other infectious diseases.11 Even more lives could have been saved if places of public entertainment had closed, not to mention the appallingly insanitary tenements themselves.
Meanwhile Cameron had to apply moral suasion in his liaison with the hospitals and medical profession throughout the city to co-ordinate interests with colleagues such as Kathleen Lynn, his complete antithesis. She was a modern, ground-breaking professional and political radical; he was the last standard-bearer of the old corporate unionist identity of Dublin. He personified the old regime, in part because of the sheer number of responsibilities, both public and private, that resided in his person. He was medical superintendent officer of health, executive sanitary officer, secretary to the Public Health Committee and city analyst. In a private capacity he was deputy grand master of the Freemasons, and de facto grand master while the head of the organisation, the Earl of Donoughmore, was a serving officer who spent most of the war abroad.
The link with the Freemasons was a familial one. Cameron came from an old Scottish military family. An ancestor was beheaded in London for his part in the ‘45, and his father had fought under the Duke of Wellington at Talavera in the Peninsular War. However, after studying philosophy and qualifying as a doctor in Germany, the centre of academic excellence in his youth, Cameron returned to Dublin to practise medicine and to write extensively on the arts as well as medical and scientific matters. He undertook much voluntary work and campaigned vigorously for public health reforms before being appointed city analyst in 1862. By 1879 he had assumed responsibility for most aspects of public health policy in Dublin. A grateful city awarded him a salary of £1,000 per annum in 1911, but by the outbreak of war he was in his eighties, and some of his policies had begun to attract criticism and even ridicule, such as his campaign to eradicate houseflies by offering 3d to every child who handed in a bag of dead flies. (It was estimated that it would take six thousand flies to fill one of his bags, and the bounty was never claimed, even when the size of the bags was halved.)
His sons reverted to the family’s military tradition,12 and the death of the youngest, Ewen, a lieutenant in the ‘Pals Battalion’ of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, cast a shadow over his declining years. Cameron’s diary entries for August 1915 tell their own story.
[Thursday 26 August] Meeting at the Man
sion House on food question. Presided at Council of the RDS.
Ewen came today. He appears very upset, apparently by the bad news from Dardanelles—death of Major Tippet and some of his late companions in the Seventh Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers.
[Friday 27 August] The dreadful news that poor Ewen had shot himself in the train between Greystones and Newcastle came today. He and Maitland went by the 10.30 train. After leaving Greystones Ewen went to the lavatory and shot dear head with revolver. I was telephoned to come home at once. Gladys Collins told me that something very serious had occurred to Ewen. I knew at once what had happened and I said has (Ewen died?) and [she] said Yes. I nearly fainted. Later on Sir Lambert Connolly told me the whole tragedy. This terrible blow will [make] the little of life left to me joyless. I was prostrate for the rest of the day.
Cameron would resign as deputy grand master of the Freemasons in 1919, citing ill health, and in March 1919 surrendered most of his day-to-day duties as chief medical officer of the city to his deputy, Dr M. J. Russell.13
If the Freemasons were regarded with suspicion, fear and envy by Catholic nationalists because of their hidden influence in the professions, the government, the police and the armed forces, they certainly paid the price in the Great War, especially in the case of the British army. The losses suffered by Sir Charles Cameron were not uncommon among masons. More than 350 members of the Dublin lodges served in the war, including members of such well-known families as Arnott, Atkinson, Ball, Bewley, D’Alton, Dawson, Dickinson, Dockrell, Fry, Goulding, Hewat, Jellett, Lawrence, Lee, Overend, Shaw, Swifte, Taylor, Watson, Weir and Wynne. There were also Dublin masons in the Curragh and Dublin Garrison lodges. Other members formed lodges in units to which they were assigned, including D Company of the 7th Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Some of these lodges were able not only to hold meetings at the front but to engage in ‘Masonic labour’ behind the lines. The last wartime commander in chief of the forces in Ireland, Sir Frederick Shaw, was in a Dublin lodge, as was Sir Auckland Geddes, a member of the Cabinet.
A City in Wartime Page 39