The changing politics of pandemic
ISOMEHOW resisted last Saturday’s Eurovision TV-fest, but the previous week I was glued. The BBC re-screened its 1959 General Election Night Results programme, and I watched all 258 minutes.
It was “The First TV Election”, with a clear majority of electors able to follow both the campaign and results on their own sets. Pushed now by the competition of ITV, the Beeb pulled out all available licence-paid stops.
Individual constituency results were still chalked on little blackboards, but reinforced by a real studio-based computer – called ‘Ella’ (short for electronic computer) – which king of the show, Richard Dimbleby, kept wandering over apparently to stroke – with, naturally, cigarette visibly in hand.
I was enthralled, and thought I’d devote the whole column to it – only joking!
Just one tough question: which was the only regional newspaper to have its editor interviewed in front of the printing presses and its Friday front page displayed on screen? Good guess – The Birmingham Post.
Even that, though, I wouldn’t have bothered you with, but for the virus business. For that October 1959 Election, giving the Conservatives a hugely increased 100-seat Commons majority, came just 18 months after the winter of the Asian Flu pandemic, which, as a Government – spoiler alert – they had handled with less than distinction.
As its name suggests, it originated somewhere China-ish. Carried initially by wild ducks (hence “bird flu”), it moved west, hitting the UK in late June 1957. From September – as I was starting secondary school – it spread nationwide pretty fast, peaking in mid-October with over
600 deaths reported in major towns alone.
A huge difference from Covid-19, however, was that, though a new strain of flu, H2N2, it was sufficiently similar to the 1918 H1N1 Spanish flu virus for a deployable vaccine to become quite quickly available. Which helps explain the flu’s presumed fairly swift disappearance – until what now seems its unsurprising return over the winter.
Total England and Wales death estimates vary, as today, according to whether you count deaths immediately following treatment (14,000+), or “excess deaths” over the recent historical average (30,000+). The worldwide figure was up to two million deaths.
As with all epidemics, fatality rates were hugely skewed towards the elderly, but roughly half the estimated nine million Britons contracting it were children under 14, like me and my younger sister, Jennifer.
We both caught it and were away from school in the new year – at different times, to our mother’s annoyance. Our schools weren’t closed, though many were, notably in London and the North West.
Teachers were presumably priorities for what was a double vaccination, and, while I honestly can’t remember if we were vaccinated then, we certainly were in subsequent years.
But – get this – over 5.5 million were “attended by their doctors”. This was partly because everyone was instructed not to attend doctors’ surgeries, but to “stay at home and take aspirin”. Sound familiar?
Mainly, though, it was because that’s what NHS “family doctors”, like our Dr Braby, did then: daily rounds of home visits, after surgeries, which doubtless explains, in an era when masks weren’t fashionable and hand sanitisers uninvented, why so many GPs contracted the virus themselves.
I do remember symptoms – alternately feverish and chilled body temperature, achy all over, sore throat, dry cough, loss of appetite – though not the nose bleeds that many, especially boys, suffered. No hand-washing mania, but regular spongings.
But I’m jumping ahead. What, you’re doubtless asking, were Government ministers doing, particularly the still newish PM, Harold Macmillan, who had succeeded Anthony Eden in January 1957, following the calamitous 1956 Suez invasion.
Well, first he appointed a Government containing just the 35 fellow Old Etonians, making Johnson’s two-thirds privately educated Cabinet look almost diverse. Then in July, shortly after the flu’s arrival, he famously proclaimed to a party rally that “most of our people have never had it so good” – not the flu, their standards of living. Don’t knock it – more than enough believed it come that 1959 General Election.
But does the style sound familiar? More clues. Journalists rooting around in the National Archives reckon the PM only learned about the virus from reading about it in a newspaper; that he took a fortnight before making any public statement; and only convened a Cabinet meeting in early September because “I am worried about the public relations side of all this”. A distinctly un-urgent public statement was finally made on September 9. Following which, apart from those school closures, little of note was cancelled. Trains and buses ran, hand-shaking continued. The party conferences went ahead, and other major public and sporting gatherings, football included. The Government’s non-performance was criticised, particularly by the medical profession, but, as that 1959 General Election demonstrated, economically it had cost little, and politically nothing.
Indeed, throughout the whole election, the pandemic seemingly passed unmentioned. Nothing in Labour’s manifesto or in major campaign speeches and broadcasts, clearly suggesting there was nothing considered seriously worth attacking.
I offer three explanations. First, all adults had come through World War II, which was infinitely worse, with even sudden deaths commonplace. Secondly, thousands died each winter from “ordinary” flu; at least a vaccine was available for this one.
Thirdly, children getting infectious diseases was one of those things that happened every winter – chicken pox, measles, German measles (don’t ask!), mumps, scarlet fever. I somehow missed mumps. Life’s changed, a lot – so, come the next General Election, I don’t expect this Government’s performance to go entirely unmentioned.
Chris Game is a lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies at the University of
Birmingham