Laura McQuilkin, a waitress at the Empire Hotel, ‘got the flu very bad’.
It came on very sudden one night after giving myself a bath. I got into bed and left the window wide open. Different people in the hotel were yelling out, ‘Laura, come here, you’re wanted’, but I stayed under the blankets, fresh air blowing over me all night.
Next morning, Mr. Ken the chemist and a doctor came through the hotel spraying everyone with formalin. I told them I could see playing cards all over the ceiling. My tongue was very big. Mr. Ken brought quinine medicine for me. They wanted to move me over to the Winter Show building, but I told them to leave me alone where I was.
They said afterwards I was turning black and they thought I was a goner. There were several others who died; the boss’s wife, a housemaid, a barman and barmaid were all carried out on stretchers. But I survived. I went home for a week to see Mother, and it had been just as bad in the Wairarapa.17
For overworked doctors and nurses the proceedings were occasionally diverted by scenes tinged with black comedy. At Christchurch Hospital, Nurse Winifred Muff treated a honeymooning couple who had been admitted after collapsing at Addington Races.
The wife was taken back to her hotel, but nobody knew where it was. The husband was admitted to my ward. He was very delirious, singing hymns one minute, cursing the next. He got out when no one was looking and, in his nightshirt, ran out of the grounds to the Riccarton Hotel. The porters went to fetch him with a wheelbarrow because there was no other transport available. He died later that same day.18
Another delirious patient, a wealthy farmer, told Nurse Muff: ‘Don’t stop me! I have to go twenty miles for a bedpan. My man has a horse waiting for me.’19
These events may not have seemed amusing at the time, but once the nurses went for their break and exchanged stories, ‘we saw the funny side of things’, such as the doctor who came in with a sticky stethoscope. He had been examining an old lady and listening to her chest, but when he went to get up, the stethoscope stayed stuck fast. ‘Treacle,’ she said, ‘it’s very good for a cold!’20
Dorothy Hoben of Wellington, a volunteer nurse at a temporary hospital set up at the former Thorndon Normal School, recalled: ‘One night the ambulance men brought in a fat old woman who must have weighed at least sixteen stone and was incredibly dirty. We thought she had black stockings on, until we discovered it was dirt! … She was so very, very ill. At least the poor old soul died clean.’21
In some cases, New Zealand’s Spanish flu epidemic brought out the good in people, in unexpected ways. Peggy Clark, of Te Awamutu, remembered that:
During the worst of the crisis a man claiming to be a doctor appeared on the scene and worked ably and selflessly among the victims. Many years later Dad received a letter from the Palmerston North courthouse asking for information about this ‘doctor’, who had named Dad as a referee. It turned out that he was an escaper from Waikeria Prison in 1918 and had no medical qualifications whatsoever. Apparently he was in trouble again. Dad was pleased to write back his admiration of the man’s work in the epidemic.22
In some cases, madness seemed the only sane response to the ongoing horror. Jean Forrester, née Quoi, of Auckland, was a member of the St John Ambulance Brigade and worked in an emergency hospital set up in Seddon Memorial Tech. One of Jean’s patients, described as ‘a Hindu man’, ‘was delirious and kept asking if it was four o’clock, as he was going to die then. Four o’clock came and went, but he did not die. He just couldn’t accept that he hadn’t died, and became so deranged in his ravings that he was removed to the mental hospital.’23
Maurice O’Callaghan, of the St John Ambulance Brigade, Auckland, made a horrific discovery when called to a house in Grey Lynn: ‘We found a man who had been dead three days. His body was in the bed, and his wife was lying in the same bed, not dead but driven out of her mind with a dead husband and could not get up…’24
Volunteer nurse Ivy Landreth, of Owaka, South Otago, remembered one horrific night when a man cut his throat and died while she was on duty. ‘My brother was one of those who had to deal with him. I remember my brother saying he had never experienced anything so bad all the time he was at the war, in spite of the fact that he had lost his left arm at Passchendaele.’25
In New Zealand, as in other parts of the world, the pandemic was responsible for many poignant scenes of family tragedy. At Kouipapa, Catlins District, Sister May Newman, a hospital nurse, was ordered by the police to work in an emergency hospital. This was in spite of the fact that the Newman family home had just burned to the ground and May was supposed to be caring for her motherless siblings. One afternoon their brother, Douglas Newman, was discovered collapsed by the side of the road with his horse standing by. Douglas was taken to hospital at Owaka, where it emerged that May, too, had become a patient. May had been on duty on the night when another patient had cut his own throat, and had held his head down while the doctor stitched his throat back together. Douglas survived, but when he recovered it was to be told that May had passed away. Douglas maintained that May had died as a result of the nursing duties she had been compelled to take on. ‘This man was breathing directly onto my sister’s face,’ he said, ‘and this I believe was the reason she caught the plague.’26
When Spanish flu hit the Hawkins family, dairy farmers in Limehills, near Winton, Southland, almost everyone fell sick. Edith Hawkins, a child at the time, remembered her mother refusing to go to bed but sitting up with her four-month-old son, Jim, who did not have influenza. Occasionally, she would sprinkle sulphur over the hot coals to fumigate the house and Edith enjoyed ‘watching the pretty colors this made as it burned’.27
The family soon recovered with the exception of Edith’s father, who died on 24 November, aged just thirty-three.
We were lucky to get a coffin right away, though it was a lady’s coffin covered in pale blue velvet. Grandad Holland and Grandad Anderson harnessed up old Sandy the horse and yoked him into the spring cart that Dad used for carting the milk to the factory. Friends helped lift the casket into the cart. The two men sat one on each side of it at the front.28
As Edith sat on the doorstep, her mother stood in the doorway, ‘holding a twin by each hand, and we watched them drive away down the road, round the corner and out of sight’.29
Just as they had done in North America and South Africa, the native population endured a considerably higher death rate than the white settlers. In the epidemic of 1918–19 a total of 8,573 New Zealanders died. This included 2,160 Maori out of an estimated Maori population of 51,000.30 According to Geoffrey W. Rice, author of Black November: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand, there was ‘a huge difference between European and Maori death rates’ in New Zealand, and the ‘Maori were seven times more likely than Europeans to die from the flu’.31 On 22 November 1918, the Pukekohe and Waiuku Times carried this desperate plea for help:
Te Awamutu is pitiable. There is no business being done and the deaths are appalling. The great trouble here is the scattered nature of the settlement. Families are stricken and lie about until almost past hope before they are discovered … It is simply horrible.
The Maoris at Parawere are suffering badly and there is very little hope for them as there are very few people left even to attend to white people. They are talking of opening the town hall as a temporary hospital similar to Te Awamutu, but there is no help available.
Do not let this plague get the upper hand in Pukekohe. Take drastic measures.32
Julius Hogben, running an emergency hospital in Thames, was in charge of a ward to which most of the Maoris were sent. Many would only go to hospital as a last resort. ‘They said that if you went there you would die, and, because of the advanced stage of the disease they were in on arrival, some of them did. Apart from influenza, some of them were suffering from malnutrition.’33
One fourteen-year-old boy was admitted described as ‘skin and bone and sores’, and died within a day. It later emerged that, during the previous
winter, he had lived on little more than dried shark.34 Florence Harsant, of Tanoa, Northland, recalled a certain air of fatalism among the Maoris: ‘To show you how quickly it took its victims, a Maori neighbor of ours called Andrew passed the house on horseback one day when mother was on the veranda. “Goodbye, missus, goodbye,” he called out. “I’s sick, I won’t be here tomorrow.” And indeed next morning he was dead.’35
Nursing patients in the more remote areas of New Zealand presented a considerable logistical challenge. Ivy Driffell, of Rawene, Hokianga, was a young nurse in Hokianga Hospital in 1918:
I was just a young nurse but, being a good rider, was sent to a very backblock Maori settlement, first having to cross the Hokianga River by launch from Opononi and then ride over sandhills and beach … There were no doctors, chemists or antibiotics, just a bottle of brandy and lots of aspirins, and the use of our own judgement. Numbers of Maoris died before we arrived and many after.
I rode forty-odd miles daily, there were so many side tracks. One home I went to, a father, mother and small boy were down, the boy obviously dying, so I gave him all I could and had to leave him. Next morning he had died and the parents had been carried on stretchers up a ladder into a large corn crib. Up I went and saw that the father was not so bad but the mother was failing. I gave her all I could, then talked to the old man and gave him a brandy and aspirin. He was furious and said, ‘That’s not fair, you gave her more than me!’ She died that night.36
Florence Harsant, a ‘Maori Organizer’ for the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement, had grown up fluent in the language as her father taught in a Maori school. She remembered a doctor telling her that the influenza epidemic ‘was the nearest thing to the Black Plague he had ever seen’.37
One of Florence’s duties was to cut the Maori women’s hair, as the doctor insisted that ‘the weight of the hair and the heat it generated would not help their high temperatures’.38
One girl, a bride of one month, had the most lovely head of long brown hair, her husband’s pride and joy. No matter what we did, we could not get her temperature down. At last the doctor told me her hair must be cut off. I broke the news to her husband, and while tears rolled down his cheeks (and, I must admit, mine too) I cut those lovely tresses away. I gathered up her hair and gave it to him. Hair is very sacred to the Maoris. He wept as he took it away to bury it. After sponging her down, then attending to some other patients, I came back to find that her fever had dropped. She was one who lived.39
As usual, the outbreak took its toll on the medical profession, too. Dr Charles Little had served the district between Waikari and Waiau and was married to Hephzibah, a nurse at Christchurch Hospital. They had both worked tirelessly during the early stages of the epidemic, and both contracted influenza. Hephzibah died on 22 November, in the same hospital where she had trained, and Dr Little died of pneumonia four days later. A stunned community built a hospital in their memory, with a statue of Dr Little gazing out at the community for which he gave his life; tellingly, there is no statue to Hephzibah.40 However, Dr Margaret Cruikshank, revered in the district as a dedicated general practitioner, was commemorated in a statue at Seddon Park, Waimate, in 1923. Dr Cruikshank had died of pneumonia on 28 November, and her funeral was one of the largest ever seen in Waimate.41
Over in Australia, public health officials were confident that they had prevented the arrival of Spanish flu. Warned from afar as the epidemic advanced across Europe, Africa and North and South America, Australians had the opportunity to arm themselves and enact strict quarantine measures. Initially, this had proved successful. But in January 1919 the first cases of killer influenza were reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, and within weeks Australia’s most populated city had fallen victim to the Spanish Lady. The Herald, realizing that the city was in terrible danger, issued this edict:
TO THE PEOPLE OF NEW SOUTH WALES
A danger greater than war faces the State of New South Wales and threatens the lives of all. Each day the progress of the battle is published in the Press. Watch out for it. Follow the advice given and the fight can be won.42
Stressing that ‘the many shall not be placed in danger by the few’, the paper urged readers to wear a mask. ‘Those who are not doing so are not showing their independence – they are only showing their indifference for the lives of others – for the lives of the women and the helpless little children who cannot help themselves.’43
Strict quarantine regulations introduced into Sydney doubtless saved lives. As in the United States, all places of public entertainment were closed, along with bars and even public telephones; church services and race meetings were banned. The wearing of masks in public became compulsory.
But even Sydney could not outwit the Spanish Lady. The mortality rate climbed, and by the end of the year 3,500 Sydney residents had died, among the total 12,000 Australians who had lost their lives, illustrating that it was impossible to isolate a continent from Spanish flu, however strict the quarantine procedures.
CHAPTER TWENTY
AFTERMATH
THE ARMISTICE DID not bring about the demise of the Spanish Lady. Instead, after a vicious campaign against humanity in the closing months of 1918, she lingered on wretchedly like an unloved invalid for the best part of another year. At the first peacetime Christmas in four years, the London Times commented ruefully that ‘Never since the Black Death has such a plague swept over the world; never, perhaps, has a plague been more stoically accepted.’1
Two weeks later, one of Britain’s youngest war heroes became one of the Spanish Lady’s last victims of the year. William Leefe Robinson VC, the first British pilot to shoot down a German aircraft over Britain, died of influenza on 31 December 1918, aged just twenty-three. Known as ‘Billy’, Leefe Robinson was born on his father’s coffee estate in Coorg, India, on 14 July 1895.2 Sent to public school in England, Billy proved to be sporty rather than academic, and attended Sandhurst military academy before being gazetted into the Worcestershire Regiment in December 1914. The following March, Billy joined the Royal Flying Corps in France, qualifying as a pilot in September 1915. Billy had an absolute passion for flying: ‘You have no idea how beautiful it is above the clouds … I love flying more and more every day, and the work is even more interesting than it was,’ he wrote in a letter home.3
Billy was posted to No. 39 Home Defence Squadron, a night-flying squadron near Hornchurch in Essex, and had his first chance to shoot down a Zeppelin in April 1916 but could not get his aircraft into position for an effective attack. However, on the night of 23 September, he was given another chance. Engaged on a routine ‘search and find’ operation flying at around 10,000 feet between the airfield and Joyce Green, Billy spotted a Zeppelin at 1.10 a.m., caught in two searchlight beams over Woolwich, south-east London. He set off in pursuit but lost the Zeppelin in thick cloud.4 By this time, the searchlights over Finsbury Park, north London, had spotted another airship, one of sixteen on a mass raid, and anti-aircraft guns opened fire. Billy was low on fuel but he gave chase, joined by two comrades. As anti-aircraft fire lit up the sky, the airship unloaded its deadly cargo and soared higher. Billy emptied two drums of ammunition into the airship, but it flew on, apparently indestructible. He made another attack from astern and fired his last drum into the airship’s twin rudders.
‘When the colossal thing actually burst into flames of course it was a glorious sight,’ Billy later wrote to his parents. ‘Wonderful! It literally lit up all the sky around and me as well of course – I saw my machine as in the fire light – and sat still half dazed staring at the wonderful sight before me, not realizing to the least degree the wonderful thing that had happened!’5
‘My feelings?’ Billy continued. ‘Can I describe my feelings? I hardly know how I felt as I watched the huge mass gradually turn on end, and – as it seemed to me – slowly sink, one glowing, blazing mass – I gradually realized what I had done and grew wild with excitement.’6
The airship burst into flames and plun
ged to earth, as thousands of Londoners looked on and cheered. It eventually crashed into a field in Cuffley, Hertfordshire. In fact, it had been a wooden-frame Schütte-Lanz machine, not strictly a Zeppelin, but this distinction was of little importance to the public and politicians. While Billy was back at Sutton’s Farm writing his report and sleeping, the excitement of ‘Zepp Sunday’ broke out across London, and Billy woke up to find that he had become a hero. Within forty-eight hours, he had been awarded a Victoria Cross, the first man to receive one for action over the United Kingdom, and one of only nineteen awarded to airmen during the First World War. After receiving his VC from King George at Windsor Castle, Billy modestly told the press that, ‘I only did my job.’7
He was recognized now wherever he went, whether in uniform or in mufti. People turned and stared, policemen saluted him, porters and waiters bowed and scraped, babies, flowers and even hats were named after him. As Billy himself commented, ‘Oh, it’s too thick!’8 His fame also made him a magnet for young women, but he never seemed to complain about that. Soon after being awarded his VC, he was sent back to France as a flight commander and shot down by Manfred von Richthofen, the ‘Red Baron’, in 1917.9
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