A double-dose of lockdown
Fifty years after Ashley Southgate was stuck on a ship for 21 days due to a typhoid outbreak, the 80-year-old Timaru man found himself in lockdown once again.
‘‘I’ve been in quarantine before so when all this happened, I thought, ‘Oh, this is familiar’,’’ he said.
Southgate and his ex-wife were among the 1045 passengers and about 500 crew aboard the British ocean liner Oronsay when the outbreak of typhoid fever forced the ship to be quarantined in Vancouver harbour in Canada between January 14 and February 4, 1970.
‘‘Somebody had put faeces in the water supply,’’ Southgate said.
‘‘We all had to get a jab in our arm and had to be checked after so many days for any reaction. If there were no symptoms, the ship was allowed to sail through to Auckland.’’
Southgate boarded the ship at Southampton in England, travelling home after installing passenger lifts in the area.
He remembered the people of Vancouver staging concerts on the wharf and beach for the quarantined passengers and crew.
‘‘We would stand up and dance along.’’
After the ship was given the all clear to sail, excitement met it at every port.
Southgate clipped stories about the ordeal from Canadian papers which came on board, keeping them as a souvenir.
He also saved an envelope from a letter he sent to a relative from the ship, as proof he was there.
‘‘They’ve been in storage with me ever since, until I couldn’t find them,’’ he said.
‘‘They went missing for a long time and I’d been looking for them for a while but my sister had them.’’
Southgate said the rediscovery came at an interesting time, 50 years after the ordeal and when he was again back in lockdown.
The typhoid outbreak aboard the Oronsay came to light after a crew member was hospitalised in California in the United States with symptoms of the disease. It was traced back to sewerage pipes which were wrongly installed during a refit.