Resource Booklet

Refer to this booklet to answer the question for History 91003 (1.3).

Check that this booklet has pages 2–11 in the correct order and that none of these pages is blank.

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INTRODUCTION

The influenza of the 1918–1919 season was far more than a cold. In the two years that this disease ravaged the earth, a fifth of the world's population were infected. The flu was most deadly for people ages 20–40; a pattern very unusual for influenza, which is usually a killer of the elderly and young children. It infected approximately 25% of the world’s population and in America alone, 28% the population were affected by the disease. An estimated 675,000 Americans died of influenza during the pandemic, compared with 67,500 that died in World War I. In New Zealand, approximately 8 600 people, from a population of 1 150 000, died from influenza in less than two months. Of the people that died, an estimated 2 600 were Māori. Internationally an estimated 50–100 million people died from influenza. By world standards, the European death rate was moderate at 5.8 per thousand, but the Maori death rate was seven times this figure.1

Sources:

¹ Adapted From: Geoffrey W. Rice, Black November: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2005, p 17.

Ministry for Culture and Heritage, Wellington, viewed 2 August 2009, www.nzhistory.net.nz.

Stanford University, Stanford, California, view 2 August 2009, www.stanford.edu/group/virus/uda.

Resource A:  Conditions in auckland

It appears to me that by trying to inflame the people of Auckland against the Public Health Department you [the Mayor of Auckland] are seeking to distract public attention from the revolting conditions proved to exist in your city ...clean up the filthy slums and disease-breeding places in your city...obey the law and set an example. If you choose to ...defy the law you will find that I, as Minister, can carry out my responsibilities to the letter without fear.¹

 

George Warren Russell, Minister of Public Health²

Sources:

¹ George Warren Russell, Minister of Public Health, quoted from Geoffrey W. Rice, Black November: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2005, p 87.

² (Photo) Standish and Preece Photo, “Mr G W Russell, Minister of Public Health”, New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, Victoria University of Wellington, 17 June 2010, < http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/Cyc03Cycl-fig-Cyc03Cycl0091a.html>

Resource b:  SURVIVORS ACCOUNT OF THE FLU IN AUCKLAND

I was living in Mt Eden during the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918... I had a friend called Paddy...who hadn’t been seen for awhile...We found Paddy in his room, almost a skeleton of a man, the room stank and there was no inside toilet...we took him back to our place but he was pretty far gone. The next day we had to help a widow and her three children. We found her in the front room with only a fur coat over her ... the children were in a back bedroom, lying on a filthy mattress...there was no inside toilet or gas or electricity...¹

Auckland slums: old houses in the inner city, showing backyard privies beside washing lines. These congested areas reported numerous cases of influenza, but their death rates were no worse than more affluent areas.³

Sources:

¹ Janet Fenton quoted from Geoffrey W. Rice, Black November: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2005, p 77.

² (Photo) Source: Sir George Grey Special Collection, Auckland City Libraries, “Showing an area of slum housing in the inner city”, 1950–1959, Auckland City Council, 17 June 2010, < http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll>

³ George Warren Russell, Minister of Public Health, quoted from Geoffrey W. Rice, Black November: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2005, p 77.

RESOURCE C:  MĀORI DEATH RATE

The official Maori death toll, published in ... the 1919 Health Department report was 1, 130. With a Maori population estimated at 50, 000...this gave an official death rate of 22.6 per thousand, [or 2% mortality], five times the European rate. On the basis of these figures the new Director of Maori Hygiene, Dr Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa), declared in 1920 that the Epidemic was ‘the severest setback the race has received since the fighting days of Hongi Hika’. He was referring to the intertribal wars of the early nineteenth century which, together with ‘new’ diseases such as measles and whooping cough, had more than halved an estimated pre-European Maori population of about 100, 000. After reaching its lowest recorded ebb of just under 40, 000 in the 1896 census, the Maori population had been making a slow but steady recovery until 1918, when the flu pandemic struck....[later research has shown that the official statistics were incorrect] and the total registered Maori deaths rose to 1, 679. Assuming that the total population [after corrections] was 51, 000, this gives a death rate of 32.9 per thousand, or more than 3% mortality.

Tumokai Katipa recalls one incident during the Epidemic

“The only doctor, who was at Mercer, couldn’t do much and didn’t even try. Nobody knew what they should be doing. One person told us not to drink water, and we believed it for a while. Then one of the ones who was ill went mad and jumped in the river and drank frantically. He got better. Others, my sister among them, were crying out for water, their mouths all burnt. We didn’t give them any, and they died. We just didn’t know what we should have done...We just lived from day to day in a kind of daze. It didn’t seem real. It got so bad that people hardly knew what was happening and didn’t care”

Katipa was apparently one of only three adults not affected in a community of 200 at Mangatawhiri in the Waikato. He estimates about 50 were killed. None of these deaths were apparently officially registered.¹

Source:

¹Tumokai Katipa from Geoffrey W. Rice, Black November: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2005, pp 160–161 & 167.

RESOURCE D:  MORTALITY RATES

Epidemic Mortality
	European	Death Rate	Māori	Death Rate
Northland	171	3.6%	561	44.6%
Auckland	1128	7.6%	35	68.4%
Thames / Bay of Plenty	181	4.9%	389	43.7%
Waikato	298	6%	73	17%
East Cape / Hawkes Bay	395	4.9%	121	13.6%
King Country	185	8.1%	162	34.8%
Taranaki / Wanganui	414	5.3%	221	54.3%
Manawatu	327	5.1%	32	13.5%
Wairarapa	195	6.3%	40	45.7%
Wellington	757	7.9%	16	35%
Marlborough	57	3.4%
Nelson	53	2.2%
West Coast	137	4%	1	1%
North Canterbury	129	4.1%	1	.6%
Christchurch	458	4.9%
Banks Peninsula and Chatham Islands	22	5.2%	8	16.4%
South Canterbury	10	4.3%
Otago	223	3.5%
Dunedin	273	3.9%
Southland	491	8.2%	9	64.7%

Source: Geoffrey W. Rice, Black November: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic In New Zealand, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2005, pp. 284–293.

RESOURCE E:  INFLUENZA AND MĀORI

In many places the Maori response to the 1918 flu pandemic was shaped by deep seated religious beliefs about disease and the supernatural…these beliefs help to explain what relief workers described as a’ fatalism’ in their Maori patients: a deep resignation or apathy, the loss of the will to live. “They just turned their faces to the wall and died” is an account often found in relief workers reports. Dame Whina Copper was in Panguru in 1918:

“All the patients were taken to Panguru School…everyone was sick, no-one to help, they were dying one after the other. My father was very, very sick then. He was the first to die…I remember we put him in a coffin, like a box. No time for tangis…it was a flu that was really eating away at you…everybody looks weak and nobody wants to eat…I don’t think we had any medicines…Most or all, our people, they didn’t have their sense, you know, they lost much of their sense at that flu, very strange. They’re just like little children, they’re wandering, just going about, you see them going about praying and all that sort of thing…there was the feeling that aroha, love, is nothing. Your feeling for your relation wasn’t there. Like my own father, when I knew he was dead, I don’t think I even cried…’” ¹

Dame Whina Cooper, ONZ, DBE²

Sources:

¹ Dame Whina Cooper quoted from Geoffrey W. Rice, Black November: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2005, p 167.

² (Photo) “Dame Whina Cooper”, Auckland War Memorial Museum, 15 June 2010,http://www.dnzb.govt.nz/images, C175

RESOURCE F:  Age / Sex distribution of mortality (european)

Age/Sex Distribution of Mortality (European) in New Zealand 1918
Age	Male	Female
0 – 9	181	189
10 – 19	212	136
20 – 29	888	587
30 – 39	1348	612
40 – 49	715	292
50 – 59	250	205
60 – 69	136	99
70 – 79	104	66
80+	40	31

Source: Figures sourced and adapted from Geoffrey W. Rice, Black November: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2005, p 222.

RESOURCE G:  The Minister of Health’s visit to Auckland

The Minister of Health, Dr George Warren Russell, arrived in Auckland, on the morning train on 5 November, intending to spend only one day in Auckland. The acting Chief Health Officer, Dr Joseph Frengley however, persuaded him to stay for two days to visit some of the district depots and inspect the overcrowded hospital. Russell was quickly convinced that a major emergency existed and a Gazette Extraordinary was issued the next morning (6th November) declaring influenza to be a notifiable infectious disease. This meant that local health authorities were now able to exercise all of their special powers, set out in Section 18 of the Public Health Act 1908, to deal appropriately with ‘persons, places, ships, animals or things’ to check or prevent the spread of disease.

Dr Frengley immediately ordered the closure of all public halls, places of entertainment, billiard rooms and shooting galleries for at least a week. All meetings, including race meetings, were also cancelled to prevent the spread of disease. Churches were asked to hold only morning services, schools throughout Auckland were closed and examinations at schools and universities were postponed.

The Minister of Health returned to Wellington a very worried man, convinced at last that this was no ordinary influenza. The Heath Dept’s inspectors set about setting up inhalation chambers, but these did not prevent the increasingly high rate of absenteeism. Peter Fraser, MP for Wellington Central and later Prime Minister of NZ, toured the poorer parts of his electorate on November 12th finding widespread sickness and distress. Health Department officials confessed that they did not know how many people had the flu because only the serious cases were being reported and the doctors were too few and too busy to supply accurate notifications.¹

Source:

¹ Adapted from Geoffrey W. Rice, Black November: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2005, pp. 90–91.

RESOURCE H:  A HEALTH WORKERS ACCOUNT

Alfred Hollows (NZ Army Medical Corps)

I was detailed to an emergency hospital in Abel Smith Street (Wellington). It was a hall that had been fitted with beds and was staffed by women volunteers who had no real nursing experience. There were 60 beds in total. The women did a splendid job of the cooking and stuck to it when everyone else panicked. There were about 12 ‘nurses’ on the wards…By about the 18^th or 19^th November our death rate was quite appalling, something like a dozen a day, and the women volunteers disappeared and weren’t seen again. Defence Headquarters sent three orderlies to help out. We split shifts evenly, two on nights, two on days – that was the idea, but we all tended to keep going regardless, there was so much to do and it was about a week before further relief arrived; four more arrived and we had a much needed sleep.

Our doctor, Dr Hardwick Knight was a truly wonderful man, the only sleep he got was catnaps in the back of the motor car as he was driven from case to case. I suspect his driver sometime delayed a bit in order to give him more of a sleep. At the height of the epidemic we had 60 in the men’s ward with four orderlies and thirty in the women’s ward with three VAD’s (Voluntary Aid Detachment).

We ran half hourly checks for high fevers etc, but it was mostly just sponging people to try and get the temperatures down. Those that didn’t respond to the few drugs we had slipped into a coma and usually died within 5–10 days. The bodies of those that passed away were carried to the ‘morgue’, in the gents cloakroom, where they were laid in rows until the undertakers came to take them away.

We had a sergeant major on telephone duty, and as soon as a death occurred he notified headquarters and a new patient would arrive, almost as we were changing the bed. We were so busy that we lost count of the dead from one day to the next, but we occasionally took a breather and stepped outside for a short walk. I stood in the middle of Wellington city at 2pm one day and there was not a soul to be seen…it really was a city of the dead.¹

Source:

¹ Adapted from Geoffrey W. Rice, Black November: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2005, pp. 96–97.