Living with Enza: the forgotten story of Britain and the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918

Abstract/Biographical note:

'Never since the Black Death has such a plague swept over the face of the world and never, perhaps, has a plague been more stoically accepted.'

Thus wrote the Times in December 1918, during the worst visitation of infectious disease in British history. Between the summer of 1918 and the winter of 1919 the 'Spanish' influenza (so-called because Spain was the only country not to censor reports of the spreading epidemic) claimed the lives of an astonishing 228,000 Britons - as many as were killed at the Third Battle of Ypres.

 

Worldwide the death toll from the Great Flu was simply incomprehensible with as many as 100 million dead, according to some estimates. As a doctor's son from Lancashire recalled: 'All treatment was futile…people collapsed in their homes, in the streets and at work.'

 

But though the pandemic struck a population reeling from nearly five years of continuous warfare, decimating communities even as they were celebrating the Armistice, the influenza caused little overt distress or alarm and resulted in no public memorials.

 

Ninety years on, as the world faces the prospect of a new pandemic, triggered this time by the bird flu virus H5N1, Mark Honigsbaum recalls the 'forgotten' story of the 1918 influenza and examines how British society and public institutions might cope with a similarly devastating outbreak today.

 

Would Britons present a 'stiff-upper lip' as they did in 1918 or would there be widespread panic? Would patients heed the Department of Health's call to stay at home and telephone the National Flu hotline for advice, or would they besiege chemists and GP's surgeries demanding antiviral medications and vaccines? And given Britain's 'just-in-time' economy and our dependence on international markets, how would the government prevent an economic meltdown and a Northern Rock-style run on banks, supermarkets and petrol stations? 

 

Drawing on an archive of unpublished letters from British survivors of the 1918 pandemic, contemporary newspaper reports, and the memoirs of Army medics and civil servants, I will paint a vivid picture of the depredations of influenza and the response of ordinary Britons in towns and villages across the British isles.

 

I will describe:

• how the Prime Minister Lloyd George came close to dying from influenza in September of1918 and how civil servants and sympathetic newspaper editors conspired to keep the severity of his illness from the public
• how Britain's Chief Medical Officer drew up plans for extra nursing cover, cinema closures, and restrictions on train and tram travel only to shelve his plans at the last moment for fear of harming the war effort
• the race by military and civilian scientists to isolate the pathogen of influenza and develop a vaccine
• the desperate effort by Manchester's medical health officer to warn people of the impending disaster only for his worst fears to be realised when thousands of munition workers, soldiers, and textile workers flocked to the centre of Manchester on 11 November to celebrate the Armistice.

 

In addition, I willpresent a vivid picture of the long queues that formed outside doctors' surgeries, the mounting shortages of coffins and grave-diggers, the urgent appeals for doctors to be released from military service, and the belated advice from medical health officers for civilians to avoid crowded, unventilated spaces.

 

Finally, I willexamine the latest data on bird flu and the government's current 'pandemic preparedness plan' and ask how fearful we should be about the oft-repeated predictions of a new pandemic.

 

MARK HONIGSBAUM is a journalist and author based at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL. Specializing in the science and history of infectious disease his work appears in the Guardian, the Observer and the Financial Times. His previous books include The Fever Trail: In Search of the Cure for Malaria, and Valverde's Gold: In Search of the Last Great Inca Treasure, which was the Critics' Choice selection in the Daily Mail. His latest book, Living With Enza: the forgotten story of Britain and the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918,  is published by Macmillan Science on 7 November.