LATIMER’S DIARY
How today’s pandemic stacks up against past plagues, and considering Dead People’s Food
IF you were to conduct a poll of Britons and ask them what the most significant event in UK history that they have personally lived through, the majority – and certainly most of those born after 1945 – would nominate Right Now.
The virus has killed tens of thousands, left others with debilitating long-term health problems, and now the fear is that it will have caused huge damage to the economies of many countries, including this one.
So yeah, we’re living through History alright, aren’t we?Aren’t we …?
The problem with pandemics is that they get forgotten very quickly. People die, but buildings aren’t destroyed or damaged. They are not dramatic in the way that wars or even freak weather events are.
There are countless books, movies, TV dramas and documentaries, for instance, about the First World War, but very little of anything about the 1918-19 flu pandemic which killed at least twice as many people as the war did – and probably more.
In an online lecture the other night hosted by the Bristol branch of the Historical Association (see bristolha.wordpress.com/) the reliably wonderful Professor Ronald Hutton made the point that the Great Plague of 1665 killed more people in three months in London alone than the entire number killed in the English Civil War.
Arguably we would be much, much less aware of the Great Plague were it not for Samuel Pepys’ diary and because of Daniel Defoe’s 1722 Journal of the Plague Year, which is a sort-of work of fiction.
Most folk who know anything about history will be aware of the medieval Black Death and the Great Plague of 1665, but that’s pretty much it. But there were numerous other periodic visitations which regularly carried off tens of thousands, but researching anything before the 19th century is difficult.
The records are scattered with references to plague outbreaks, or the Tudor “sweating sickness” (possibly a strain of influenza) which exacted huge death tolls, but details are sparse. Trying to research the plagues of Tudor and Stuart times in Bristol is difficult (I’ve tried!) but we know of at least two outbreaks in the 1500s and 1600s in which it carried off maybe a quarter of the city’s entire population, and possibly more.
To put that into perspective, for Covid-19 to be as bad as the worst Tudor plagues it would be killing 115,000 people in Bristol alone. To be on the scale of the Black Death it might kill twice as many, or more.
So I’m not convinced that the great events we think we’re living through now will be as well remembered as we might think. One suspects that Bristolians who are primary school children now will be getting blank looks when they tell their own children about lockdown and banana bread and rainbow paintings in front windows.
That’s the thing about pandemics. The populations are usually quickly replaced through immigration and birth, the economy bounces back and the dead are soon forgotten.
We rightly remember the dead of world wars, but there are few memorials to those who die of disease.
Maude’s War
Jonathan Rowe’s article this week about his various forebears who were “in service” is one of those periodic reminders you get about how Bristol can be a small town, even in the past.
His grandmother Amy worked for Charles and Maude Boucher, and I know Maude rather well.
Bristol Archives holds a collection of scrapbooks that Maude kept during the First World War, and since she also used them as a sort of diary, they are a priceless record of the social history of Bristol at the time – well, social history as viewed by a middle-aged Clifton lady (who’s also a bit cranky and snobbish, if you ask me).
When I was researching and writing a book (and BT articles) about Bristol in WWI Maude’s scrapbooks proved invaluable.
The books consist mostly of clippings from the local and national press. But in between in her own handwriting there are numerous diary entries touching on family events and experiences. This includes the death on the Western Front of her brother Captain Frank Hannam, or the accounts of various family members of the celebrations on Armistice Day.
There are other, smaller, forgotten things, too, such as food shortages, or a preposterous argument as to whether or not a crucifix should be carried at the head of a parade of Bristol’s various (Protestant) churches seeking divine help in the war effort.
That’s right. Millions are killing and dying at the Front, but in Bristol a bunch of God-bothering ninnies are having a row about a crucifix (which Maude’s husband Charles Boucher was trying to settle), which some saw as an excessively “Catholic” symbol.
In the event, the parade took place in torrential rain and was called off half-way along the route. You have to wonder if the Almighty was showing His disapproval.
Liquorice
Jonathan’s article also provides a fascinating I-never-knew-that little aside: Charles Boucher was boss of the firm which invented Nigroids, the liquorice sweets which were renamed Vigroids ten years ago, presumably because the original name, based in the Latin word for “black”, as in the colour of the pellets, was considered potentially offensive. Funny stuff, liquorice. Apparently Nigella Lawson recently caused a bit of a stir by cooking with the stuff, but one can’t see its popularity making a permanent return. Liquorice is the Marmite of the sweet world, with the difference that more people like Marmite than like liquorice.*
(*A bald assertion I make with no statistical evidence whatsoever.)
I bet there are plenty of BT readers who were like me. When as a child you were presented with a bag or box of Liquorice Allsorts you pulled them apart, ate the unpleasant liquorice bits first, and had the nice soft candy bits afterwards. Likewise with the round one; you ate the liquorice cylinder in the middle and then savoured the coconutty stuff.
It occurs to me that BT needs a new category to add to its fixation with Old People Food. That is, food products which not even old people like anymore, but which their parents and grandparents consumed with relish.
Perhaps we should call it Dead People Food?
It would include arrowroot biscuits, steak and kidney pudding, tripe, pigs’ trotters and anything involving liquorice. What other contenders might there be?
Cheers then!