Pandemic 1918

by Catharine Arnold

  Although the day was grey and overcast, with the threat of rain, no one minded the weather. Parliament Street and Whitehall were packed with people, and the streets were hot with excitement. London was possessed by an impulse to ‘let business go hang, to get into the streets and yell and sing and dance and weep – above all, to make oneself supremely ridiculous’.18

  In the thick of the crowd outside the Houses of Parliament, numerous omnibuses, taxicabs and motor cars moved with difficulty, crawling up and down the thoroughfare, all packed with soldiers and civilians, not just inside but on the roofs and cabs as well, ‘shouting, yelling, singing snatches of songs and gesticulating as wildly as the pedestrians on the footways – only the more so. Not only did everyone seem bent on bursting their throats in an effort to contribute to the din, but everything that could be banged, blown and rattled seemed to have been pressed into service for a like purpose.’19

  Among the uproar, MacDonagh could hear

  the hooting of motors, the ringing of handbells, the banging of tea-trays, the shrilling of police whistles, and the screaming of toy trumpets in the resulting infernal orchestra. Among the many ludicrous incidents to be observed were a colonel in uniform squatted on the top of a motor-car sounding a dinner-gong and a parson marching at the head of a group of parishioners singing lustily with a Union Jack stuck in the top of his silk hat.20

  If anyone had any doubts about the war being over, ‘the mad follies of the girl clerks of the Government offices in Whitehall must have removed it. They actually showered down upon our heads from the windows masses of official forms relating to the War. Think of it!’21

  Vast crowds gathered outside Buckingham Palace, waving miniature flags and joining in with a collective staccato cry of ‘We want King George!’ and the Victoria Memorial was almost obliterated by the swarms of people climbing on it.22 The King and the Queen appeared on the balcony of the Palace to a tumultuous greeting, as the crowd sang ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, and then ‘Tipperary’, which evoked sad memories. ‘How many of the boys who sang it in the earlier years of the War will be coming home?’ MacDonagh wondered.23

  In Trafalgar Square, munitions girls who had left their factories in their caps and overalls at the sound of the maroons were romping with soldiers.24 A rollicking band of young subalterns appeared, blowing police whistles and dancing around a big teddy-bear on wheels decorated with Union Jacks. A group of American soldiers, who had evidently made a raid on a Lyons’ or A.B.C. teashop, held waitresses’ trays, which they beat like tambourines while singing ‘Yankee Doodle’. Taxi cabs crawled by, each with a colonial soldier and a girl sprawling on the roof.25

  Members of the Stock Exchange, wearing silk hats and frock coats, marched up Northumberland Avenue from the Embankment heading up a ‘band’ composed of tin-kettles containing stones, the music produced being ‘an infernal rattle’.26

  Witnessing the scenes, MacDonagh felt as if London was engaged in nothing so much as an enormous family party, ‘a stupendous house-warming’27 celebrating the reopening and occupation of a new London and an era of peace and security, after years of care and worry. Everyone taking part was, as befitted such an unparalleled occasion, in extravagantly irresponsible high spirits, ‘utterly forgetful of self-propriety, pretentiousness, absorbed in the desire to contribute something to the Pandean frolic’.28

  The police and the army had agreed that existing bans on bonfires and fireworks would be lifted. This meant that, after dusk, the citizens of Hythe in Kent were able to burn the Kaiser in effigy, although in reality, ‘the most hated man in England’ was dining as guest of his Dutch host, Count Bentinck, at Amerongen that night.29 As restraints had also been lifted on domestic lighting, the big cities were brightened for the first time since ‘dim glimmer’ was imposed with the onset of the Zeppelin raids. Later that night, the Government not only suspended DORA (the Defence of the Realm Act) but put on a brilliant searchlight display.30

  A crowd of Londoners and servicemen on leave filled Trafalgar Square, often linking hands, singing and swaying. To the writer Osbert Sitwell, serving as a captain with the Grenadier Guards, ‘they moved … as in a kermesse painted by Breughel the Elder’.31 Captain Sitwell, accompanied by the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev and the dancer-choreographer Leonide Massine, who had been in London performing with the Ballets Russes, joined a party at the Adelphi, between Trafalgar Square and the Thames.32 Fellow guests included D. H. Lawrence and his German-born wife Frieda, cousin of the flying ace Baron von Richthofen, who had been killed seven months before. Close by, in the Union Club overlooking Trafalgar Square, T. E. ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ attended a quieter celebration, dining with two archaeologists, pre-war friends now in uniform.33

  Lieutenant Duff Cooper of the Grenadier Guards was in no mood to celebrate but felt compelled to go out. He dined at the Ritz with his fiancée, Lady Diana Manners: ‘There was an enormous crowd, the intervals between the courses were interminable and the food when it came was cold and nasty’, Duff Cooper confided in his diary. ‘I could not enjoy myself and as soon as possible Diana and I slipped away and came back to St James’s Street. The streets were full of wild enthusiasm. Diana shared the melancholy with which these filled us – and once she broke down and sobbed.’34

  The following morning, Duff woke up with a fever, and lay in bed reflecting on ‘what a cruel irony it would be to survive the war only to die from flu in his own London flat’.35 The following month, Duff’s sister, Steffie, developed pneumonia after suffering from flu: ‘In Dover Street I met Neil Arnott the doctor who told me that Steffie had died not many minutes ago. Her temperature had gone down last night and she had seemed better, but they now knew that her lungs were full of poison and the case was hopeless.’36

  In Colorado, Katherine Anne Porter immortalized her own reaction to the Armistice in Pale Horse, Pale Rider. As Katherine’s alter-ego, Miranda, lay in bed, she was awoken by pandemonium in the streets outside the hospital: ‘Bells screamed all off key, wrangling together as they collided in mid air, horns and whistles mingled shrilly with cries of human distress; sulphur colored light exploded through the black window pane and flashed away in darkness.’37

  When Miranda asked what was happening, her nurse, Miss Tanner, replied: ‘Hear that? They’re celebrating. It’s the Armistice. The war is over, my dear.’38

  But Miranda, who had lost her lover, Adam, to Spanish flu, was in no mood to celebrate. As a ragged chorus of old ladies sent up a ragged recital of ‘Oh Say, Can You See?’ their voices almost drowned by the bells, Miranda turned her face away. ‘Please open the window, please,’ she begged. ‘I smell death in here.’39

  The announcement of the Armistice left Miranda numb: ‘No more war, no more plague, only the dazed silence that follows the ceasing of the heavy guns; noiseless houses with the shades drawn, empty streets, the dead cold light of tomorrow. Now there would be time for everything.’40

  In New Haven, Connecticut, John Delano, who had lost many playmates in the epidemic, heard the sounds of the Armistice:

  The firehouses blew their whistles and the factories blew their steam whistles and people ran into the streets banging pots and pans together. The boys were coming home! We had a big parade down Grand Street in New Haven and all the military men marched past in their uniforms, their tin hats, and their leggings. Everyone was waving flags, crying and hugging and kissing.41

  Dan Tonkel, in Goldsboro, North Carolina, was awoken before dawn by his father’s pool buddies, who wanted to borrow the large American flag draped across the outside of his store. A few hours later, the flag was on a pole, leading a victory parade as it marched through the town. To Dan, it was a ‘joyous’ time: ‘People poured into the streets, forgetting their fears, hugging and kissing. It was a joyous, joyous time. Throngs paraded through Goldsboro.’42

  After the parade, life in Goldsboro returned rapidly to normal. ‘It was like you’d flipped a switch. Businesses and theaters opened up again. We went back to sc
hool. The farmers started coming back with their wagons of produce, and other vendors showed up within a week or two.’43

  Columba Voltz, recovering from Spanish flu in Philadelphia, along with her parents, was no longer troubled by the funereal ‘BONG, BONG, BONG’ of the passing bells. Instead: ‘The church bells began to ring again so gloriously. I think every church bell in Philadelphia rang that day. It was the most beautiful thing. Hearing the bells, everyone came out of their houses, congregating again, forgetting about the flu, so happy the war was ending. I felt all the joy come back into my life.’44

  Street life also returned to normal in Anna Milani’s lively Italian community: ‘All the children were outside again playing. The fisherman came by with his wagon, selling fresh fish. The pushcart salesman was selling his vegetables. My mother came out – all the mothers came out – buying their fish and vegetables.’45

  At the end of his feature on the Armistice Day celebrations, Michael MacDonagh concluded: ‘For long have we been under the shadow of Death and Destruction. Our faces are now set forward – looking towards the Light of Life. At least such of us from whom the Light is not veiled by a mist of tears for those who will not return from the War.’46

  Tragically, this ‘Light of Life’ would not shine upon everyone. As Dr Victor Vaughan observed, ‘in November the Armistice was signed but there can be no armistice between medicine and disease’.47

  The Spanish Lady did not disappear at the end of the war. In Manchester, she stalked through the crowds gathering in Albert Square to celebrate the Armistice, despite Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. James Niven’s warnings about the consequences of such mass gatherings. While the Manchester Evening News feared that ‘by leaving their homes it is quite probable that many millions of microbes have been passed to one another’,48 Niven’s advice went unheeded as thousands of people poured into the city to celebrate. By the last week of November 1918, Niven had recorded 383 influenza deaths in one week, twice the number who had perished in the last week of June. ‘A real calamity had befallen the city.’49

  In Canada, the Spanish Lady travelled home with returning soldiers, while in New Zealand, she triggered the fatal outbreak of ‘Armistice Flu’.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  BLACK NOVEMBER

  THE NEWS THAT an Armistice was to be signed reached New Zealand at nine o’clock on Tuesday, 12 November 1918. As the news spread, the main streets of every city and town were jammed with people and scenes of wild celebration.1 Trams stopped running, shops and businesses stood empty, court sessions were suspended and cinema managers ‘abandoned any idea of entertaining the public’. Daily life ground to a halt, but it was joy that brought the streets to a standstill, and not the Spanish Lady. ‘Everybody in the streets seemed to have a flag, and everybody in this case meant thousands.’2

  In Christchurch, Stan Seymour, a carpenter’s apprentice aged sixteen, recalled:

  I remember being in Cathedral Square for the Armistice celebrations. It was the biggest crowd I’d ever seen. There were a lot of men in uniform, just returned from overseas, and the crowd was quite drunk with rejoicing. There were people hugging and kissing total strangers. The crowd was so tightly packed that people’s elbows jabbed my ribs, and big boots trod on my toes … 3

  According to Alex Dickie, a young lad from Gore, the following day was declared a general holiday and the celebrations took the form of a sports carnival at the Showgrounds.

  We pupils of the Gore School marched there and the railway locomotives kept up their almost non-stop ‘Hip, hip, hurrah’ whistling. As we marched along, our master, ‘Snowy’ Nelson, flanked himself alongside each class in turn to tell us not to return to school next day and to wait for a notice when to return. That was the start of a long summer vacation.4

  But this enticing prospect would prove to be anything but enjoyable. A sudden epidemic of influenza had closed the schools, and while some people were dancing in the streets to celebrate the Armistice, others were already in mourning. Laura Hardy, a housewife from Onehunga, then an outer suburb of Auckland, recalled that on Armistice Day, ‘funerals were passing our house continually all day. Coffins were turned out by the hundred and were just made of rough boards … To this sad and sorrowing community came the news of the Armistice. There were few families which felt like rejoicing.’5

  Kate Shaw’s brother, Sergeant Angus Carnachan, was a young soldier in Featherston Military Camp when the news of the Armistice came through. Angus, who had not quite recovered from an attack of influenza, went into town to join in the celebrations, suffered a relapse and died. Kate recalled a ‘nightmare journey’ by train the following day as she travelled to collect her sister-in-law. ‘All along the line we saw funeral after funeral, victims of the epidemic.’6

  In Christchurch, young Stan Seymour was one of the first to help when Spanish flu hit his neighbourhood, a well-to-do area of town called Fendalton. Stan accompanied his mother on visits to the sick, carrying groceries and cleaning their houses. After a few days, even the most affluent homes began to stink of rotting food and overflowing chamber pots. ‘I can remember my mother rolling up the long sleeves of her dress and grimly setting to work, to clean up sordid messes…’ Stan recalled.7

  One smell was worse than the rest combined. ‘In houses where someone had died and the body was awaiting removal, there was quite a different smell, not the same as the rotting food and unemptied chamber pots, but quite distinctive.’8

  New Zealand’s doctors and nurses, their ranks already culled by the war, struggled to cope with the pandemic. One of the most outstanding was Dr Margaret Cruikshank, only the second woman to graduate in medicine from the Otago Medical School, in 1897, the first to register as a doctor and the first to enter general practice. She had also attended medical school in Edinburgh and Dublin.9 When Dr Cruikshank’s colleague, Dr Barclay, volunteered for the Medical Corps, Dr Cruikshank took sole charge of their practice, and took over Dr Barclay’s car. Dr Cruikshank worked tirelessly during the outbreak, and when her driver came down with influenza, she used her bicycle for calls within the town, and a horse for those further afield.10

  Dr David Lloyd Clay, of Wellington, had already survived one influenza epidemic and initially had no fears when the new outbreak hit Wellington in 1918. As a medical student at the Manchester Infirmary during the 1889–90 Russian flu epidemic, when 8,800 people died in England and Wales, Dr Clay believed he knew his enemy. ‘They were mostly the very elderly and complications were rare,’ he said of his British patients. But Dr Clay watched with mounting concern as he realized that this new strain of influenza presented disturbing features.

  This 1918 flu seemed clinically quite different … Early in the case the patient showed signs of distress. Grave and alarming symptoms appeared in 24 to 36 hours. The headache was intense. The delirium was sometimes quiet, at other times violent, and at other times almost maniacal. The patient had excruciating pains in the chest. A common expression among patients was, ‘Doctor, they have taken out the lining from my inside!’ Men cried out in their pain, most especially in the severer cases. The temperature rose to about 104°, and as the cough became worse, bleeding started from the nose, the lungs and sometimes from the rectum.11

  Dr Clay was desperately overworked during the epidemic. On the fourth day after Spanish flu appeared in Wellington, he worked for 22 hours without a break, visiting 152 houses and travelling 150 miles. He had his work cut out for him, with an average of two cases in every house.12

  Young Arthur Cormack saw his home town transformed within days of the Armistice games in Gore:

  The main street had the appearance of being a real ghost town. More than half the businesses were closed, and those that were open might as well be closed too, for there were no people about apart from Boy Scouts gathering for their late-afternoon tour of duty. The scouts did a marvellous job taking cooked food to stricken households. This food was prepared in the Cookery Technical block behind the Gore High School by Miss Ma
cHutchison and Mrs Pigeon. They and their helpers rendered a service that just couldn’t be rendered in words.13

  The service was much needed. One lady recalled one case

  That has stayed in my memory through all the years told of a little boy who, feeling the pinch of hunger, went to ask the butcher for some meat. He then asked the butcher how to cook it. The butcher asked why his mother wouldn’t be cooking it. The little boy replied that his parents had been asleep in bed for two days. The butcher accompanied the lad home to find that they were asleep permanently.14

  In Christchurch, Stan Seymour, who had been helping his mother care for the influenza patients, became a victim of Spanish flu himself:

  I had a very high fever with tremendous sweating. My pajamas and bedclothes became completely sodden. Mother said she could wring the moisture out of my pajamas. I can recall her sponging me down to reduce the fever. Delirium was another distinctive symptom … I’d never had dreams like these before or since: they were terrifying, whirling, out-of-control dreams, with horrible fantasies.

  I developed tremendous swellings under my armpits, so big that I couldn’t lay my arms along my sides, and big purple-black blotches on my thighs. To any educated person, these were just like the symptoms of the medieval Black Death. Some people at the time said it was only flu, but it seemed more like a plague.

  Stan had his own theories as to the origins of this mysterious and deadly disease, sentiments which echo those of victims from Europe, South Africa and the United States: ‘I still reckon it had something to do with the First World War, all those bodies rotting in the open air in no man’s land…’15

  Syd Muirhead of Oamaru, South Island, recalled his father return home from work earlier than usual, flushed and running a high temperature:

  Mother immediately packed him off to bed in the front room, which was reserved for visitors or special occasions, with extra towels, a basin and a container for formalin, a formaldehyde solution used as disinfectant. Dad indicated that he could not eat or drink – he had lost his voice – but Mother insisted that he have a plate of gruel. With pencil and paper and hand signals, Dad indicated that he had a bottle of whiskey planted in a cupboard for just such an emergency, and if she would add some to the gruel he would eat it. In all innocence, Mother tipped half a bottle of neat whiskey into the gruel. Dad drank it quickly and very soon broke out in a sweat. He perspired copiously and the bedclothes had to be changed several times. He seemed to be delirious, and his remarks on regaining his voice were quite incoherent for some time. But he made a quick recovery and always maintained that it was the quantity of whiskey and the shock and impact that brought about this miraculous recovery.16