Living with Enza: The Forgotten Story of Britain and the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918

260 Pages·2008·1.62 MB·English

by  Mark Honigsbaum

Living with Enza
The Forgotten Story of Britain and
the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918
Mark Honigsbaum
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Living with Enza
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Also by Mark Honigsbaum
The Fever Trail: the Hunt for the Cure for Malaria
Valverde’s Gold: in Search of the Last Great Inca Treasure
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Living with Enza
The Forgotten Story of Britain and
the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918
Mark Honigsbaum
Macmillan
London New York Melbourne Hong Kong
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© Mark Honigsbaum 2009
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham
Court Road, London W1T 4LP.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be
liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2009 by
MACMILLAN
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
Companies and representatives throughout the world
ISBN-13: 978–0–230–21774–4
ISBN-10: 0–230–21774–5
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed
and sustained forest sources.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09
Printed and bound in China
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For my father, Frank
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contents
list of figures viii
acknowledgements ix
prologue xii
part I
chapter 1 influenza: a primer 3
chapter 2 prelude: Etaples, winter 1916–1918 18
part II
chapter 3 first wave, March–August 1918 35
chapter 4 second wave, September–December 1918 65
chapter 5 third wave, January–May 1919 107
part III
chapter 6 Vietnam, February 2005 153
chapter 7 Britain, Summer 2012 179
epilogue 199
biographical postscript 206
notes 212
selected bibliography 224
index 228
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list of figures
1.1 Everyone has influenza 13
2.1 The piggery at Etaples 21
3.1 Sir Arthur Newsholme 58
4.1 A patient with advanced cyanosis 81
4.2 James Niven 100
5.1 Major Greenwood 113
5.2 A mobile bacteriology laboratory 118
5.3 Mr Punch wrapped up in blankets in front of the fire, eating 143
gruel and suffering from influenza
6.1 Two women selling ducks at Hanoi wet market 159
E.1 George Newman 200
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acknowledgements
I have been fascinated with the ‘Spanish’ influenza for many
years but until I stumbled on Richard Collier’s extraordinary
collection of letters at the Imperial War Museum I could not
see a way of doing justice to the British experience of the
pandemic. My first thanks then go to Richard Collier for having
the means and wherewithal to collect the testimonies of British
survivors before they were lost to history, and to the trustees of
the Imperial War Museum for allowing me to quote from the
letters freely.
My second stroke of good fortune was in discovering Will
Francis at the literary agency Greene and Heaton. It was Will
who encouraged me to see the testimonies in the Collier
Collection not merely as first-hand accounts of a catastrophic
disease event but as a window onto a particular period of
British history. In particular, Will worked with me on early
drafts of chapter four, helping to contextualize the material
and to bring out the conditions on the Home Front – condi-
tions which, I believe, go some way to explaining the stoicism
of British survivors and why the experience of the pandemic
was so quickly ‘forgotten.’
Just as it was important to put the pandemic into a proper
social context so it was essential to give readers some sort of
scientific envelope with which to make sense of the theories
about the origins of the 1918 virus and its unusual pathology.
In particular, I am indebted to Professor Peter Openshaw at
Imperial College, London, for taking the time to explain to
me the various ways in which viruses and bacteria trigger
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