Sally Furniss
Well-known member
Listen to survivors of the 1918 Flu Pandemic.
http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/?q=node/3698
He took me in his arms and carried me to see my dead sister before she was carried to the grave. He took me for a last visit to my mother for he thought that both of us would die. But we didn't. We gasped for breath, our chests and throats rattled with the passage of the hard-won air. We sweated and we shivered, we fainted and revived. Death waited for us but we survived.
From a 1967 radio documentary about the pandemic, 'The Great Plague'. Hear and read this extract from the documentary.
Current anxiety over the danger of avian influenza virus – H5N1 – has revived memories of New Zealand's worst disease outbreak, the lethal influenza pandemic of 1918. In two months New Zealand lost about half as many people to influenza as it had in the whole of the First World War.
Was the Niagara to blame?
Many people believed the deadly flu virus came to New Zealand aboard the Royal Mail liner Niagara, which arrived in Auckland from Vancouver and San Francisco on 12 October 1918. However this is now no longer believed to be the case. Read more.
The 'Spanish flu', as it was often called, arrived in New Zealand in early October 1918, probably with returning troops. By the time it eased in December the death toll had topped 8600, including at least 2160 Maori. Worldwide, the flu is now thought to have killed as many as 50 million people.
At the height of the crisis, during November, the whole country held its breath: schools, factories, shops, theatres and hotels were closed. One man recalled how he:
stood in the middle of Wellington City at 2 p.m. on a weekday afternoon, and there was not a soul to be seen - no trams running, no shops open - It was really a City of the Dead.
The virus struck with little warning. Apparently healthy people could collapse within hours of the first symptoms appearing; some died within a day. Often, corpses turned purple or black, adding to the grief of survivors and evoking images of the Black Death of the fourteenth century. Across the country, schools and halls were turned into makeshift hospitals. Much of the burden of caring for the sick fell on volunteer caregivers, especially women.
Impact on Maori
The virus had an especially deadly impact on Maori, whose death rate, 4.2 percent, was about seven times that of Pakeha. Many people blamed substandard housing — Maori rural dwellings often had earthen floors and were damp and overcrowded — but the small size and isolation of Maori settlements also compounded the misery. The flu spread so fast that remote communities had little or no warning of its arrival. In the absence of outside help, there were often not enough locals left standing to care for the sick.
Whole settlements were decimated: at Mangatawhiri in Waikato, about 50 out of 200 local Maori died. Whina Cooper recalled similar suffering at Panguru, Hokianga:
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 couldn't do anything for him. I remember we put him in a coffin, like a box. There were many others, you could see them on the roads, on the sledges, the ones that are able to drag them away, dragged them away to the cemetery. No time for tangis.
Even worse was the flu's impact on Western Samoa, then under New Zealand military rule. There, over 7500 – one in five people – died, at least partly because of the negligence of the New Zealand authorities in enforcing a quarantine.
Remembering the Pandemic
This collection of recollections from people who lived through the pandemic are taken from a 1967 radio documentary by Jim Henderson called 'The Great Plague'. None of the interviewees are named in the documentary. Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero
reference: TCDR562
The sound files may not be reused without permission from Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero.
Black Plague
Hear this recollection from 'The Great Plague' (mp3, 175kb)
[Woman speaking] I well remember my husband, who was custodian of the town hall at the time, coming home very depressed and telling me all about this awful flu epidemic that was spreading so fast. The patients had very high temperatures and when they died the bodies turned black just like the plague and it was really serious. He felt that if he got it that would be the end. So I said well it's no use frightening ourselves into it, we must take every precaution and hope for the best. I used to disinfect the drains well and we gargled with a weak solution of Condy's fluid everyday. Tom used to spray the car with formalin after taking patients to the hospital. It spread so fast that they had to put up a marquee to take their overflow of patients.
Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero
Reference: TCDR562
This sound file may not be reused without permission from Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero.
Armistice
Hear these recollections from 'The Great Plague' (mp3, 189kb)
[Woman speaking] Well I was very bad in bed, I worked at dress making and I just fell on the table and [was] taken home in a taxi and I … had to sit up in bed when the war was over and wave a little flag, I couldn't go out to celebrate - my boyfriend was away at the war at the time.
[Woman speaking] And it came, Armistice Day. I went to town early that morning - a friend came and drove me in - as we simply had to have more hospitals, more room to nurse cases. I got into town just before 9 and the bells started ringing. I said 'whatever is going on?' 'It's peace' they said, 'peace!' How I loathed the sound of it. Everything shut up and I could get nothing, not a thing until tomorrow. And that was just the day that I'm sure cost hundreds of lives. But simply had those people been able to be taken in to those hospitals that day, they might have been spared. You couldn't do a thing about it, it was peace and everyone was celebrating.
Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero
Reference: TCDR562
This sound file may not be reused without permission from Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero.
Carrying the dead
Hear these recollections from 'The Great Plague' (mp3, 138kb)
[Man speaking] At all times it seems, day and night, ambulances were on the move everywhere. They must have been manned in relays. In those days there was no free ambulance, the hospitals carried their own. These vehicles had tinkling bells instead of sirens.
[Woman speaking] At night time was, I think, the most saddest of all because the trucks were rumbling past my place all night long. We found out after that they didn't have time to make coffins they were just buried in boxes and the sad part was when we went over to cemetery later, when it was all over, no one knew where they were putting the flowers, they just put them on a mound of ground and trusted the luck of it being one of their own.
Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero
Reference: TCDR562
This sound file may not be reused without permission from Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero.
Cures
Hear these recollections from 'The Great Plague' (mp3, 368kb)
[Man speaking] And I had a mate standing - we were on the corner and he fell down by the lamppost and …he hadn't had anything to drink that day. So then he managed to get home and he had the black plague all right, black spots all over him and he was taking mulled beer, if you know what that is, heated beer. It's no good. Every morning I visited him and now he says, 'I'm going Harry', course I couldn't say otherwise…and then he recuperated!
[Woman speaking] Some used gargles and that sort of thing and there was this formalin place. And the old fashioned remedy of wearing a camphor bag - that was very prominent - and people had them on their children and on themselves and um I don't know whether it had the effect, but sometimes just the thought that you got something like that is a help to people's morale isn't it?
[Man speaking] Most of them got over it but if you bled at the nose - if they bled at the nose - they got over it. If they didn't they went black and that was a finish.
[Woman speaking]I was living with my sister and she would have a fire set ready for me to light with sulphur sprinkled all over the wood. Before I mixed with the family I went to this room, lit the fire and bent over it and inhaled some of the fumes and was also fumigated at the same time. We kept away from crowds and never took home books from libraries.
Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero
Reference: TCDR562
This sound file may not be reused without permission from Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero.
Delirium
Hear these recollections from 'The Great Plague' (mp3, 287kb)
[Woman speaking] And the thing was they came in with terrific temperatures and if we couldn't get those temperatures down, they dropped suddenly - below subnormal - and they started delirium. And once they got very delirious, we just couldn't save them and there was no way of bringing the temperatures down then except by cold sponging. And that had to be done by somebody with experience you see, otherwise they'd get an awful shock if it's badly done and chills as well. So I'm trying to keep the patients moderately clean and then when they got really delirious keeping them in bed. And the noise of the delirium at night was terrific.
[Man speaking] And he went raving mad one night before they took him away. He was running around the room with a knife… he just couldn't control himself. So they came and took him away to the hospital. Next morning they came over and told me poor old Jack had died, so that was one of my mates who went.
[Man speaking] One particular night there was a chap - I won't mention any names - but he jumped out of bed and I grabbed him and I said 'where are you going?' He was a big fella and of course I'm not very big, but I got me arms around just big around him and said 'come on, come on back to bed'. 'Let me go, let me go' he said, 'let me go' he said, 'I must get down and meet Massey and Ward'. Massey and Ward at that time were coming back from an Imperial conference at home [Britain] you see, and anyway I said 'come on get back into bed'. Yes, I got him back - I just got him on to bed and he said 'oh God' he said, and he was dead as a doornail, just went dead.
Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero
Reference: TCDR562
This sound file may not be reused without permission from Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero.
One family's story
Hear this recollection from 'The Great Plague' (mp3, 437kb)
[Man speaking] My father, the Reverend James McCaw [?] of Lower Hutt - although by this time engrossed in helping people ill or dying with the dreaded plague - breathed a sigh of relief that his son was not on board the Tahiti but safe in camp at Featherston. Safe? Within a week the camp was visited by death a dozen times a day. Bert was one of the victims. A day later his sister, Nan, a year younger, joined him from the Lower Hutt manse. Here too lay the youngest of the family and their mother all at death's door. But the parson, he was fit and well and capable. He boiled a daily brew of beef tea in the copper. He fed a score of helpless sick folk in an emergency hospital set up in the church hall and each day he presided over ten or a dozen funerals. He and Father Walsh were the only two ministers of religion in the valley able to get about. They buried the dead as they were brought to the grave irrespective of creed or denomination. In the midst of all this horror came the Armistice, November 11, 1918. I recall the nearby church bell ringing and my father telling me the war was over. I was only vaguely interested. He told me that Bert my brother had died. I took as much interest. He took me in his arms and carried me to see my dead sister before she was carried to the grave. He took me for a last visit to my mother for he thought that both of us would die. But we didn't. We gasped for breath, our chests and throats rattled with the passage of the hard-won air. We sweated and we shivered, we fainted and revived. Death waited for us but we survived. Close to us lived two middle-aged women retired nurses. They bolted their doors and hid from the plague. My father burst their door open with a charge of his great shoulder and thrust them in to the fray where they and he toiled mightily. So he and his wife and the rest of his family came through it. But a hundred Hutt people did not. My father lost a score of his flock and two of his children, but not his faith.
Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero
Reference: TCDR562
This sound file may not be reused without permission from Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero.
Kids coping
Hear these recollections from 'The Great Plague' (mp3, 209kb)
[Woman speaking] Interviewer: Was it a problem with the children running around?
[Woman speaking] Answer: Ah no, the children were very good; we had to keep them, they were not allowed out the gate. They had to play in their own back yards. So no the children seemed to realize too how dreadful the time was and the unfortunate part was when anyone having a baby, the mothers were lost, the babies seemed to survive. But there was a dreadful lot of babies were left without their mothers. And I think that was one of the saddest parts.
[Man speaking] At the school, when we're in the class, and that some of my friends whose parents had passed away would all of a sudden start their crying and the teacher would have to console them later.
[Man speaking] I remember that the schools were closed and we rather enjoyed the holiday, the extended holiday for the tragedies that were happening everyday. It didn't touch me, I was far too young to realize.
Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero
Reference: TCDR562
This sound file may not be reused without permission from Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero.
Kids helping
Hear these recollections from 'The Great Plague' (mp3, 288kb)
[Woman speaking] Mother would come home and she would boil up and make the most beautiful vegetable and meat soups and then I would take them in thermos flasks to people who were too ill to perhaps warm their own food. And I wasn't allowed to enter the house, I just placed it on the door step and then went back to my pony and where people were a little better I could carry it in a billy in a jelly form and people were able to get food in that manner. But most of these people were almost unable to more than come to the door and just pick up the container that was left for them.
[Woman speaking] It wasn't safe for men to go out on the farms alone in case they were struck down and no one knew where they were. So one of the children or someone, they generally went in twos. When we wanted to do our shopping we had to go into Waverly by a horse and gig and when we got into the grocer's shop we rattled a kerosene tin which was hanging from a beam of the verandah. They came out to their door, took our order and then put the things on the pavement and we collected them and put our money into a mug with disinfectant in it and they collected it out of the mug.
Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero
Reference: TCDR562
This sound file may not be reused without permission from Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero.
Overwhelmed
Hear these recollections from 'The Great Plague' (mp3, 214kb)
[Woman speaking] It just got so that if you wanted help - if you didn't feel so well - you opened your window and you put a white rag out the window and you unlocked you front door and left a white rag on the handle of the door you see so that anybody could come in and when these people who were going around on motorbikes in cars saw them you see they got out to investigate because it was beyond, you couldn't deal with it. You just couldn't deal with it at all. It was beyond anything.
[Woman speaking] I lived in Wellington at the time and was working in a chemist shop. People started to pour in with prescriptions of all descriptions and people were collapsing on the road and being picked up and taken to hospital until the hospitals were full and then it began that we could hardly deal with them for the simple reason they came in so thick and fast. I gave prescriptions. I was working in the shop and the chemist was working flat out and the doctors finally put the prescription in the paper and so they copied it out and copied this and gave it in bulk form.
Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero
Reference: TCDR562
This sound file may not be reused without permission from Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero.
Need for nurses
Hear this recollection from 'The Great Plague' (mp3, 168kb)
[Woman speaking] Well the Red Cross give girls or women training in home nursing at the beginning of every year and if girls would only take that training from my experience of the epidemic it was one of the best things that they could do. It was a very good training for 3 months and if anybody came into the hospital when we were desperate you could even take a temperature, or make a bed or a pulse or had any idea of nursing we would fall almost on our necks with gratitude because we didn't have to show them around you see. We just said get to it and we look after them you see. So ever since then I worked a good deal in the Red Cross you see in Hastings and Havelock and my great idea is to get every girl trained that I could in this course of home nursing. We'll have epidemics again and we'll have emergencies again probably of the Civil Defense now is working as you know probably don't you. Well what they wanted is people who can nurse. Don't you agree?
http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/?q=node/3698
He took me in his arms and carried me to see my dead sister before she was carried to the grave. He took me for a last visit to my mother for he thought that both of us would die. But we didn't. We gasped for breath, our chests and throats rattled with the passage of the hard-won air. We sweated and we shivered, we fainted and revived. Death waited for us but we survived.
From a 1967 radio documentary about the pandemic, 'The Great Plague'. Hear and read this extract from the documentary.
Current anxiety over the danger of avian influenza virus – H5N1 – has revived memories of New Zealand's worst disease outbreak, the lethal influenza pandemic of 1918. In two months New Zealand lost about half as many people to influenza as it had in the whole of the First World War.
Was the Niagara to blame?
Many people believed the deadly flu virus came to New Zealand aboard the Royal Mail liner Niagara, which arrived in Auckland from Vancouver and San Francisco on 12 October 1918. However this is now no longer believed to be the case. Read more.
The 'Spanish flu', as it was often called, arrived in New Zealand in early October 1918, probably with returning troops. By the time it eased in December the death toll had topped 8600, including at least 2160 Maori. Worldwide, the flu is now thought to have killed as many as 50 million people.
At the height of the crisis, during November, the whole country held its breath: schools, factories, shops, theatres and hotels were closed. One man recalled how he:
stood in the middle of Wellington City at 2 p.m. on a weekday afternoon, and there was not a soul to be seen - no trams running, no shops open - It was really a City of the Dead.
The virus struck with little warning. Apparently healthy people could collapse within hours of the first symptoms appearing; some died within a day. Often, corpses turned purple or black, adding to the grief of survivors and evoking images of the Black Death of the fourteenth century. Across the country, schools and halls were turned into makeshift hospitals. Much of the burden of caring for the sick fell on volunteer caregivers, especially women.
Impact on Maori
The virus had an especially deadly impact on Maori, whose death rate, 4.2 percent, was about seven times that of Pakeha. Many people blamed substandard housing — Maori rural dwellings often had earthen floors and were damp and overcrowded — but the small size and isolation of Maori settlements also compounded the misery. The flu spread so fast that remote communities had little or no warning of its arrival. In the absence of outside help, there were often not enough locals left standing to care for the sick.
Whole settlements were decimated: at Mangatawhiri in Waikato, about 50 out of 200 local Maori died. Whina Cooper recalled similar suffering at Panguru, Hokianga:
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 couldn't do anything for him. I remember we put him in a coffin, like a box. There were many others, you could see them on the roads, on the sledges, the ones that are able to drag them away, dragged them away to the cemetery. No time for tangis.
Even worse was the flu's impact on Western Samoa, then under New Zealand military rule. There, over 7500 – one in five people – died, at least partly because of the negligence of the New Zealand authorities in enforcing a quarantine.
Remembering the Pandemic
This collection of recollections from people who lived through the pandemic are taken from a 1967 radio documentary by Jim Henderson called 'The Great Plague'. None of the interviewees are named in the documentary. Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero
reference: TCDR562
The sound files may not be reused without permission from Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero.
Black Plague
Hear this recollection from 'The Great Plague' (mp3, 175kb)
[Woman speaking] I well remember my husband, who was custodian of the town hall at the time, coming home very depressed and telling me all about this awful flu epidemic that was spreading so fast. The patients had very high temperatures and when they died the bodies turned black just like the plague and it was really serious. He felt that if he got it that would be the end. So I said well it's no use frightening ourselves into it, we must take every precaution and hope for the best. I used to disinfect the drains well and we gargled with a weak solution of Condy's fluid everyday. Tom used to spray the car with formalin after taking patients to the hospital. It spread so fast that they had to put up a marquee to take their overflow of patients.
Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero
Reference: TCDR562
This sound file may not be reused without permission from Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero.
Armistice
Hear these recollections from 'The Great Plague' (mp3, 189kb)
[Woman speaking] Well I was very bad in bed, I worked at dress making and I just fell on the table and [was] taken home in a taxi and I … had to sit up in bed when the war was over and wave a little flag, I couldn't go out to celebrate - my boyfriend was away at the war at the time.
[Woman speaking] And it came, Armistice Day. I went to town early that morning - a friend came and drove me in - as we simply had to have more hospitals, more room to nurse cases. I got into town just before 9 and the bells started ringing. I said 'whatever is going on?' 'It's peace' they said, 'peace!' How I loathed the sound of it. Everything shut up and I could get nothing, not a thing until tomorrow. And that was just the day that I'm sure cost hundreds of lives. But simply had those people been able to be taken in to those hospitals that day, they might have been spared. You couldn't do a thing about it, it was peace and everyone was celebrating.
Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero
Reference: TCDR562
This sound file may not be reused without permission from Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero.
Carrying the dead
Hear these recollections from 'The Great Plague' (mp3, 138kb)
[Man speaking] At all times it seems, day and night, ambulances were on the move everywhere. They must have been manned in relays. In those days there was no free ambulance, the hospitals carried their own. These vehicles had tinkling bells instead of sirens.
[Woman speaking] At night time was, I think, the most saddest of all because the trucks were rumbling past my place all night long. We found out after that they didn't have time to make coffins they were just buried in boxes and the sad part was when we went over to cemetery later, when it was all over, no one knew where they were putting the flowers, they just put them on a mound of ground and trusted the luck of it being one of their own.
Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero
Reference: TCDR562
This sound file may not be reused without permission from Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero.
Cures
Hear these recollections from 'The Great Plague' (mp3, 368kb)
[Man speaking] And I had a mate standing - we were on the corner and he fell down by the lamppost and …he hadn't had anything to drink that day. So then he managed to get home and he had the black plague all right, black spots all over him and he was taking mulled beer, if you know what that is, heated beer. It's no good. Every morning I visited him and now he says, 'I'm going Harry', course I couldn't say otherwise…and then he recuperated!
[Woman speaking] Some used gargles and that sort of thing and there was this formalin place. And the old fashioned remedy of wearing a camphor bag - that was very prominent - and people had them on their children and on themselves and um I don't know whether it had the effect, but sometimes just the thought that you got something like that is a help to people's morale isn't it?
[Man speaking] Most of them got over it but if you bled at the nose - if they bled at the nose - they got over it. If they didn't they went black and that was a finish.
[Woman speaking]I was living with my sister and she would have a fire set ready for me to light with sulphur sprinkled all over the wood. Before I mixed with the family I went to this room, lit the fire and bent over it and inhaled some of the fumes and was also fumigated at the same time. We kept away from crowds and never took home books from libraries.
Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero
Reference: TCDR562
This sound file may not be reused without permission from Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero.
Delirium
Hear these recollections from 'The Great Plague' (mp3, 287kb)
[Woman speaking] And the thing was they came in with terrific temperatures and if we couldn't get those temperatures down, they dropped suddenly - below subnormal - and they started delirium. And once they got very delirious, we just couldn't save them and there was no way of bringing the temperatures down then except by cold sponging. And that had to be done by somebody with experience you see, otherwise they'd get an awful shock if it's badly done and chills as well. So I'm trying to keep the patients moderately clean and then when they got really delirious keeping them in bed. And the noise of the delirium at night was terrific.
[Man speaking] And he went raving mad one night before they took him away. He was running around the room with a knife… he just couldn't control himself. So they came and took him away to the hospital. Next morning they came over and told me poor old Jack had died, so that was one of my mates who went.
[Man speaking] One particular night there was a chap - I won't mention any names - but he jumped out of bed and I grabbed him and I said 'where are you going?' He was a big fella and of course I'm not very big, but I got me arms around just big around him and said 'come on, come on back to bed'. 'Let me go, let me go' he said, 'let me go' he said, 'I must get down and meet Massey and Ward'. Massey and Ward at that time were coming back from an Imperial conference at home [Britain] you see, and anyway I said 'come on get back into bed'. Yes, I got him back - I just got him on to bed and he said 'oh God' he said, and he was dead as a doornail, just went dead.
Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero
Reference: TCDR562
This sound file may not be reused without permission from Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero.
One family's story
Hear this recollection from 'The Great Plague' (mp3, 437kb)
[Man speaking] My father, the Reverend James McCaw [?] of Lower Hutt - although by this time engrossed in helping people ill or dying with the dreaded plague - breathed a sigh of relief that his son was not on board the Tahiti but safe in camp at Featherston. Safe? Within a week the camp was visited by death a dozen times a day. Bert was one of the victims. A day later his sister, Nan, a year younger, joined him from the Lower Hutt manse. Here too lay the youngest of the family and their mother all at death's door. But the parson, he was fit and well and capable. He boiled a daily brew of beef tea in the copper. He fed a score of helpless sick folk in an emergency hospital set up in the church hall and each day he presided over ten or a dozen funerals. He and Father Walsh were the only two ministers of religion in the valley able to get about. They buried the dead as they were brought to the grave irrespective of creed or denomination. In the midst of all this horror came the Armistice, November 11, 1918. I recall the nearby church bell ringing and my father telling me the war was over. I was only vaguely interested. He told me that Bert my brother had died. I took as much interest. He took me in his arms and carried me to see my dead sister before she was carried to the grave. He took me for a last visit to my mother for he thought that both of us would die. But we didn't. We gasped for breath, our chests and throats rattled with the passage of the hard-won air. We sweated and we shivered, we fainted and revived. Death waited for us but we survived. Close to us lived two middle-aged women retired nurses. They bolted their doors and hid from the plague. My father burst their door open with a charge of his great shoulder and thrust them in to the fray where they and he toiled mightily. So he and his wife and the rest of his family came through it. But a hundred Hutt people did not. My father lost a score of his flock and two of his children, but not his faith.
Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero
Reference: TCDR562
This sound file may not be reused without permission from Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero.
Kids coping
Hear these recollections from 'The Great Plague' (mp3, 209kb)
[Woman speaking] Interviewer: Was it a problem with the children running around?
[Woman speaking] Answer: Ah no, the children were very good; we had to keep them, they were not allowed out the gate. They had to play in their own back yards. So no the children seemed to realize too how dreadful the time was and the unfortunate part was when anyone having a baby, the mothers were lost, the babies seemed to survive. But there was a dreadful lot of babies were left without their mothers. And I think that was one of the saddest parts.
[Man speaking] At the school, when we're in the class, and that some of my friends whose parents had passed away would all of a sudden start their crying and the teacher would have to console them later.
[Man speaking] I remember that the schools were closed and we rather enjoyed the holiday, the extended holiday for the tragedies that were happening everyday. It didn't touch me, I was far too young to realize.
Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero
Reference: TCDR562
This sound file may not be reused without permission from Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero.
Kids helping
Hear these recollections from 'The Great Plague' (mp3, 288kb)
[Woman speaking] Mother would come home and she would boil up and make the most beautiful vegetable and meat soups and then I would take them in thermos flasks to people who were too ill to perhaps warm their own food. And I wasn't allowed to enter the house, I just placed it on the door step and then went back to my pony and where people were a little better I could carry it in a billy in a jelly form and people were able to get food in that manner. But most of these people were almost unable to more than come to the door and just pick up the container that was left for them.
[Woman speaking] It wasn't safe for men to go out on the farms alone in case they were struck down and no one knew where they were. So one of the children or someone, they generally went in twos. When we wanted to do our shopping we had to go into Waverly by a horse and gig and when we got into the grocer's shop we rattled a kerosene tin which was hanging from a beam of the verandah. They came out to their door, took our order and then put the things on the pavement and we collected them and put our money into a mug with disinfectant in it and they collected it out of the mug.
Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero
Reference: TCDR562
This sound file may not be reused without permission from Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero.
Overwhelmed
Hear these recollections from 'The Great Plague' (mp3, 214kb)
[Woman speaking] It just got so that if you wanted help - if you didn't feel so well - you opened your window and you put a white rag out the window and you unlocked you front door and left a white rag on the handle of the door you see so that anybody could come in and when these people who were going around on motorbikes in cars saw them you see they got out to investigate because it was beyond, you couldn't deal with it. You just couldn't deal with it at all. It was beyond anything.
[Woman speaking] I lived in Wellington at the time and was working in a chemist shop. People started to pour in with prescriptions of all descriptions and people were collapsing on the road and being picked up and taken to hospital until the hospitals were full and then it began that we could hardly deal with them for the simple reason they came in so thick and fast. I gave prescriptions. I was working in the shop and the chemist was working flat out and the doctors finally put the prescription in the paper and so they copied it out and copied this and gave it in bulk form.
Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero
Reference: TCDR562
This sound file may not be reused without permission from Sound Archives / Nga Taonga Korero.
Need for nurses
Hear this recollection from 'The Great Plague' (mp3, 168kb)
[Woman speaking] Well the Red Cross give girls or women training in home nursing at the beginning of every year and if girls would only take that training from my experience of the epidemic it was one of the best things that they could do. It was a very good training for 3 months and if anybody came into the hospital when we were desperate you could even take a temperature, or make a bed or a pulse or had any idea of nursing we would fall almost on our necks with gratitude because we didn't have to show them around you see. We just said get to it and we look after them you see. So ever since then I worked a good deal in the Red Cross you see in Hastings and Havelock and my great idea is to get every girl trained that I could in this course of home nursing. We'll have epidemics again and we'll have emergencies again probably of the Civil Defense now is working as you know probably don't you. Well what they wanted is people who can nurse. Don't you agree?
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