After four years of war waged on three continents, a new enemy emerged in 1918. Nowadays, ‘a touch of ‘flu’ is a casual label attached to any cold-like ailment real or imagined (at least, in the days before coronavirus), but in the last full year of the First World War, influenza was to bring a new wave of death and devastation to a war-weakened population at home and abroad.
In Leith, Edinburgh’s port but a separate local authority, the first cases had been reported in July 1918, followed by a temporary lull in the numbers of sufferers. But in October the epidemic fully revealed itself. In a fourteen-week period, Leith Hospital admitted 86 flu patients – this at a time when the number of resident doctors had been reduced from five to a solitary one by military calls. Of the 86, ten died within 48 hours, and another fourteen later, giving a major fatality rate of 27 per cent.Yet none of this seems to have got in the way of Leith’s efforts, later that year, to play its part in welcoming home thousands of prisoners of war (POWs) recently freed from wartime incarceration.
The POWs return
The armistice of 11 November was only a week old when Leith town council received a notification that their town would be one of three British ports – the others were Hull and Dover – through which POWs liberated from Germany would be repatriated.
The council was delighted to hear this news announced by Provost John Lindsay, and it was agreed to decorate the route which the returning men would follow on arrival, from the dock gates in Constitution Street to Central Station at the foot of Leith Walk. On 28 November, the first of the former prisoners arrived.
The steamers and had entered Leith Roads on the evening of
