The expedition and subsequent excavation was far from straightforward. There were anxieties among the scientists that the specimens might have been ruined when the permafrost melted. In addition, an international media circus had descended on the quiet town of Longyearbyen, eager for the latest discoveries. As if these factors were not enough, there were tensions among the members of the expedition. Various sources, including Esther Oxford and Duncan herself, have testified to the clash of personalities that marred the project. The eminent scientists, it seemed, were sceptical of Duncan’s amateur status, glamorous appearance and ‘emotional’ graveside press conferences, in which, while blinking back tears, she begged for dignity to be accorded to the miners’ bodies. This was never in doubt, with the excavation conducted in an atmosphere of respect for the influenza victims. Duncan, for her part, came to feel increasingly patronized and marginalized by a scientific establishment that refused to give her credit for the time and effort she had devoted to the project. Duncan later referred to the expedition as ‘the most unpleasant experience of my life’.10
On the eighth day of excavating the pit where the miners were buried, Dr Daniels’ spade hit the lid of a box. This seemed too early; the mass grave was only half a metre deep, and still in the sloppy active layer of permafrost. But, much to Professor Oxford’s dismay, the box turned out to be a coffin. ‘When I first saw that coffin, I didn’t think it was one of our coffins,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to think it was the first coffin. I could see the project vanishing down the tube.’11
After some discussion, the team decided that the coffin did not belong to one of the miners, and that it would be safe to continue digging. But the following day a second coffin was found at the same level, then a third, then a fourth. The team continued to dig until they had uncovered seven coffins, hoping against hope that these were not the coffins of the miners. ‘Even when we had the seven there was no clear indication that they were our seven,’ said Rob Daniels. ‘It was only when we found some newspaper in the coffins, dated 1917, that we realized these were probably our men. Up until that point there was always the hope that there would be another seven bodies further down.’12
To make matters worse, one of the coffins had burst, and turned out to be full of grit and sand, raising queries about the suitability of the tissue samples. When the coffins were opened, they revealed six skeletons, one family having refused permission to examine the remains.
The sight was, in the words of Esther Oxford, a ‘pitiful’ one.13 The seven coal-miners, all young men, had been buried naked, wrapped in nothing but newspaper. There were no personal items, no pieces of clothing; little care had been taken in arranging the bodies. Only one had his hands crossed over his crotch. The rest lay with their hands by their sides. All were submerged in water and coated with a fine, clay-like substance. The coffins were packed tightly into the grave.14 ‘I thought they would be more separate,’ said Professor Oxford. ‘But there wasn’t an inch between each coffin.’15
Autopsies were conducted in a respectful atmosphere by Barry Blenkinsop, an assistant pathologist from the Chief Coroner’s office in Ontario, Canada, and his colleague, Charles Smith.
With the tenderness of a father, Blenkinsop lay beside each of the six bodies on a platform of wood planks, and using three tools – a scalpel, a knife and a pair of forceps – he gently lifted out lumps of organs, carefully removed the layer of silt, then placed them reverently in the sample jars. He also took samples of bone marrow, hair (‘blond’ through loss of pigment), and small artefacts such as bits of newspaper or rope.16
Despite the silt in the coffins and the condition of the bodies, the team remained in good spirits. It was decided that the excavation would continue, as radar indicated ground disturbance two metres deep, leading to speculation that other bodies were buried further down.
But the mood didn’t last. That night, an event took place that might have been foreseen, given the unstable nature of permafrost. The pit walls filled with water and the pit collapsed overnight. The following day, the site was abandoned, and Esther Oxford watched as the gravediggers from Necropolis filled in the hole. ‘It was the collapse of a dream for my dad,’17 wrote Esther.
Professor Oxford’s own response was more pragmatic. While accepting that the Spitsbergen project was now untenable, he turned his attention to other less expensive and time-consuming forms of ‘viral archaeology’ back in England, such as analysis of two bodies found buried in lead near St Bartholomew’s Hospital 200 years earlier, including a boy who died of smallpox. In an interview conducted in 2016, Professor Oxford told me that, for his purposes, the best clinical data came from ‘path labs, human tissue harvested from PMs at Bart’s and the Royal London’.18 This was also an efficient method of bypassing ethical issues and issues such as obtaining permission from families for exhumations. While agreeing that Jeffery Taubenberger has had ‘good results with “lung blocks,” a piece of tissue the size of a sugar cube taken from larger lung samples, the problem with this is you only get a small perception of the pathology of the lung. It’s better to have the entire lung or even the body to examine the pathology of the infection.’19 To this end, Professor Oxford and his colleagues embarked on further projects such as the investigation into the remains of Sir Mark Sykes, the diplomat who died at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, an exhumation with which this book began. Leading up to this, Professor Oxford and his colleagues had embarked on another project, taking specimens from the bodies of nine victims of the 1918 pandemic buried in lead-lined coffins in south London and Oxford. Professor Oxford had located the grave sites by asking a funeral company to review its records of young people who died in the autumn of 1918 and by checking the death certificates of ten likely to be best preserved because they had been buried in lead. One Spanish flu victim in particular, Phyllis Burn, buried in Twickenham Cemetery in 1918, seemed likely to offer valuable specimens. ‘Her family were very well off,’ Professor Oxford told me, ‘they owned a motor car, very unusual in those days. So they buried her in a lead-lined coffin placed in a brick vault, as befitting her status.’20 As a result, it was hoped that Phyllis Burn’s remains might be sufficiently preserved to provide internal tissue samples ‘which could give vital information about the influenza virus – with the potential to save millions of lives’.21
The brief life of Phyllis ‘Hillie’ Burn provides a poignant coda to this book. In many respects, Hillie was a typical victim of Spanish flu, young, healthy, and, as a VAD, sacrificing her life for the war effort. This would have come naturally to a young woman who was the daughter of an army officer, Major James Montague Burn, and raised in the tradition of duty and service.
Phyllis Burn was born in 1898 and grew up with her two sisters, Nellie and Jessie, in a large house in Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, south-west London. Theirs was a happy, carefree childhood, until tragedy struck when their father died of cancer on 17 March 1912, aged just forty-five.22
When war broke out two years later, Phyllis and her sister Nellie signed up to the Volunteer Aid Detachment and together they nursed injured British soldiers returning from France for medical treatment. Phyllis was young and healthy, but on 28 October she fell sick with a headache and chills, classic symptoms of Spanish flu. Realizing that she was ill, Phyllis immediately moved out of the family home to save her mother and sisters from becoming infected. Phyllis went to stay with a neighbour, Janet Newton, in Southfield Gardens, Twickenham. Two days later, at Janet Newton’s house, Phyllis died. She was just twenty years old.23
Phyllis was buried in Twickenham Cemetery, with a carved gravestone reading ‘In Sweet and Loving Remembrance of Phyllis “Hillie”, eldest daughter of Fanny Isabella Burn’.24
In 2004, Mrs Hilary Burn-Callander, widow of Phyllis’s nephew, Roderick, still remembered what a tragedy Phyllis’s death was for her family. ‘It was a terrible tragedy for the family to lose a daughter after losing the father,’25 she said. ‘Phyllis was really loved by her sisters. After
Phyllis’s death, they lived very quietly. They never got over her death.’26
When Mrs Burn-Callander was first contacted by Professor Oxford, for permission to exhume Phyllis’s body, she admitted she felt ‘baffled’.27 But Professor Oxford ‘explained that there was a good chance that her chest cavity has been preserved and that the virus could still be there and that it was important to help prevent another pandemic. If that’s what scientists need to stop any future lethal outbreak, then it has to be done. I hope that after all these years, Phyllis can stop this happening again.’28
Sadly, Phyllis proved unable to make a posthumous contribution after all. After her body had been exhumed, it emerged that Phyllis’s coffin was not, in fact, made of lead. As she had been buried in wood, no usable samples could be retrieved. Despite this disappointing development, Professor Oxford and his team have continued with their research undaunted, in the knowledge that finding a solution to the riddle of pandemic influenza is increasingly vital.
Spanish flu killed upwards of 100 million souls during 1918–19. As Professor Oxford told me, we will never know the true figures for certain as so many deaths went unrecorded. But knowing our enemy, finding out who the Spanish Lady and her descendants really were, is vital in order to prevent another devastating type of pandemic.
The threat of another influenza pandemic remains a very real one. ‘We are like vulcanologists,’29 Professor Oxford told an interviewer back in 2000. ‘We are sitting on our volcano, and we don’t know when it is going to erupt.’30
The threat of pandemic flu is as severe as that of a terrorist attack. According to Professor Oxford, the impact of a flu pandemic in Great Britain would be the equivalent of blowing up a nuclear power station.31 The police, hospital staff and military and local authorities therefore conduct regular contingency exercises in preparation for such an event.
Quarantine plans are tested, antibiotics, analgesics and anti-viral inoculations are stockpiled, and, chillingly, leisure centres and stadiums are designated as emergency morgues. Planning is the key to survival. And even this may not be enough: the influenza virus, ‘that clever little virus!’ as Taubenberger called it, mutates constantly, meaning that a new version of the shape-shifting Spanish Lady could one day return. Back in 2013, the AIR Worldwide Research and Modeling Group ‘characterized the historic 1918 pandemic and estimated the effects of a similar pandemic occurring today using the AIR Pandemic Flu Model’.32 In the model, it was found that a modern-day Spanish flu event would result in 188,000–337,000 deaths in the United States alone.33
Although Spanish flu was once the forgotten tragedy, so traumatic that it was apparently wiped from the collective memory, the pandemic now fascinates a generation of medical researchers, writers and historians. And the Spanish Lady’s victims are beginning to get the memorials that they deserve. One cold November afternoon, I visited the chapel of the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel to view the Johannes Schreiter memorial windows, one of which is dedicated to the victims of Spanish flu. The chapel is now the medical school library and a new generation of students sat industriously at their books and laptops. Professor Oxford had described the stained-glass window to me during our interview, an abstract stained-glass triptych designed by Caroline Swash to honour the staff and patients who lost their lives in 1918. The design is based on the ‘W’ diagram of the waves of Spanish flu, and as I walked past, the colours flickered and changed with the light. For Professor Oxford, this window is a memorial to the courage and resilience of those who fought against killer influenza.
‘Who are we?’ he had asked me. ‘We don’t know until we are up against it.’34
The fight against flu, says Professor Oxford, had been characterized by ‘tiny daily acts of heroism by men and women. In 1918 there were more acts of heroism on the Home Front than on the Western Front.’35
‘Death Chart’ showing the infamous first and second waves of Spanish flu in 1918 and 1919.
Camp Funston, Fort Riley, suffered one of the first epidemics in April 1918.
Medical textbook showing a patient suffering from the deadly symptoms of ‘heliotrope’ cyanosis.
Extract from the Los Angeles Evening Herald, 22 October 1918. Family slayings became a tragic consequence of panic over Spanish flu.
The ill-fated transport ship the USS Leviathan in camouflage, September 1918.
An AEF hospital in France. The first wave of Spanish flu hit the Allies in April 1918.
An early victim: Mrs Rose Selfridge, wife of Selfridge’s founder Gordon Selfridge.
Katherine Anne Porter, Spanish flu survivor and Pulitzer Prize winner.
Flying ace William Leefe Robinson VC survived being shot down by the Red Baron but succumbed to Spanish flu.
Norwegian artist Edvard Munch painted his ‘Self Portrait with the Spanish Flu’ in 1919.
‘Don’t Spit!’ poster at the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia, warning the public to avoid infection.
Advertisement for ‘Sanitas Fumigator’ for the treatment of influenza.
A school’s gymnasium in America is converted into a flu ward due to overcrowding at the hospitals.
Cartoonist William Heath-Robinson’s response to the open-air treatment, as published in the Bystander, 16 April 1919.
Troops at Camp Dix gargling with salt water to prevent infection from Spanish flu, 24 September 1918.
‘Suck a tablet whenever you enter a crowded germ-laden place’ advised Formamint.
Americans were encouraged to ‘Eat More Onions!’ to keep Spanish flu at bay.
Factory workers in Brisbane, Australia, 1919.
A family in Dublin, California, along with their cat, demonstrate the importance of flu masks.
Seattle police in masks add a surreal touch to this photograph.
Safety at work: a typist in her flu mask, New York, 1918.
‘Obey the laws!’ A couple in their masks.
A customized flu mask sets off a young man’s straw boater.
A sentimental view of an influenza patient, as printed in the French magazine La Vie Parisienne, November 1918.
‘Out to get you!’ A British cartoon by E. Noble of the ‘Flu Monster’, c. 1918.
A nightmare memory of the Spanish flu from a Dixie Cups advertising campaign, 1920.
The songbook cover of ‘Happy’ Klark’s dance hit ‘The Influenza Blues’.
Spanish flu was often mistaken for La Grippe, which could affect even those who were in good health.
Wilhelm Schulz’s cartoon in the German satirical magazine Simplicissimus shows the Angel of Peace being overtaken by a cat-faced ‘Spanish Lady’, September 1918.
Postcard showing a memorial to the victims of Camp Funston. Harry A. Harding (seen here) designed the monument.
The Influenza Pandemic Window from the Johannes Schreiter windows at the Medical Library, the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
*Please note some of the links referenced throughout this work may no longer be active.
Introduction: An Ill Wind
1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/humber/7617968.stm.
2. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/a-cure-for-flu-from-beyond-the-grave-933046.html.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Michael B. A. M. Oldstone, Viruses, Plagues, and History: Past, Present and Future, revised edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 177–8.
7. Ibid.
8. Joan Eileen Knight, ‘The Social Impact of the Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19: With Special Reference to the East Midlands’, PhD thesis, University of Nottingham, (2015), p. 1.
9. Ibid., p. 2.
10. Ibid., p. 4.
11. Ibid., p. 4.
12. Ibid., p. 4.
13. Ibid., p. 5.
14. Ibid., p. 6.
15. Ibid.
&n
bsp; 16. Interview, Jeffery Taubenberger, Senior Investigator in the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Interview location: The National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Maryland, United States, 27 November 2007; https://www.pathsoc.org/conversations/index.php?view=article&catid=65%3Ajeffery-taubenberger&id=92%3Ajeffery-taubenberger-full-transcript&option=com_content.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Lynette Iezzoni, Influenza 1918: The Worst Epidemic in American History, New York: TV Books, 1999 (1619 Broadway New York NY 10019).
Pandemic 1918 Page 26
