“Black November, the 1918 influenza pandemic in New Zealand”,
by Dr. Geoffrey Rice, Associate Prof of History at Cantrerbury University.
Canterbury University Press, 2005. p 7
This book has its origins in an afterdinner conversation with my father in 1977…. I asked him to name the most vivid experience of his childhood. Without a moments hesitation he replied, “Why the Black Flu, of course”. This rang no bells for me, so I asked, “When was that”? His reply, as I recall, went something like this;
“That was the big flu epidemic at the end of the First World War. I thought everyone had heard about the Black Flu. You wouldn’t forget it if you’d lived through it. People collapsed and died like flies, even big strong men in the prime of life. In fact it would affect them worse than the weedy types…. It went through the country like wildfire. Thousands died in that flu, especially the Maoris. They seemed to get it worse than the rest of us. But I don’t remember ever seeing an official death toll. Perhaps they were too afraid to publish the figures.”
He told me how Taumarunui (a railroad town in the middle of the North Island of NZ) had come to a complete standstill for what seemed several weeks, with all the shops and pubs shut and nearly every adult in the town laid low with the flu. His family was one of the lucky ones that seemed to be immune. my grandparents spent all day, every day, visiting their sick neighbors and feeding the convalescents. At first my father went with them. His job was to light the fires each morning in the coal ranges which then heated the water and warmed the houses. He was very proud of his system. having set the paper and kindling in three houses, he would return to light them, and by the time the third one was lit, the first one would be ready for more wood. He then would repeat the round to add coal, before moving on the the next three houses. Nobody needed to lock their doors at night in those days.
As well as lighting the fires, my father also had to look into the bedrooms to see if anyone had died in the night. In my ignorance I asked, “How could you tell? They’d just look as if they were asleep”. I will never forget the shock of his reply;
Öh, you could tell all right. In that flu, when they died, the bodies turned black. That is why our Nanna always called it the Black Flu. In one house I looked into a bedroom and there was the wife, still fast asleep, and her husband dead and black beside her. It was a terrible time. I had to turn it in (quit) after that, I just couldn’t carry on.”
He was only nine years old in 1918.
Well, wish this history was getting taught in school…
and included, along with the (more local for us) Ft.Devens accounts, in the few and far between local “flu” education forums.
:-(
“Black November, the 1918 influenza pandemic in New Zealand”,
by Dr. Geoffrey Rice- p 118
transcribed oral history- Stan Seymour of Christchurch, New Zealand
I’d just left school in 1918 at the age of sixteen….
The epidemic hit very suddenly. All at once, it seemed, all the households around us were stricken. It was incredible how quick it took you. Within half an hour, from feeling perfectly well to feeling utterly wretched and helpless. You just had to go to bed and I couldn’t get up.(sic) I had a high fever with tremendous sweating. My pyjamas and bedclothes became completely sodden. Mother said she could wring the moisture out of my pjamas. I can recall her sponging me down to reduced the fever. Delirium was another distinctive symptom. I was a pretty intense and imaginative kid anyway, but I’d never had dreams like these, before or since: they were terrifying, whirling, out-of-control dreams, with horrible fantasies.
I developed tremendous swellings under my armpits, so big that I couldn’t lay my arms along my sides, and big purple-black blotches on my thighs. To any educated person, these were just like the symptoms of the medieval Black Death. Some people at the time said it was only the flu, but it seemed more like a plague.
If you are trying to get people to prep, a great motivator is to read about 1918. Reading stories like these, plus Barry’s book, defintely kicked me into high prep gear.
Clark - Even after reading “The Great Influenza” your posts about the book “Black November” give me chills. I guess even after reading about the events of 1918 the sheer scope of it all can really only be understood by those who have experienced it. If these books can’t convince people to prep nothing can.
clark, amazing, chilling stuff, thank you so much for posting it. Wow, the second excerpt brings me back to DaFoe’s “Journal of the Plague Year”! Is this book or transcription available to buy or on the internet? Like others are saying above, nothing works like these true experiences to make it real for people.
Hi Northstar
You can buy the book second hand from Amazon for about $30
Black November: The 1918 influenza pandemic in New Zealand by Geoffrey W. Rice
Reviewed by Dorothy - 28/04/06 http://www.nzine.co.nz/views/1918pandemic.html
The threat of bird flu hangs over the world and we have no idea when or whether it will hit the New Zealand community. We are warned that we should be prepared, but we cannot be given specific guidelines because the nature of the threat is not specific. A detailed investigation of the impact on the New Zealand community of the 1918 Pandemic is most timely reading for people everywhere living under the threat of another pandemic. Geoffrey Rice’s book, Black November: The 1918 influenza pandemic in New Zealand, gives a detailed account of how the 1918 flu impacted on individual communities in the country. The final chapter, “Influenza after 1918”, is of particular relevance to the present situation, outlining influenza occurrences and research and commenting on the likely outcome of a pandemic in this country. It includes advice on hygiene and stresses the importance of developing community networks which will be of vital importance if hospital resources are over-stretched.
Black November: The 1918 influenza pandemic in New Zealand by Geoffrey W. Rice
New publication an expansion of an earlier volume Black November was first published in 1988, Thanks to the author’s tireless research the 2005 publication is brought up to date with three new chapters, fifty first-hand eyewitness accounts, and over 200 photographs and cartoons, many of which had not been published previously.
Taumarunui’s suffering inspires research Professor Rice was told in 1977 about the appalling sights witnessed by his father during the 1918 epidemic in the small timber and railway town of Taumarunui in the middle of the North Island. His father was nine years old in1918 and the time of the epidemic was his most powerful memory from his childhood. He recalled lighting fires in the morning in the houses where the adults were ill and finding a woman asleep in bed beside the body of her husband blackened in death.
His first publication about the 1918 flu epidemic was published in the New Zealand Journal of History in 1979. The scant number of references to the epidemic in history books impelled him to research and write about the epidemic which had been such a traumatic experience in his father’s life. The research was centred on Christchurch death certificates, and was the first published research based on such evidence.
After its publication Professor Rice was interviewed for an article in the newspaper and its publication brought a flood of letters and phone calls over the summer of 1979/80. He visited all the larger retirement homes in Christchurch and recorded people’s memories.
After being advised that to sell on the New Zealand market his book must cover the whole country and include what happened to Maori as well as Pakeha he was only temporarily deterred by the size of the task.
As it was before the days of laptops he recorded all the needed information by hand on index cards. Gathering together all the information from the death certificates, newspapers and interviews took a year and resulted in a large volume. A small printing of a reduced volume, with chapters only about the main centres, produced Black November in 1988.
New chapters were added at the beginning and the end and additional illustrations and eye witness accounts were inserted in the text of Black November1988, and Black November: The 1918 influenza pandemic in New Zealand was published by Canterbury University Press in November 2005.
Topic of vital importance In the introduction Professor Rice assesses the importance of the topic. “It is a story worth telling because it provides us with a unique snapshot of New Zealand society at the close of an unprecedented war effort trying to grapple with an unprecedented civil emergency. In most New Zealand towns and cities ordinary public life was suspended for two or three weeks at the height of the flu epidemic in November 1918.”
Use of sulphate sprayer In the 1990s I interviewed for NZine articles a number of older people, asking them about their early years. The flu epidemic and the use of sulphur as a protective measure featured largely in their memories, so I was keen to read this book and not deterred by its 300+ pages.
The new volume telling this story captured my interest at first sight with the photograph on the cover. It shows a group with a sulphate sprayer at the Health Department offices in Auckland early in November 1918.
Significant preface Inside the front and back cover is a copy of some death notices from the Weekly Press – a powerful reminder of the heavy death toll from the epidemic. Then comes the Preface, and I strongly recommend you not to pass this over as “just a preface” as it tells the story of the flu in Taumarunui and makes compelling reading.
History of influenza epidemics The first chapter on the history of influenza epidemics gives a clear picture of people’s experience of such epidemics and explains the sources of the widely held ideas about such illness and how patients should be cared for. It makes it easier to understand the attitudes and practices common in 1918 and should silence harsh criticism of the mistakes that were made.
The Great War and the Great Flu “The Great War and the Great Flu”, the new second chapter, covers the relevant events of the Great War, sanitation regulations at the war front, the movement of troops, the outbreak of cerebro-spinal fever and influenza in 1915 at Trentham camp in New Zealand, and of influenza in the United States, the movement of American troops taking the flu to Europe for the first mild wave in the middle of 1918. With an enormous amount of wartime shipping, the movement of troops and the rapid railways moving people across countries the second wave of deadly influenza spread rapidly through both the northern and the southern hemisphere in the last few months of 1918. The movement of so many men in the war certainly contributed to the spread of the flu.
Why did the nature of the flu suddenly change? The sudden change in the nature of the influenza and its impact on such wide areas have puzzled epidemiologists ever since, and they have offered a number of theories including the possibility that the widespread use of gas in Europe during the War was one cause of the development of the more severe form of the flu. These theories are outlined and discussed in chapter 2.
Real life accounts of people coping From then on the main theme of the next five chapters is how people coped with the problems caused by the pandemic – nursing patients and coping during an unprecedented civil emergency. There is a systematic coverage of the cities, moving south from Auckland where the epidemic began, followed by rural and then Maori communities. These are not just presentations of statistics and facts, but moving stories made more real by first hand accounts and photographs and authenticated by statistics in the appendix.
Origins and diffusion of the flu The author then discusses the possible origins and diffusion of the flu, and the impact of the docking and disembarking of the patients and other passengers on board the Niagara,. The next two chapters include an investigation into patterns of influenza throughout New Zealand and a discussion about the victims – their age and sex, their health before they developed the flu, their socio-economic position, their occupation, possible areas of contact ….
Influenza after 1918 The last chapter, “Influenza after 1918”, includes comments on any outbreaks of influenza, research by virologists and important lessons to be learnt from the past. Of major significance is the development of neighbourhood communities as much nursing has to be done in the homes when the hospitals are full. Advice on nursing techniques must be taken seriously as must strict observance of hygiene precautions. Reserve stocks of water, food and batteries must be kept up to date and the purchase and use of appropriate face masks are strongly recommended.
I strongly recommend that you read this well written and interesting book. It is useful and particularly relevant as the threat of a pandemic hangs over us.
This is a great book for giving anecdotal evidence from those who survived. I found myself in tears virtually each time I read one. (Some of the statistical pages get ‘arduous’.)
The main points I parsed from it as a community survivial technique were those places that set up a grid system for assessing and assisting the very sick. Also, those communities where all places of gathering were immediately closed seemed to fare better.
The author has been, correctly, ‘clinical’ in determining the numbers who actually died from the ‘flu and acknowledges that this is a very conservative figure. None-the-less, they are very sobering. Some smaller communities were almost wiped out. Dairy farmers were badly hit as they attempted to return to work before they had recovered - the reality of the rural life.
Thank you clark for starting a thread about this book - I had discussed it within other threads about 2 months ago when I read it.
Hi AnnieB I just picked it up at the Dunedin public library in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t know it existed. I missed your discussion of it. Forgive me. I totally agree with your assesment of the book. I probably copied and pasted the 12.57 from one of your earlier posts from another flu site? Thank you!
The little oral histories also moved me to tears. That is why I have been copying them to the thread. My mother was named after one of my great aunts who died of the 1918 flu. But other than that, I knew NOTHING about an event that killed 50,000,000 to 100,00,000 people within living memory. That is more than died from the Black Death during the middle ages. It is more than all who died in WW1 plus WW2!
I happened upon the flu discussion a year ago when helping my 10 year old with a project for school. He picked the “Bird flu”.
I wish someone could explain to me how a disease can come, kill 100 million of us- turning many of the victems black in the process- do this in a matter of months- and leave almost no impact on our consciousness’s. Where are the movies, the books (a couple of fairly obscure ones), the dramatisations. An 747 crashes somewhere or some maniac blows herself up in a train- and we never hear the end of it. Yet 100 million of us can vanish without a trace, and we all just get on with our busy lives. It is verrrry weird and bears some discussion.
Why are there so few of us on these discussion boards?????? Why just this small handful?
Hi clark - I am a kiwi too - Wellington based - thanks for the storm you just sent our way ;-) (By the way, you can keep the iceberg!)
Talking with my mother, and as stated in Rice’ book - very few people talked about the flu. Mum said this was because it was associated with the war (not as a source of the event but the timing thereof) so it just didn’t get discussed. Most of the next generation (my mother included) knew nothing about it until many years later. She is a keen prepper and is saddened by the attitude of others of her own age - she thinks they think of it like a world war - won’t happen again …
AS to the number of people on this board - I think you will find there are lots of lurkers who read a lot but seldom or never post - there are just a few of us who are keyboard-vocal!
If you have been lurking here a while, you will know that our NZ is held in great esteem for our government level planning - I have followed it closely and I am very happy that TPTB are on top of this as best as they can be. The key message has been (of course) take ownership of preps yourself - I hope you have done so as a result of local publicity and your reading ;-) (email me at barr1 at xtra dot - you know the rest (don’t want my email address ‘out there’ if you want to talk ‘locally’)
Hi Annie
It is Marc here from Dunedin. What a windy day! I have written to our health department, and I to feel that our government is one of the best prepared on Earth. I also think that New Zealand is well positioned- most people can still light a coal range (can we?) and wouldn’t die of shock if they missed three meals in a row.
I have stopped talking to my friends and neighbors about it. I have stopped writing to the Otago Daily Times. I wrote to the paper asking about chlorine supplies for water treatment, and a prof of Microbiology from Otago University wrote in and said that H5N1 was just a plot by greedy researchers to ask for more than their fair share of research funds (flu virus was not his area!!) You can only laugh.
So even though we are better prepared, it is like we have our seatbelts on, while no one else does- in a car going 210 km per hour in a rainstorm, driven by a 17 year old who has just drunk a half a bottle of vodka and he feels GREAT!. We are safer, but not safe!
Thanks for posting… fascinating. I went through the newspaper in my town (war years, censored) but other than pleas for nurses, there was little written on the topic.
The state DPH did caution against trying to fumigate the schools with fireplace smoke to clear the miasma (apparently a common practice at the local level). We still had one room schoolhouses.
Hi again AnnieB Prof Rice estimates that 16,000 kiwis died in WW1, over 4 years- and 8,000 kiwis died of the 1918 flu pandemic in 4 months. We never shy away from WW1. Why are we so circumspect about New Zealand’s worst natural disaster??? Disaster #2 was the Napier Earthquake which killed 256 precious people.
Disaster Date Killed
Epidemic Nov-1918 6,700
Earthquake 3-Feb-1931 256
Volcano 25-Dec-1953 150
Wind storm 14-Apr-1968 50
Flood Feb-1938 21
Earthquake Jun-1929 17
Wind storm 7-Mar-1988 6
Flood 17-Feb-1985 4
Earthquake 24-May-1968 3
Wind storm 11-Jan-1997 3
It is weird
This is slightly off topic, but one of the great mysteries about the 1918 flu was that it peaked in Oct-Nov in most countries around the world, in both northern and southern hemispheres.
How did that happen?
And, clark, you are right. The other mystery is how come there is so little written about it. I have a history book entitled ‘1918′. In 600+ pages, there was one reference to influenza, about how young women were dying in Germany from influenza, and the orbituary pages that used to be filled with men’s names from the war were suddenly filled by women’s names. That was it.
clark I guess we shy away from reporting figures associated with illness .. look at what we are discovering on other threads about the rates of Dengue etc in some countries - quite an eye-opener.
We do report, as you show, natural disasters or ‘man-made’ events - wars, plane disasters etc.
You will note in the introduction by Geoffrey Rice to this edition of the book that he had collated all the personal stories for the first edition (1975?) but was not able to include them in that print - can’t remember the exact reasons given. I am just so glad he collected those stories or we would probably have nothing to reference now ..
There are more books on the Napier earthquake than the flu pandemic but very few record the personal stories - I know as my mother’s family were all there and, fortunately, all survived. I have their stories of the event and if more Kiwis could hear those we would all make sure we were much better prepared for natural disasters etc!
anon_22 one of the reasons given for the ‘same time’ for the flu peak was the soldiers returning from war and bringing it home with them … In Rice’ book he discusses this same issue and remains unresolved as to this cause - it doesn’t make real sense, given travel times, different climatic conditions etc. Australia only got badly hit in the ‘third wave’ in March 1919 - they closed their borders in the Oct-Nov 1918 period.
Given the troop ships took 8–12 weeks to travel from Europe to NZ, and there were deaths from the ‘flu onboard during the journey, this could imply that the people still ‘exhaled’ the virus after they became well and ‘asymptomatic’ - wrong use of the terms I know but I am sure you understand what I mean - when they arrived home they were breathing the virus onto people with no immunity despite not showing any further signs of the illness themselves. That is just not worth thinking about …
That community cooperation mentioned is one thing that is so missing in the USA. And could you imagine parents these days sending their child around to sick houses to light a fire? (Not a criticism). How many people could deal with personally caring for ANY severe illness at home? So many just have no experience to withstand the helplessness and reality of illness on that level.
AnnieB – at 23:07
It was more than that. I can’t find the reference now but I have read in at least 3 places that scientists think that is one of the great mysteries of 1918, that the timing of the peak cannot be explained simply by people movement.
<note to self - start history project>
Fiddlerdave – at 03:13
So true. And not just in the US, in all developed countries.
Maybe we need to undevelop ourselves.
Maybe we need to undevelop ourselves.
There’s work being done to translate Woodson’s Good Home Care manual. And we’re also looking at Schools Closed, Now What.
Fluwikians, always ahead of the curve.
My maternal grandfather died at Trentham Army camp in 1918 - he had been a late call up for the war as he was a “useful trade” up until then. My Dad now 91 tells me that during the epidemic his father had to go to the town hall to collect some form of antiseptic. No-one in his immediate family died although they may have contracted the flu at that time. I will pick his brains some more.
JulieM - thank you for sharing that - there is mention of the ‘devastation’ at Trentham in Rice’ book and some photos of the camps - have you read it? The temporary camp at Featherston was worst affected if I remember correctly.
clark - could you possibly find that section of the book dealing with the virus spread and give Rice’ words for anon_22 ??
Thanks team - I might have to go get the book again from our local library and have another read through ..
In 1996 it was estimated that 1,390 MILLION [as in 1,390,000,000] people traveled internationally.
link: http://www.multilingual-matters.net/jost/010/0114/jost0100114.pdf
We may not have the numbers of troops moving around as 1918 did, but we darn well make up for it…..
How many milliseconds will it take for HP H5N1 to come visit me on the East Coast once it achieves efficient H2H?
Hello, I am in Auckland and have this from Rice’s book on the virus spread: “The grim reaper found an abundant but uneven harvest in New Zealand, as if the seeds had been scattered by a drunken gardener: here a thick handful, there a thin sprinkling, and in some places hardly any at all.. There is no obvious pattern to be found in the way the epidemic struck New Zealand communities….the majority of the pandemic’s victims were urban-dwellers. Little more than half of the European population lived in urban centres, yet 78% of those who died dwelt in towns or cities…. You were three times as likely to die in the flu epidemic if you lived in a city than if you lived in the country, twice as likely to die if you lived in a town rather than on a farm.” However,he goes on to say that there were high mortality rates in some rural areas and “the underlying cause was almost certainly the quirky nature of the patterns of partial immunity left by the mild first wave, together with the unpredictable behaviour of a virulent and rapidly mutating virus.” Dairy farmers died because they left their sickbeds too soon to go and milk their cows, and he also notes that big strong men were felled by the flu, and often the ‘weedy’ ones were not. Hope this is helpful.
“Black November, the 1918 influenza pandemic in New Zealand”,
by Dr. Geoffrey Rice- p 169
transcribed oral history of Wikitoria Meihana
Wikitoria Meihana helped her grandmother Emma TAinui, cope with the the epidemic at Arahura Pa, near Hokitika, on the West Coast of the South Island.
Taua Gran and I were the only ones in the pa (Maori villiage) that never got sick. At the height of the epidemic, she would start in the morning and go from house to house caring for the sick. She always said a prayer with the sick people before moving on to the next house…At first she could only do half of the houses in a day, sleep at the house when night fell, and do the other half next day, making her way from home to home. There were about twenty houses in the pa then. Several houses had pakeha (european) families living in them. Taua Gran looked after them too… Those who were very sick were sponged down, bed clothes changed, bed remade, mustard plaster applied, fed if possible and given medicine. For the very sick she would boil milk for them to drink warm. She cooked barley so they would have barley water to drink. All of their drinking water was boiled….
She would send me to town two or three times a week for things that she needed…I had to walk along the railroad track as it was the shortest way… It took me half a day to walk into town… Mr Parkell (the grocer) would carry my stores up to the railroad station for me. I would then get fumigated and travel home by train… You could only get on the train where there were fumigation places. That is why I couldn’t get on the morning train that passed the pa on its way to Hokitika.
There weren’t many people moving around in Hokitika (town). A lot of town people went down with the flu. The doctor was very busy. He didn’t come back to the pa after his visit to my father. In Hokitika they couldn’t make coffins fast enough. At the hospital they would wrap bodies in canvas to bury them as soon as possible. When people died they turned black. We called it the Black Plague.
There were no deaths at Arahura Pa thanks to Taua Gran…The epidemic was during the whitebate season. I remember see the river full of whitebait (little fish, eaten as a delicacy) with no one well enough to catch them.
thank you for posting these -my library doesn’t seem to have this book…may have to find it and give it to them.
Thanks Clark!
Thanks clark - reading this story again had the same effect as the first time I read it - I am in tears! But they are healthy tears ;-)
Crfullmoon - if it helps, here are the publisher and ISBN details (from Amazon - not advertising)
Okay team, this has all been copied over the the new site.
You can see it at this link
In a few days this thread will probably be closed down as we don’t want split information across the two sites.
If you would like to post more, it is preferable you do so at the new site. If you do post here, we will do a final ‘sweep’ before it is closed.
Cheers team
Please use the link above for the new thread.