Panic? Well, that just wouldn’t be British…
In the face of health crises, this country has long prided itself on getting on with life, says Simon Heffer
What many have found wonderful, and rather reassuring, about most of our fellow Britons in recent days is just how resistant we are to panic. Pestilence, in the shape of the coronavirus, has arrived from the East, and its consequences might be severe and devastating. As geographically near as Italy, whole towns are in lockdown. Here, by contrast, the only people displaying serious signs of agitation are in the Government, where careers are at stake. Hence, talk of closing Parliament, banning public gatherings and even playing football matches behind closed doors (it is apparently all right if the 22 players, referee and linesmen infect each other). It is claimed public transport and the shops are emptier than usual in London; and some people, alarmed by stories of what the virus may do, have stopped shaking hands or kissing.
As the Telegraph letters column has admirably shown, many Britons are determined to confront the threat with defiance. An international opinion poll has shown that no people on earth are panicking less in the face of this unknown danger than the British. Each year, regrettably, some elderly people, or those already ill, die of whatever flu virus occurs, usually in their thousands. Resolutely, we accept things will get worse before they get better; but they will get better, and the fear will pass, without having to put the whole nation in a state of siege so complete that it would cripple essential public services and derail the economy.
The opinion poll is all too credible, because, as a people and as a culture, we have a long history of not panicking when danger presents itself. We can turn ugly when threatened – as Boadicea showed when the Romans tried to impress their authority on the Eastern counties two millennia ago, or as the Saxons did when the Normans arrived in 1066, or as our parents and grandparents did in 1940 – but we don’t routinely lose our heads.
The Black Death – which also came from China – arrived with an infected sailor who landed at Weymouth from France in the summer of 1348. Within a year, it had slain people throughout Britain; but by late 1349, it was virtually gone. In an era when the streets were literally awash with excrement, this rat-borne disease was unstoppable. Between a quarter and a half of the population died.
Predictably, the poor suffered disproportionately because of the squalor in which they lived; the other group who died most prolifically were clergymen, infected while consoling the dying. What happened was seen as God’s will; there are no accounts of panic. Outrage took 30 years to manifest itself, when landowners did not respond to the consequent shortages of labour by raising wages, provoking the Peasants’ Revolt.
Fast-forward to 1665, and the Great
Plague. This was a blip compared with 1348-49. A quarter of Londoners died, but after three outbreaks in the previous 60 or so years, people were used to it, much as we are used to the annual flu now. Life remained, in the notable phrase of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, “nasty, brutish and short”. Death was recognised as an occupational hazard, thanks to the continued absence of sanitation and the primitive and often lethal nature of medicine. Also, no one had a clue what caused bubonic plague. It was understood the disease originated abroad, so ships were quarantined on arrival in London in 1665, as in previous outbreaks.
More controversially, the City authorities ordered houses where a plague victim lived to be closed up. This invasion of individuals’ rights did cause a riot, which was soon put down. Some of the rich fled the city, led by Charles II – the equivalent these days of avoiding the Tube or working from home. Many of the poor died, though in London most of the professional class stayed in their posts to ensure order was maintained and normal life could be carried on: this despite more than 2,000 (out of a total London population of an estimated 450,000) dying of plague in the last week of July 1665 alone.
Samuel Pepys described the plague in his diaries and, as in 1348, the main attitude appeared to be one of resignation and prayer. By September, 7,000 a week were dying and London had become a ghost town; but there was no more rioting or panic.
By the following February, life was returning to normal, in time for the Great Fire the following September; and once that too was over, as Pepys also shows, Londoners were not just hardened by these appalling disasters, but inspired by them.
Fast-forward again, to an event almost within living memory: the so-called Spanish flu of 1918. It could hardly have arrived at a worse time. In the early summer of that year, the British and French armies had been driven back to within reach of Paris by a great German offensive. Ironically, the two million American soldiers who arrived to help fight it also brought the flu with them. It had originated not in Spain but, it seems, in a holding camp for troops in Kansas. Sir Arthur Newsholme, principal medical officer of the Local Government Board, has been credited with the phrase “Keep calm and carry on” during the first wave of the epidemic, but is accused thereby of ensuring more were infected.
However, much was at stake. If war production – especially of weapons and ammunition – fell, Britain could lose. Rest for the sick was of course necessary – but panic was not an option. The government advised people “to avoid picture palaces and other crowded places”, and they did.
The temptation to compare 1918-19 with today should be resisted, though. The war necessitated the movement of vast bodies of people who were living communally, such as the American “Doughboys”, creating millions of extra opportunities to transmit the disease. Nutritional standards, much lower then in any case, became lower still because of food shortages. There were too few doctors because so many were drafted into the Army after the German offensive. Medicine was, by today’s standards, still basic.
There was no NHS, and the co-ordination of public health policy was rudimentary. When the Local Government Board, three weeks into the epidemic, issued advice on how to avoid the disease, The Times remarked that “it would have been better to lock the stable door before the escape of the horse… The need for a Ministry of Health to protect the public in matters of this kind has never received a more forcible illustration”.
Factories were sometimes deserted for days on end, not because workers feared the disease but because they were already ill: the country soldiered on. In some towns, undertakers ran out of coffins. Readers bombarded newspapers with suggestions of how to stave off the flu – cocoa three times a day was popular. A Mr Harry Furniss, writing from the Garrick Club – not exactly at the forefront of clinical excellence – proclaimed that the only known cure was “to take snuff, which arrests and slays the insidious bacillus with great effect”.
In 1918, people did keep calm and carry on. Many deaths, as in all subsequent flu epidemics, were of the elderly; a famous casualty was Sir Hubert Parry, aged 70, the great composer who just two years earlier had written Jerusalem. He kept up his war work, and his directorship of the Royal College of Music, until illness felled him. Millions of others also carried on, despite the disease attacking victims so quickly that, by October 1918, some were dropping dead in the street, and queues of funeral cortèges formed outside cemeteries. Although the only way to avoid the disease was to shut yourself indoors for an indefinite period, very few did: life, and death, went on.
Since then, pundits have invited panic but rarely achieved it. The Bolshevik revolution predicted after the Great War never happened. Nor did the fascist takeover that was feared in the Thirties. When 40,000 civilians died in the Blitz of 1940-41, Britain simply took it. The Soviets did not attack during the Cold War, despite blood-curdling predictions of nuclear horror. The atrocities of 9/11 and 7/7 did not unleash fear of Islamist fanatics on the streets of the West. And, most recently, the world did not end because of Brexit.
The vast majority do keep calm and carry on, whatever the threat – because that is exactly what we have always done.
Many Britons are determined to confront the threat with defiance
The only way to avoid the Spanish flu was to shut yourself indoors – but very few did