Page 6 - July on-line VV_Neat

The focus – if there was one – lay in minimising the risk of infection through contact. Advice offered by local authorities and
the press was largely ineffective.

The Bexhill-on-Sea Observer advised readers to avoid crowds by catching a later train home, sitting on the open upper deck
of a bus, and wearing an extra coat. In Brighton, publicans were urged to thoroughly wash the outside lips of drinking glasses
in running water, while a pamphlet recommended people to “give up shaking hands for the present and give up kissing for
all time”.
The London Borough of Hackney recommended that victims stay isolated, go to bed when symptoms appeared, and to gar-
gle with potash and salt. Baffled doctors in Manchester prescribed an age-old tonic: whisky.

Factories in the Black Country relaxed their no-smoking rules, believing that cigarette smoke would prevent infection. Lon-
don cinemas were required to be ventilated for 30 minutes every three hours in the belief that fresh air would stem the virus
spreading, while those in Wolverhampton were ordered to ban children and remove all carpets.
DIY ‘cures’

The Playhouse in Morpeth, Northumberland, applied ‘a specially prepared chemical’ before and after each performance.
Dr Robertson Dobie, of Perthshire, prescribed jam and sweets after noting that few of his flu patients worked at the local jam
factory. Sir Leonard Hill, a physiologist, recommended the deep breathing of cool air and sleeping in the open.

Several isolation hospitals apparently placed patients in “soaking wet beds and sprinkled them regularly with cold water to
keep them completely sodden” hoping it would stimulate their immune systems.

One government official simply encouraged people to “clean [their] teeth regularly”, while the News of the World suggested
readers “eat plenty of porridge” and, at the George Hotel, Nottingham, Sister Veitch offered flu victims electric shock treatment.
Hanningtons department store in Brighton tried to cash-in on the misery. It advertised that the best way of treating the flu
was to spend money at their sale!
As the death toll rose across England, a new skipping song was heard in school playgrounds:

I had a little bird,
Its name was Enza;
I opened the window
And in-flu-enza.

However, following the third wave in early 1919, the pandemic died away swiftly, its force spent. The disease that had
wreaked such havoc disappeared almost as quickly as it had come.