Black November: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand

By Geoffrey Rice

This book details New Zealand's worst public health crisis, and its worst natural disaster: over 8,500 New Zealanders died from influenza and pneumonia in just six weeks. Nearly a quarter of the victims were Maori, who died at seven times the death rate of European New Zealanders. First published in 1988, Black November now has three new chapters to bring it up to date, over fifty first-hand eyewitness accounts, and over 200 photographs and cartoons, many published here for the first time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canterbury University Press
• Release date: Oct 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781927145913

Book preview

BLACK NOVEMBER

The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand

GEOFFREY W. RICE

with assistance from

Linda Bryder

REVISED AND ENLARGED

SECOND EDITION

To the memory of my father

BASIL MONTAGUE RICE

(1909–1982)

and

my great-grandmother

KATHERINE MEIKLEJOHN HERCOCK

née Reid

(1843–1918)

last victim of the 1918 flu in Taumarunui

and to all the victims and survivors of

New Zealand’s worst disease disaster

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction to the first edition

A few facts about influenza

1. ‘Leg rope’: Influenza before 1918

2. The Great War and the Great Flu

3. Auckland’s Armistice Epidemic

4. Crisis in the Capital

5. The Southern Cities

6. Beyond the Cities: A typical country town

7. ‘Severest setback’ for Maori?

8. Origins and Diffusion: Was the Niagara to blame?

9. Patterns of Death

10. The Victims

11. The Reckoning

12. Influenza after 1918

Appendices

Influenza timeline since 1918

Epidemic mortality in counties and towns

Durations and peaks of the 1918 flu

Bibliography

Index

Copyright

PREFACE

This book had its origins in an after-dinner conversation with my father in 1977. I had been reading an exciting little book by Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (1975) and, as a new parent, had become interested in the history of households and families in the past. We were talking about his childhood in Taumarunui, which was then a raw new railway and timber town in the middle of the North Island, and I asked him to name the most vivid experience of his childhood. Without a moment’s 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 seemed to affect them worse than the weedy types. It came on a ship called the Niagara. Massey and Ward were coming back from some war conference in London, and they didn’t bother to quarantine the ship. 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 then told me how Taumarunui had come to a complete standstill for what seemed like 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 neighbours 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. Then he would repeat the round to add coal, before moving on to 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:

Oh, you could tell all right. In that flu, when they died, the bodies turned black. That’s why your 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 after that, I just couldn’t carry on.

He was only nine years old in 1918.

My mother had been spared such sights. She was a bank manager’s daughter in Levin, aged ten. The schools were all closed and it was the longest summer holiday she ever had. She remembered the celebrations at the end of the Great War, and showed me the medal her sister had won at the Levin Armistice Sports. But then the epidemic took hold and they were not allowed outside the property until it was over. My mother remembered the strong smell of disinfectant in the bank, and her mother worrying in case her father caught ‘the flu germ’ from counting banknotes. She also heard her parents whispering about people they knew in the town who had died. But none of their close friends caught it or died.

As soon as possible I went to the Canterbury Public Library and asked to look up the old newspaper files from 1918. Sure enough, November 1918 was full of news about influenza, taking over from the bold headlines announcing the Armistice and the end of the Great War. As I turned the pages the death notices of epidemic victims began to outstrip the war casualties in the ‘Roll of Honour’ columns. Full-page official notices appealed for volunteers to report to their local block committee, women with nursing experience were asked to report for duty at their nearest temporary influenza hospital, and detailed instructions were given to those nursing flu patients at home: ‘Patient to be isolated in bright, well-ventilated room. Be sure windows open fully. No one except the nurse or attendant to enter room.’ There were notices from the Health Department declaring the closure of all dance halls, theatres, billiard saloons and places of entertainment until further notice. Other official notices announced the location of ‘inhalation chambers’ where people could breathe a vapour designed to kill ‘the flu bugs’. In Christchurch these appeared to be mostly tramcars stationed at various termini around the city.

Then I found a column headed ‘Black Fortnight in Taumarunui’ that confirmed many of my father’s recollections. It seemed to have been one of the worst-affected North Island towns, with 1,000 flu cases in the borough and 3,000 in the surrounding district. A small band of volunteers organised by the mayor had ‘braved all odds to save lives’. Presumably that small band included my grandparents. Yet over fifty Europeans had died, and many more Maori deaths were feared.

Taumarunui, 1912: view northwest across the railway engine shed. Lawler and Rice, general engineers, on Hakiaha Street. Maori pa on plateau in background.

Author’s collection

There were similar stories from many other towns, of volunteers setting up temporary hospitals and soup kitchens, of relief parties motoring out to visit the nearest Maori pa and finding dozens of people dead or dying, of tragic deaths leaving a whole family orphaned, or soldiers returning from the war to find a mother or brother dead from the flu. I was curious to know just how many people had died, but the newspapers had very few figures. It was as if there had been an official ban on such depressing details. Burials for the four main centres, however, indicated hundreds if not thousands of deaths in the space of only a few weeks. Auckland had the biggest death toll, just over a thousand, and there were so many bodies that special trains had to be arranged to take the coffins to Waikumete Cemetery.

Taumarunui, 12 November 1918: Armistice parade on Hakiaha Street, children’s section. Fire station and railway station in background.

Photo by A. Willis, courtesy of Ron Cooke, Taumarunui

How had I not heard about such a major event in New Zealand history? I could not recall hearing about it at school, and though I had taken a course in New Zealand history as part of my degree it had been mostly concerned with politics and made no mention of a great epidemic. All my subsequent research and teaching had been in European history.

A brief report from The Press, Christchurch. North Island newspapers gave more detailed reports on the flu in Taumarunui.

A quick check of standard textbooks turned up only a terse two-line statement in Keith Sinclair’s Penguin History of New Zealand that about 5,500 people had died in the 1918 flu. Burdon’s New Dominion was more informative, with three pages and a clutch of useful footnotes, while M. H. Holcroft’s essay ‘The Great Epidemic’ in the illustrated part-history New Zealand’s Heritage added further details and some interesting pictures. But there was no single book on the subject, and I found only scattered references in various medical memoirs and hospital histories.

Looking up Burdon’s footnotes, I soon found the report of a royal commission on the epidemic in AJHR, and a very detailed Health Department report by Dr Robert Makgill, full of tables and statistics. Suddenly I had more figures than I knew what to do with. And yet my curiosity was aroused rather than satisfied. These reports were both set at the national level and, apart from a few generalised death rates for the cities and provincial districts, I could not find details of the epidemic mortality in the smaller towns. Was Taumarunui’s death toll exceptional, or typical of many?

By then it had dawned on me that the information to answer such questions must still exist somewhere. For every death in the epidemic, there had to be a death certificate, and from these it should be possible to establish exactly who died, where and when, what their occupation had been, and what size family survived them. I then wrote to Professor Bill Oliver at Massey University to see if anyone had already done this work, but he said he didn’t know of anyone and it sounded like a really good social history research topic. Taumarunui seemed a bit small, so why not work on Christchurch? A visit to the local registrar’s office in Manchester Street soon resulted in my sitting down with a big leather-bound volume and reading about people who had died close by my childhood home in Waltham. This was utterly fascinating. I was hooked for life on local social history.

My article on the Christchurch epidemic victims was published in the New Zealand Journal of History in 1979. To the best of my knowledge, this was the first study of the 1918 influenza pandemic anywhere in the world based on the systematic analysis of individual death certificates. By now I was keen to turn the article into a book, using the 1918 newspapers and the memories of my father’s generation. A newspaper interview brought a shower of letters and phone calls that took most of the summer of 1979–80 to follow up. I also visited all of the larger retirement homes in Christchurch, talking to elderly people about their memories of 1918. That was a wonderfully enriching experience. I met some remarkable individuals whose memories of sixty years ago were sharper than their recollections of last week or last year. But it was extremely time-consuming, and the amount of useful information was often disappointing. Oral history is rather like panning for gold: you have to turn over a lot of shingle to get a trace of colour or the occasional nugget. By contrast the newspapers offered a wealth of detail about local epidemic committees, temporary hospitals and the like. While I talked to the old folk, a succession of students on vacation employment schemes went through the Christchurch papers, typing out whatever they found relating to the epidemic.

Max Rogers at the publishing house of Whitcoulls warned me that the New Zealand market was too small for a book on Christchurch alone; it would need to cover the whole country, and would need to explain what happened to Maori as well as Pakeha. My heart sank at the thought of all those death certificates, and the scores of provincial newspapers that would have to be read. I must confess I was tempted to drop the whole idea and get on with my European research, which seemed much more straightforward. Two things kept me going, apart from my inherited Ulster stubbornness. First was the enormous interest that people showed when I said I was working on the 1918 flu. Middle-aged people especially would tell me that they heard lots of stories about the flu as they were growing up. Some told me that their uncle or grandfather or a neighbour had died in the epidemic. Though the 1918 flu had only rated two lines in Keith Sinclair’s book, it obviously still mattered a great deal to families that had suffered personal loss. Surely their stories needed to be told? The second thing that kept me going was the news that two postgraduate students who had seen my work on Christchurch were now applying the same approach to the epidemic in their respective cities. My debts to Martine Cuff and Linda Bryder are suitably acknowledged elsewhere.

Many months of tedious research followed at the Registrar-General’s office in Lower Hutt and in provincial towns up and down the country, spread over several years. Those were the days before the personal computer revolution, and I recorded my findings the old-fashioned way, writing notes on index cards before coding the data onto punch-cards for processing in the University of Canterbury’s big Burroughs computer. How much easier it would be today with a laptop! Bringing together all the death certificate data, newspaper research and interview material took me another year, and my first draft was a very big book. By then I had signed a contract with Macmillan New Zealand, who insisted that it be reduced by half. Then they ran into financial difficulties and cancelled most of their contracts, mine included, but their editor’s parting advice was that I seemed to have two books struggling to cohabit, so at the end of 1985 I rewrote the main-centre chapters and the social analysis as a small academic monograph, and Bridget Williams agreed to publish it as Black November in 1988, with editorial assistance from the Historical Branch of the Department of Internal Affairs. Only 750 copies were printed and the book sold out within a year. Since then Bridget Williams has become one of New Zealand’s leading publishers and her contribution to the fields of women’s history and Maori history has been immense. But she was not interested in reprinting Black November, or in publishing my companion volume of eyewitness accounts, photographs and cartoons. Five other publishers in turn agreed with her commercial judgement that Black November had already satisfied a very small market. I finally gave up, put the box in the proverbial bottom drawer and got on with other projects.

However, I never lost interest in the 1918 flu pandemic, and gave papers to several academic conferences in New Zealand and Australia on the subject, as well as talks to community groups. A trip to Japan in 1990 with my second wife, Dr Edwina Palmer, gave me the opportunity to research the effects of the flu there, thanks to her linguistic expertise. (She translated aloud while I took notes.) Together we published three articles in leading academic journals in the early 1990s that made available for the first time in English a wealth of information about the 1918 pandemic in Japan. (The only material previously available in English was a single paragraph in a British report of 1920.) These articles led to an invitation to attend the first-ever international conference on the 1918–19 ‘Spanish’ influenza pandemic held in Cape Town in September 1998. My paper comparing official responses in Japan and New Zealand was selected for inclusion in a subsequent volume of essays about the pandemic edited by Howard Phillips and David Killingray (2003). Several scholars at the conference asked where they could obtain copies of Black November and were dismayed when told it was out of print. This made me think there might be a market for a revised second edition, incorporating the best of the interviews and photographs from my stillborn companion volume. By then I had had three books published by Canterbury University Press. Its director, Jeff Field, and publishing manager, Richard King, were receptive to my suggestion that the Press might publish an expanded second edition of Black November. Funding was a problem, as always, but my colleagues in the School of History came to the rescue with a timely grant, later supplemented by the Ministry of Health.

While only minor corrections had to be made to the core chapters and statistical analysis, there are new chapters at front and back of this expanded second edition, and of course many illustrations and eye-witness accounts scattered throughout the text. The new first chapter attempts to sketch what was known about influenza before 1918, and how that knowledge, often mistaken, shaped people’s responses to the crisis they faced that year. It is easy for us to feel superior to people in the past, with our enhanced understanding of viruses and epidemiology, but I believe it is important to assess their actions and decisions in the light of the knowledge and information available to them at the time. They did what they thought was for the best, and we should not judge them too harshly if they happened to be mistaken. 

The new second chapter attempts to set the unfolding phases of the 1918 pandemic in the context of the First World War, suggesting that the war may have been a major factor in the spread and impact of the disease.

The new last chapter sketches the development of influenza virology since 1918 and the amazing discoveries that have been made about the virus just in the last decade. The major pandemics of 1957 and 1968 are examined, together with the ‘swine flu’ scare of 1976 and the ‘chicken flu’ scare in Hong Kong in 1997. We now know much more about influenza than anyone in 1918, yet many puzzles remain unexplained about the so-called ‘Spanish’ flu. Why was it so exceptionally lethal? Why did it kill mostly young adults in the prime of life, aged between 25 and 45? Why did it kill more men than women in some countries, including New Zealand?

This book is being published at a time of heightened international anxiety about the risk of another flu pandemic, from the H5N1 Asian bird flu. Jet travel has made the world a viral village, and experts in the World Health Organization’s influenza surveillance network rightly warn that a pandemic as potentially lethal as that of 1918 could spread around the globe within days. Hospitals and public health systems are likely to be overwhelmed quickly in such an event, making the front line in any future pandemic the local community and our own homes. Vaccines and anti-viral drugs may well reduce mortality levels, if they are available in sufficient quantities and administered in time, but that is a very big if. The final chapter asks what lessons might be drawn from the 1918 pandemic that may be useful if we have to face another one, and offers some advice on how to avoid infection and what to do if the disease invades our homes.

One of the major conclusions to emerge from my research on this pandemic is the importance of neighbourhood and community cohesion in times of crisis. In 1918 the promptness and quality of community response depended a great deal on the leadership of a few key individuals, and the willingness of others to follow their lead. New Zealand was lucky in that the flu struck just at the end of the First World War, because many of the voluntary organisations developed for the war effort were easily adapted to deal with the epidemic. Groups such as the Red Cross, St John Ambulance and the Boy Scouts played vital roles in New Zealand towns and cities in the 1918 flu. In some places the patriotic committee simply renamed itself the epidemic committee and set about organising the flu relief effort. Would New Zealand communities respond as quickly or as effectively if another flu pandemic hit us tomorrow? Or has New Zealand society changed so much since 1918 that we cannot assume a repeat performance by volunteers and public-spirited individuals?

One of my hopes for this book is that it may prompt some readers to delve further into the 1918 flu in their localities, and to relate this disaster to the history of their families and communities. Many genealogists have come across the 1918 flu while researching family histories, and I have been pleased to hear from those who found the first edition of Black November helpful in explaining the context for their family’s experience of the epidemic.

However, a word of warning may be needed here. If you work from local death registrations, newspaper death notices or cemetery inscriptions, your figures for local deaths may differ from those given in the Appendix to this book. The reason is that I tried wherever possible to link victims to their usual place of residence, in order to give a true measure of the social impact of mortality. A person from Greymouth may have died in Christchurch Hospital and had her death registered in that city, but the loss of that person would be felt by her family in Greymouth. Similarly, soldiers in camp or overseas who died from the 1918 flu were added to the death toll for their home town or county. It is only by going through the central death registers systematically that these deaths away from home can be properly coded and assigned to their correct locality. My totals are therefore likely to be slightly different from those derived only from local sources.

My biggest regret is that most of the old folk I interviewed in the 1980s have not survived to see their recollections in print, and I must now include my father in that company. In many ways this was to be his book, for his interest did much to sustain my efforts in the early stages of research. He was eager to hear all that I could discover about the 1918 flu in Taumarunui, and was amazed when I told him that his own grandmother had been its last victim in the town. He had no recollection of her passing, being so young and presumably so numbed by his own experience of the epidemic. The cause of her death had never been discussed by the family. He just assumed she had died of old age. Yet her death certificate plainly stated, like thousands of others, ‘influenza/pneumonia’. Our conversations ranged far beyond the flu, of course, and in those last few years before lung cancer killed him I came to know and understand my father much better than I had as a child. For that alone I am glad that I persevered with this book.

The illustrations in this book vary in quality from very good to very poor. Some have been included despite their poor quality because they are the only surviving illustrations of some key episode or process; for example, the inhalation sprayers. Others have been included to give readers some sense of place or context. We apologise for the poor quality of some illustrations, especially those from the Free Lance, whose cheap wartime newsprint has deteriorated badly, but we felt that even these would be better than nothing. Every effort has been made to secure permissions from copyright holders, but some were not traceable, and we would be glad to hear from any we have inadvertently missed.

‘The Elite’ Palm Court Orchestra, Taumarunui, 1923. B. M. Rice (age fourteen) at right end of back row.

Author’s collection

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First I must thank a former New Zealand Registrar-General, the late Jack Wright, for granting me the then rare privilege of research access to the Central Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages at Levin House, Lower Hutt. If he had said no, this book would not have been written. To his successor, Peter Horne, and the staff of the Search Room in the early 1980s, especially Betty Taylor, my warm thanks for their advice and assistance.

For permission to make use of their research results I am indebted to two graduate students whose work followed my pioneering use of death certificates for the analysis of 1918 flu victims in Christchurch: Martine Cuff’s research essay on the epidemic in Dunedin and Linda Bryder’s excellent MA thesis on Auckland helped persuade me that a book was both necessary and feasible. I invited Linda to collaborate with me, and she completed some interviewing and newspaper research for the book before departing overseas for further study, but joint authorship proved impractical at a distance, and with a change of publisher the project became mine alone. Chapter Three, however, is largely based on Linda’s thesis. My thanks to her for this and her earlier involvement in the project is indicated on the title page. Even so, I conducted my own research on the Auckland and Dunedin newspapers, and reworked the Dunedin death certificate data to fit the slightly different occupation and status scales used for the other main centres. Linda and Martine carry no responsibility for the views expressed in this book. Any mistakes are all my own work.

I am deeply indebted to the late Richard Collier of Surrey, England, the author of The Plague of the Spanish Lady (1974), for lending me his entire file of letters from New Zealand survivors of the epidemic. Mostly written in 1971–72, these letters comprise an invaluable body of evidence from people who were adults in 1918, scarcely any of whom remain alive today. Several of these letters have been included in this second edition.

I also owe a considerable debt of gratitude to the following students, who are all graduates and middle-aged adults by now, for their work as research assistants on various newspaper sources: Elizabeth Dunbar, Caroline Etherington, Rachel Fry, Sharon McAuslan, Christine O’Hara, Lesley Porteous and Nancy Sutherland. Between them they produced five big files of typed transcripts, and though only a tiny fraction of what they typed has been quoted directly, it was enormously helpful for me to have comprehensive files in such convenient form. They were supported by a combination of university research grants and Labour Department temporary work schemes, and I believe this was public money well spent.

For their friendship and hospitality on my many trips to Wellington, I give special thanks to the late Percy Brooker of the New Zealand Federation of Historical Societies and to my good friends Fred and Diane Dalton, Mike and Gillian Green, Chris Lamb, Jenny Presland and Philippa Mein Smith. Sadly, Fred is no longer with us, a victim of cancer, and Jenny is teaching somewhere in China, but I still keep in touch with the others. Philippa is now one of my most valued colleagues in the School of History at the University of Canterbury.

Among the many librarians and archivists who helped me with this book I would like to thank in particular Kathryn Patterson (who was then at the General Assembly Library and later became New Zealand’s Chief Archivist) and Cheryl Campbell and Mark Stevens at National Archives (now Archives New Zealand). Brian Farrelly introduced me to the archives of New Zealand Railways when they still occupied a floor in the Wellington Railway Station; they are now housed barely a stone’s throw away in Archives New Zealand, in the former Government Printing Office. David Mattison gave me access to various provincial newspapers that were then in the process of being microfilmed by the National Library in a warehouse in Te Aro. (I was appalled to see that the volumes were having their spines guillotined to make it easier to photograph each page. I was even more appalled to be told that the paper once photographed was being sent for pulping. I would like to think that my squeak of protest helped stop this vandalism. Some of these volumes were the only surviving copies of those newspapers.) The staff of the Alexander Turnbull Library (ATL), Auckland Public Library, Canterbury Public Library, Canterbury Museum (CM), the Hocken Library in Dunedin and many provincial libraries visited in pursuit of 1918 newspapers were unfailingly friendly and helpful. Historians owe a great debt to these faithful custodians of our sources. Some newspapers were still in the care of their publishers, as in Taumarunui and Otorohanga. I will never forget sitting in a tin shed under a single light bulb on a hot day in Hawera, looking through old volumes of the Hawera Star, with big trucks roaring around the corner only two metres from where I sat.

For the first version of this book I interviewed over a hundred survivors in Christchurch, and received letters from several hundred more from all over the country. For many of them the 1918 flu had been quite simply the most important single event in their lives. For some the loss of one or both parents meant a complete change of circumstances and direction. Many of those I interviewed had been children in 1918, yet even their generation is now fading rapidly. I still wonder why nobody wrote this book thirty or forty years ago, when many of the leading figures in New Zealand’s fight against the 1918 flu were still alive. Interviewing survivors of the 1918 flu was one of the most pleasurable experiences of my career as a professional historian. The dedication of this second edition recognises their contribution, as well as the lives of all those who were victims of the pandemic.

I must also thank my employer, the University of Canterbury, for a succession of small grants to assist with travel and research expenses, and my colleagues in the School of History at the University of Canterbury for a timely grant in aid of publication of this expanded second edition.

I am grateful to the following individuals for their help with sources, illustrations or contacts with survivors: H. F. Alley (Rotorua), Mrs C. H. Arthur (Taihape), Ian Church (Patea), Mary Clark (Huntly), Vera Crozier (Mosgiel), Paula Dickie (Gore), F. H. Engelbrecht (Oxford), Don Garber (New York) Rose Graham (Gore), Janet Holm (Christchurch); Mrs B. J. Hume (Hamilton), Roberta Trey (Timaru), Mrs J. T. Jansen (Waiheke Island), Moira Keith (Owaka), J. R. Killip (Papakura), Bryan Kyle (Eltham), Jim Mandeno (Te Awamutu), Mrs L. Marshall (Auckland), Rona McCurdy (Queenstown), Joan McIntosh (Riverton), Myra McKie (Waiau), Y. C. R. Mexted (Titahi Bay), Miss M. Mitchell (Foxton), Jessie Mould (Akaroa), Mrs J. E. Nicoll (New Plymouth), Mrs E. M. Penman (Cambridge), Mary Robertshaw (Rangiora), Elspeth Simpson (Gisborne), Sue Starky (Amberley), Helen Taylor (Whangarei), R. Thomas (Taumarunui), Edwina Thompson (Temuka), S. L. Usher (Turangi), Lynda Wallace (Waimate), Norma Walls (Cheviot) and Errol Westgate (Whakatane).

The secretarial staff of the History Department, University of Canterbury, all had a hand in the making of the first edition of this book, and I recall with gratitude the work of Annette Finnegan, the late Merilyn Johnson, Lucy Mitchell and Judy Robertson. Pauline Wedlake typed all of the eyewitness accounts now printed in this edition, and Judith Yeatman helped me with the tables.

For expert advice on the virology of influenza I am still indebted to Dr Lance Jennings of the Clinical School of Medicine at Christchurch Hospital. He has become New Zealand’s leading expert on influenza epidemics, and is a member of the World Health Organization’s worldwide influenza surveillance network. His invitation for me to address a conference of the National Influenza Immunization Strategy Group in Wellington in 2003 was a further stimulus to get this second edition prepared.

I remain grateful to my former colleague Emeritus Professor W. David McIntyre for his encouragement and advice, and to Bronwen Nicholson of the then Macmillan Company (NZ) for her editorial advice on my first draft. Dr Charlotte Macdonald, now Professor of History at Victoria University in Wellington, edited Black November when she was first appointed to the Historical Branch of Internal Affairs (now the History Group, Ministry of Culture and Heritage) and saved me from several stylistic infelicities. Professor Ian Pool of Waikato University made many helpful comments on my figures for Maori mortality. My colleague Dr Chris Connolly once remarked after reading some of my interview transcripts that this was ‘great stuff’ and deserved publication. I’m sorry it has taken so long, Chris, but here is the best of it, better late than never!

To my family and friends I remain eternally grateful for their love, support and encouragement. The first edition of this book was completed as my first marriage was falling apart, but my daughters Fiona and Eleanor assure me that the one was not a cause of the other. Since then I have remarried, very happily, and my two sons David and James have learned never to ask me about the 1918 flu at the dinner table, in case they get a Stage One lecture in response.

I trust that some of my enthusiasm for the subject will become apparent through the pages of this revised second edition. The final chapter should also convey some of the excitement that has gone through the field of influenza studies in recent years, since Jeffery Taubenberger identified the virus that caused the 1918 flu. Yet it may also convey the anxiety of health authorities that the world may have to endure an equally destructive influenza pandemic sometime in the near future, if we do not remain vigilant. The big lesson of the 1918 flu, never to be forgotten, is that it could happen again.

J. C. Blomfield cartoon from the New Zealand Observer, 16 November 1918.

INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION

The 1918 influenza epidemic remains New Zealand’s worst recorded natural disaster, both in terms of mortality and the extent of disruption to everyday life. No other event has killed so many New Zealanders in so short a space of time. The First World War claimed the lives of 16,688* New Zealand soldiers over four years, while the influenza epidemic killed nearly half that number of civilians in less than two months. Very few families or communities were untouched, and some were affected more severely than others. By world standards, the European death rate was moderate, at 5.8 per thousand, but the Maori death rate was seven times this figure. An estimated four per cent of the Maori population died in the last two months of 1918.

Most Pakeha (European) New Zealanders were simply not aware at the time of the terrible ravages of the flu among Maori. Not only were they too busy coping with their own sick and dying, but official statistics of mortality were lacking during November 1918. Fears of a breakdown in public morale resulted in an official ban on the publication of death tolls, but rumour and the lengthy columns of death notices in the newspapers quickly magnified the presumed losses from tens to hundreds and from hundreds to thousands, creating exactly the opposite effect from that intended. When the official totals were finally published they attracted little notice, whereas the rumours of mass graves and burials at sea had been widely accepted as fact. Even today, some survivors still repeat such rumours, or believe there was an official cover-up to conceal the truth. Many more tried to forget the epidemic, along with all the other horrors of the First World War. As a result, the 1918 influenza epidemic might well be called New Zealand’s forgotten disaster, or its least understood.

This book is a long-overdue attempt to set the record straight and to make this remarkable episode in our history better known. 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. Shops, offices and factories closed, public services were curtailed or cancelled for lack of staff; schools, hotels, theatres and hairdressers’ saloons were closed by official decree, and even the banks closed for a week throughout the whole country. Coastal shipping came to a complete standstill, causing shortages of essentials such as coal and flour in many places. Between a third and a half of the entire population was infected with the flu. In some towns the morbidity rate (proportion of people sick) rose as high as two-thirds, and in a few exceptional places reached eighty per cent. This flu was marked by very sudden onset of symptoms, so that quite healthy individuals could be stricken and collapse within hours, some even dying the same day. There were no sure preventatives, other than isolation, and no certain remedies. Before antibiotics, patients had only even odds against death if influenza turned into pneumonia. When they died, the bodies of victims of the 1918 flu often turned dark purple or black, adding to the grief and horror of those nursing them.

How did people cope? This is the main theme of the first part of the book, which narrates the immediate impact and course of responses in the main centres, a typical country town, and among Maori. Evidence for this theme is abundant in local newspapers, archives of hospitals and local government, and from the testimonies of survivors, related in letters, diaries and interviews. The story presented in the following pages is only the tip of the iceberg. Even a single metropolitan newspaper would provide more detail; what follows is merely an outline. The story that emerges is a remarkable one, and not without important lessons for today. Despite so many people sick or dying, the epidemic prompted an astonishingly rapid mobilisation of resources within most communities. Doctors and nurses were scarce because of the war, and many went down with the flu themselves. But the war also meant that every New Zealand town and city was already highly organised, with numerous Red Cross societies and patriotic committees accustomed to fund-raising projects and co-ordinating resources for the war effort. Many such committees simply renamed themselves as epidemic relief committees and channelled their energies into door-to-door patrols and care of the suffering.

Hospitals were quickly overwhelmed by the influx of pneumonic flu cases, and teams of volunteers set up emergency hospitals in schools, church halls and under canvas. Some places even used racecourse grandstands. Soup kitchens were organised to feed hundreds of helpless convalescents, with teams of Boy Scouts and Girl Guides as couriers. Two new inventions made this epidemic easier to deal with than any previous one: the telephone and the petrol engine enabled rapid communications and transport of victims. Where a town mobilised rapidly, there was a good chance that the death toll from pneumonia could be held in check, but places where the flu hit suddenly and many people were stricken all at once took longer to respond effectively, and a few paid dearly with higher than average death rates.

The second part of the book analyses the impact of epidemic mortality on New Zealand society. This is the first time anywhere in the world that the death certificates of all victims in the 1918 influenza pandemic in a single country have been subjected to detailed scrutiny. The official figures published in 1919 were based on a very narrow definition of cause of death. It is obvious from the red pencil ticks in the margin of the death registers that the clerks who counted the official death toll had been told to count only those whose cause of death was shown as ‘influenza’ and/or ‘pneumonia’. Other epidemic-related deaths, such as those of women in childbirth, or suicides, were ignored, even where a suicide had been attributed to the epidemic by the coroner’s court. This study has adopted a broader all-inclusive approach, to measure the social rather than the strictly medical impact of the pandemic, using the full range of archival and statistical evidence now available.

How many New Zealanders died in the 1918 flu? Research for this book has led to a significant revision of the official figures. At least 6,091 Europeans died within New Zealand, and if New Zealand soldiers who died of the flu overseas are added, the total reaches 6,413. Maori mortality was seriously underestimated in the official figures because later registrations in 1919 were not included and no allowance was made for large numbers of unregistered Maori deaths. My revised estimate of Maori mortality is 2,160 deaths, which gives a death rate of 42.3 per thousand, nearly double the official rate published in 1919, and one of the highest known rates anywhere in the world for this pandemic.†

Who were these unfortunate New Zealanders? What sorts of people died in the 1918 flu? Using the information from each victim’s death certificate, a detailed analysis has been made of the age, sex, marital status and occupations of the victims, together with the households and orphans they left behind. The most striking feature of these results is the unusually high mortality among young adults aged 25 to 45, and the greater susceptibility of males than females. Unlike ordinary influenza epidemics, which tend to kill the very young or the very old, the 1918 pandemic was almost unique in its unusual deadliness for young adults in the prime of life. In most parts of the world, women and men died in roughly equal numbers, but in New Zealand men in their early thirties were twice as likely to die as women in this age group. This is only one of several puzzling features of the pandemic in New Zealand, for which even now there are few obvious or convincing explanations.

Tracing the spread of the epidemic through the country presents yet another set of problems. Although it is clear that Auckland was the first New Zealand city to suffer the explosive wave of severe mortality, and the South Island followed the North’s peak of mortality by about a week, there are many exceptions to the overall pattern of north-to-south diffusion. The striking picture which emerges from the death certificates is that the flu was in full spate from one end of the country to the other within a week of Auckland’s peak of mortality. This is almost too quick and complete for normal influenza diffusion. Likewise, there are some astonishing contrasts in the pattern of severity, with some places escaping almost unscathed while others suffered death rates almost as bad as those in the army camps at Trentham and Featherston. The worst European death rate, comparable to the worst Maori death rates, was recorded at Nightcaps, an isolated mining town in Southland, yet other nearby localities had only moderate losses, and other mining towns escaped almost unscathed. Besides the tragedy of so many untimely deaths, there are still many unanswered (and probably unanswerable) questions.

From its very start, the 1918 epidemic in New Zealand was marked by controversy as well as tragedy. Many people blamed the arrival of infection on the ship Niagara, which was allowed to dock at Auckland on 12 October without quarantine, even though a crewman had died of pneumonia the night before. About twenty flu cases were taken to Auckland Hospital, where two more died. A fortnight later the severe wave of the flu pandemic burst upon the city. The Niagara seemed the obvious culprit. Why was this ship not quarantined? Some suspected that strings had been pulled because it was bringing the Prime Minister home from a war conference: ‘Bill Massey brought the flu on the Niagara!’ This is how many survivors of the epidemic still explain its cause. Yet close examination of the diffusion pattern in the light of recent advances in the epidemiology of influenza suggests a rather different conclusion.

Given the scale of death and disruption, it was only natural that people would look for scapegoats. While the Niagara provided a simple and satisfying explanation of the disaster’s cause, most of the blame was finally heaped not on Massey but at the door of the Health Department and its autocratic minister, George Warren Russell. They were accused of lack of foresight and slowness to realise the gravity of the crisis. Many voices called for a royal commission to investigate the causes and handling of the epidemic. Russell welcomed this, saying he had done his best and had nothing to hide. He and his department defended themselves vigorously before the Epidemic Commission in early 1919. The commissioners heard evidence from more than a hundred key individuals who had led the fight against the flu in the four main centres, and the nearly thousand pages of verbatim proceedings now held in National Archives comprise the most valuable single source of evidence about the flu epidemic in New Zealand.

The Epidemic Commissioners were cautious about attributing blame for the start of the epidemic to any one person, but agreed with public opinion rather than the Health Department’s experts in concluding that the Niagara had played a major role and that the department had been caught unprepared for such an emergency. Major reforms were recommended for the administration of public health, including a complete restructuring of the Health Department. By far the most important outcome was the 1920 Health Act, which remained until quite recent times the basis for a health service widely admired overseas.

But this is almost the only tangible or worthwhile legacy of the 1918 flu epidemic in New Zealand. It was especially tragic that the epidemic struck just as the First World War ended. Soldiers who had survived the perils of war arrived home to find that loved ones had been killed in their absence by an invisible enemy. Ironically, in some places it was the celebrations marking the Armistice, which helped to spread infection from town to countryside. Whereas virtually every New Zealand borough or country town has a war memorial listing the names of the ‘glorious dead’ from two world wars, the 1918 flu has left scarcely any memorials or reminders. As a public event, it does not figure prominently in standard textbooks of New Zealand history, and until very recently was barely mentioned in schools or university history courses. Viewed from above, from a national perspective of government and institutions, the 1918 flu seems only a brief interruption to the process of adjustment to peacetime. But viewed from below, from the perspective of individuals and families closely touched by death, the 1918 flu loomed like a large black cloud, blocking out the sun. Here the pandemic left a deep and lasting impression, for it had made a decisive and permanent change in many people’s lives. This book is the historian’s humble attempt to describe their collective experience.

Cough mixtures and influenza remedies advertised in New Zealand newspapers, 1918.

* Recently revised to 18,166. See Ian McGibbon, Oxford Companion to New Zealand Military History (2000), p. 80.

† Two recent general histories of New Zealand, Michael King’s Penguin History of New Zealand (2003) and Matthew Wright’s Reed Illustrated History of New Zealand (2004), unfortunately repeat the old official figures, apparently unaware of the first edition of this book. The Bateman New Zealand Encyclopedia has given the revised figures since 1996.

A FEW FACTS ABOUT INFLUENZA

Influenza is a viral infection of the respiratory tract. Early symptoms of flu include chills and a fever, sometimes as high as 39° C (about 102° F), sneezing, sore throat, headache and muscular pains. These are often followed by a dry cough and chest pains. After a few days the cough becomes more productive and catarrh (runny nose) may develop. The fever usually lasts for two to three days, leaving you feeling weak and depressed. Unless other complications develop, full recovery usually follows in one to two weeks.

What to do? First rule: go to bed. Second rule: stay in bed! Don’t try to ‘soldier on’ as if it were just a cold. Getting up too soon will increase the risk of secondary infections such as bronchitis or pneumonia. Keep warm in bed and take aspirin or paracetamol to control the fever and ease the headache. Drink as much water or fruit juice as you can. You may have little or no appetite, but keep eating regularly, especially fruit and soup, to keep the bowels moving.

Once the fever subsides, stay in bed for at least a week for full rest and recovery. If the fever persists for more than three or four days, call a doctor. If chest pain persists, with breathlessness and blood-streaked