Short, sharp and deadly

When the Spanish flu arrived in New Zealand in October 1918, it struck with a vengeance. It could be so swift-acting that a person could show no symptoms in the morning and be dead by nightfall.

Within two months, 8500 people were dead, half the number who died in the four years of World War 1. Many of the flu victims were young adults, some of them soldiers who had survived the trenches of World War 1 only to come home and succumb to the flu.

“It was short and sharp, from late October