Another survivor recalled that the impact of Spanish flu ‘was like a blind coming down’,20 while another journalist described the mood perfectly when he quoted ‘holy writ’ by declaring that the scourge had arrived in Cape Town ‘like a thief in the night’.21
On Monday 7 October, with the newspaper’s ‘Deaths’ section already nearly a column long, the Cape Times devoted its first leader to the epidemic, instead of the war.22 The same day, the Star’s Cape Town correspondent reported ‘Cape Town at the moment is a stricken city’,23 while a Cape Argus columnist noted the tragic fact that so many victims of Spanish flu were young and healthy: ‘Death has stalked from its vantage ground in these crowded rooms and seized our youngest and strongest in their immaculate surroundings.’24
While Cape Town’s civic authorities occupied themselves with an executive committee to combat the epidemic, many individuals threw themselves into relief work to overcome their own grief. Young Mr A. van Oord, a clerk, heard that one of his closest friends had died, ‘a big well-built chap, of my own age, 20’.25 Van Oord was so deeply shocked that he felt, ‘it did not matter to me now in the least if I got the flu and died too. In fact I even hoped I would!’26 Van Oord put in extra-long hours registering deaths at the Woodstock Police Station, hoping that he might catch influenza and die too, but ‘despite the constant stream of coughing and deeply saddened, tearful people standing before and around me in that small room and stricken area, I did not even sneeze.’27
Meanwhile, the mortality rates crept upwards. Between 8 October and 13 October deaths from Spanish flu and its complications rose to more than 300 per day, and the week’s total was a horrifying 2,404. The Cape Argus called it ‘the blackest week in the history of Cape Town’,28 and described a ‘sense of calamity engendered by the terrible mortality’,29 while years later a flu survivor remembered how in Fresnaye, ‘All the house blinds were kept down on hearing of a death in the neighborhood, and bewildered children were awe-inspired by elders talking in subdued tones in an atmosphere of gloom.’30 As rumours swirled about who had actually died, Morris Alexander, a local MP, was astonished to receive a phone call from the editor of the Cape Times enquiring as to the time of his own funeral.31
Doctors soon became as nervous as laymen about the consequences of this deadly outbreak. When a close friend asked the distinguished Dr F. C. Willmot whether Cape Town was going to be wiped out, Willmot replied: ‘I will tell you what I would not tell any other man in the Union, for the first time in my life I am panicky, and believe we are.’32
By 12 October, Adderley and St George’s Street were ‘almost deserted even in the middle of the day … Cape Town is like a city of mourning … and nothing is talked of or thought about other than Influenza.’33 A little girl walking through the city centre at this time recalled ‘deathly silent streets which were really frightening’,34 while the veteran politician, John X. Merriman, noted in his diary on 17 October, ‘Cape Town very empty & forlorn.’35 As people dropped down dead in the streets, one twenty-one-year-old student at the University of Cape Town recalled that ‘Cape Town was a veritable city of the dead.’36
In scenes reminiscent of London’s Great Plague of 1665, carts circulated every morning, picking up the dead and taking them away to the cemeteries. Convicts, recruited with the promise of remission, piled up body after body, and occasionally the tarpaulin slipped to reveal arms and legs, tagged with labels. One eyewitness wrote: ‘I actually saw the wagons going round, a bell ringing as they went, whilst the drivers called “Bring out your dead!” Just as one reads in accounts of the Black Plague, and at which one has so often shuddered.’37
With every undertaker in Cape Town overstretched, many families had to convey the bodies of their loved ones to the cemetery themselves. When cars and taxis were not available, they resorted to carrying them on traditional biers (carts or trolleys upon which the coffin is placed), or even pushing them to the graveside on wheelbarrows. The inevitable shortage of coffins that came as a consequence of the epidemic meant that many corpses were buried in nothing more than a blanket.
As Spanish flu fanned outwards across the peninsula, native Africans became the inevitable victims. Mine workers returning home from the Rand died on the road or in the veldt or bushland as they travelled on foot. One farmer in the Graskop district, a gold-mining camp in Mpumalanga province, reported that it was quite common ‘to come across natives all along the road just left to die’.38 This farmer had seen ‘gangs of natives fleeing in terror from a sick boy lying in the road’,39 and recalled that ‘if an ailing native is unable to proceed farther he is simply abandoned by his friends or brothers who may happen to have been accompanying him’.40
Dying miners were carried off packed trains, ‘while conditions in the Black coaches must have been horrific. On one such train the ticket-collector refused to enter these carriages “because there was so much illness there.” When another passenger went in, he found “it was a ghastly mess.”’41 De Burger’s Pietersburg correspondent wrote that the corpses of black men could be seen lying along the tracks of the train to Messina.42 Conditions became so bad that, in the middle of October, hospital coaches were attached to trains carrying large numbers of black men to or from the Rand.
Spanish flu had a devastating impact on the South African mining industry. ‘The influenza has indeed played havoc with the profits and makes one very anxious about the future’,43 admitted Sir Lionel Phillips, chairman of Central Mining, in a private letter to the President of the Chamber of Mines. ‘One thing after another appears to arise to prey upon the gold mines.’44 Losses were experienced at a financial level, with seventeen of the forty-eight mines on the Rand reporting a net loss for the month of November 1918. While this had serious repercussions for the mine owners, their attitude towards the workforce appears callous in the extreme.
Spanish flu proved even more destructive when it hit the diamond fields of Kimberley, carried by railway passengers from Cape Town. With its defective sanitation, poor housing and overcrowding, Kimberley was a magnet for disease, and Spanish flu flourished in the overcrowded jail, military camp, black neighbourhoods and the De Beers’ compounds. As the general manager of De Beers told the subsequent Influenza Epidemic Commission: ‘With conditions existing as they did previous to the epidemic it was not surprising that when the epidemic started conditions for its spread were all in its favor.’45
Initially, doctors and public officials regarded the outbreak as ‘trifling’, and ‘nothing to worry about provided ordinary precautions were taken’.46 But as the disease spread through Kimberley, the distinctive symptoms of Spanish flu became manifest. In addition to the ‘crackling sounds from the lungs, bloody expectoration, a furry coating of the tongue, heliotrope tingeing of the skin, bleeding from nose or mouth’,47 and diarrhoea and vomiting, there was a distinctive odour, ‘like very musty straw, the unforgettable smell of the 1918 influenza’, one survivor recalled, ‘so pungent, it just came into your nostrils with a bang’.48 Many doctors came to the conclusion that this was not influenza at all, but something far more sinister. One doctor in Kimberley decided that he was looking at a new strain of pneumonia. He ‘had seen cases with gangrene of the feet and fingers’, he told the Influenza Epidemic Commission, ‘and one did not get gangrene with influenza or ordinary pneumonia’.49 Other expert opinion echoed previous theories that plague might be responsible for the devastating epidemic. Dr Alexander Edington, the prominent bacteriologist at the head of Grey’s Hospital, Pietermaritzburg, claimed that the causative agent was related to plague, while Dr W. Purvis Beattie stated in the Cape Times that the epidemic was in fact pneumonic plague and that he was notifying the authorities to this effect.
The public embraced the plague theory. ‘In God’s name, when are you going to cease talking piffle about “influenza”?’ demanded an exasperated reader of the Star. ‘Influenza does not turn a corpse black but pneumonic plague does.’50 Many Afrikaners agreed with this diagnosis, while the biblical
connotations of plague were irresistible to many Christians, who regarded the epidemic as a form of divine punishment for immorality. South African president General Louis Botha even claimed the epidemic was a punishment for the lack of unity between English and Afrikaners. ‘This visitation will prove to be one of the means sent by God in order to sober us by punishment; to clear out misunderstanding, so that everything may lead along the road of greater affection, tolerance, co-operation, and a truly united national existence in matters spiritual as well as political.’51 Botha himself became a victim of Spanish flu the following year, dying on 27 August 1919.
Other theories as to the aetiology of the disease echoed those circulating in Europe and the United States. The Cape Times maintained ‘that Spanish influenza may be directly traced to the use of poison gas by the Germans’,52 while others shared the widespread belief that Spanish flu originated from scores of rotting bodies left to decompose on the battlefields. This theory was widespread, and even in the remoter parts of Manyikaland, Southern Rhodesia, local ngangas, or witch doctors, were convinced that ‘So many were killed in the great war of the white people that the blood of the dead had caused this great sickness.’53
The Spanish Lady went by a new name in South Africa. Afrikaners called the disease longpest, reflecting the view that this pestilence was not influenza at all, but a form of plague. Among the black population, names for Spanish flu included mbethalala and driedagsiekte, or ‘that which smites’ and ‘the thing that strikes you down and sends you to sleep’.54 In one district, where African natives were the first victims, the disease was dubbed Kaffersiekte or ‘black man’s sickness’, while in another, where whites died first, the black Africans christened the disease ‘white man’s sickness’.55 But whatever name they gave it, the meaning was clear. This was no ordinary influenza and it spread terror across the Union. Horrifying stories circulated to the effect that victims fell into comas indistinguishable from death, with ‘corpses’ reviving to life on their way to the cemetery;56 bodies turned black and decomposed within hours, and the mystery disease was also killing birds, pigs and baboons.57 This ‘plague’ was said to have been borne in on a dark rain, and meat exposed to the atmosphere turned black.58
At Dutoitspan, another diamond mine, operations were halted on 30 September because of the large number of men laid up, as numerous cases appeared among Kimberley’s white population. As life in the town ground to a halt, the De Beers Company suspended work at its mines amidst rumours of an appalling number of deaths in its compounds. ‘No one realizes what is lying there’, a nurse told her family when she returned from helping out at Dutoitspan.59
Almost a quarter of the 11,445 black employees died within a month, and the death toll did not fall below 100 per day between 5 October and 14 October. On 8, 9 and 10 October it rose to over 300 per day. Soon all three compound hospitals were overflowing, with mattresses out on the verandas to accommodate more patients. Part of the side walls were removed at Wesselton Compound Hospital to improve ventilation and St John Ambulance nurses of the De Beers Corps had to be called in to supplement the nursing staff.60 When pneumonia set in and the death toll climbed, De Beers realized it had to cease work in all its mines. Conditions had become horrific, with men dropping dead in their tracks, hospital floors covered with dying patients and corpses piled on top of each other awaiting removal. One doctor said that he had seen ‘horrible things happen in the war, but nothing so terrible as the way that the natives died from influenza in the compounds’.61 On 6 October, the General Manager, Alpheus Williams, withdrew the St John nurses (of which his wife was a member) when he saw that if he left them there any longer, ‘owing to the terrible death rate everyone would have contracted the disease’.62 Days later De Beers stopped burying their dead in the local cemetery and began using a site on their own property instead.
Workers who had not yet been affected by the flu soon realized that if they wanted to stay alive, they had better leave the compound death trap quickly. From 8 October some requested permission to leave, saying they would rather die at home and wanted to look after their families.63 For a week, De Beers officials tried to dissuade them, but increasing numbers of miners begged to leave, their ranks swelled by survivors. As the De Beers management debated its options, the miners announced that they had decided to leave, and if De Beers did not agree they would break out of the compound, ‘even if fired upon’.64 De Beers gave way, and repatriation began on 18 October. Over 5,000 survivors went home, the majority by rail, over the following two and a half weeks. Provision was made for any who fell ill on the journey, although De Beers tried to ensure that no one even suspected of being ill was allowed to embark.
Horrified by the death toll in its compounds, especially as this compared so unfavourably with other mines in the country, the De Beers management realized that improvements were imperative; they could not afford the risk of another devastating epidemic like the Spanish flu. Amid general applause, the chairman promised the Annual General Meeting in December 1918 that ‘no expense will be spared to make the Compounds, if possible, more comfortable and healthy for the natives than those occupied previous to the Epidemic’.65 But there was no mention of improving conditions underground.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE DYING FALL
BY THE AUTUMN of 1918, few Allied families had reason to celebrate, despite encouraging news from the Front. Across the globe, they had lost loved ones either to the Spanish Lady or to the war. It was against this backdrop that the Spanish Lady played out her death march, killing without compunction. She did not discriminate between statesmen, painters, soldiers, poets, writers or brides.
On 11 September 1918, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George arrived in Manchester to receive the Freedom of the City, the greatest honour that a city can confer. Although Lloyd George was raised in Wales, he had been born in Chorlton-on-Medlock in Manchester and the city was understandably proud of its famous son. As his open-topped carriage drove through Manchester, Lloyd George received a hero’s welcome from soldiers home on leave and munitions girls, lining the Piccadilly and Deansgate areas and creating such ‘turmoil in the streets’, according to the Manchester Guardian, that it took over an hour to reach Albert Square.1 During this journey, Lloyd George was soaked in a shower of Manchester’s ubiquitous rain.
The following day, Lloyd George made a powerful speech about the war at his Freedom of the City ceremony. Although he reassured his audience that ‘nothing but heart failure’2 could prevent a British victory, it soon became obvious that the Prime Minister was not in the best of health. One spectator who shared the platform with him recorded that Lloyd George was ‘long’ and ‘not in his best form’. But at the time his words seem to have had a powerful impact.3
After the ceremony, Lloyd George attended a civic lunch at the Midland Hotel, where he delivered another, shorter speech, praising the exploits of the Manchester regiment and other Lancashire units. By the time evening had arrived, with the prospect of giving yet another speech at a dinner at the Reform Club, the Prime Minister felt too ill to go on. He took to his bed and all the plans for his visit had to be cancelled. Lloyd George would spend the next nine days in his bedroom at Manchester Town Hall. His room was at the front of the building, and he later recalled looking out at the statue of John Bright, ‘dripping with constant rain’.4
As the eminent ear, nose and throat specialist Sir William Milligan was summoned to supervise Lloyd George’s care, his aides battled to suppress news of the illness. The fact that the Prime Minister of Great Britain had influenza would have alarmed the public and provided a morale boost to the enemy. Bulletins were issued to the press but these gave no indication of the gravity of Prime Minister’s condition. The public were informed that Lloyd George had caught a chill, caused by the rain the previous day. There was no mention of the alarming possibility that he had contracted the same lethal strain of Spanish flu that had appeared in Manchester during the previous summer, infecting 100
,000 Mancunians and killing 322.
When Lloyd George’s condition deteriorated, Sir William Milligan decided to take the risk and announce that the Prime Minister had influenza. While the traffic was diverted from Albert Square, so that Lloyd George would not be troubled by the sound of the trams, the press downplayed the gravity of the situation.
Maurice Hankey, Secretary of the War Cabinet, later confided that the Prime Minister had been ‘very seriously ill’ and that his valet, Newnham, had said it was ‘touch and go’.5 According to one biographer, Lloyd George ‘seems to have been acutely, perhaps critically, ill at a time of mounting crisis in the world, when he needed to be in full vigour to tackle a situation that took him by surprise’.6
By 21 September, Lloyd George had recovered sufficiently to travel back to London, accompanied by Sir William Milligan and wearing a ventilator. After a brief stop at 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister was taken to Danny Park, his country retreat in West Sussex, for a working convalescence. Despite being a man of great energy and drive, Lloyd George was almost broken by Spanish flu.
‘I am crawling upward but have not yet recovered strength,’ he wrote to his wife, Margaret. ‘Unfortunately – or fortunately – things are moving so rapidly I cannot keep off affairs of State. Someone here every day.’7 By the end of September, he was still cancelling public meetings on medical advice and when he travelled to France on 4 October, Milligan insisted on accompanying him.
‘I am off by the 8 train from Charing X,’ he wrote to Margaret. ‘My temperature is still very low & my pulse too feeble … I had my first Cabinet yesterday & it tired me so that I am not yet fit for much work. It is a pity that the Paris journey could not be put off until next week … I propose staying at Versailles … more reposeful than a Paris hotel.’8
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