FROMTHEARCHIVE
Continuing our tour of high spots and forgotten corners of five eventful decades, as seen in the pages of The Sunday Telegraph
Several days after an outbreak of smallpox sent Britons dashing to their GPS for innoculations, the National Health Service was still reeling. “Yesterday, the number of confirmed smallpox cases remained at 16, including six deaths,” said The
Sunday Telegraph’s report, putting a brave face on the most shocking health crisis in years. But the knock-on effects were already becoming clear.
“Britain’s fight against smallpox is costing the National Health Service £100,000 for vaccine alone. The final cost of treating the outbreak was likely to be near £1 million when medical costs finally came in, the head of a leading manufacturing chemist told me last night. By tomorrow, one of Britain’s two manufacturers will be producing as much vaccine in a week as it normally makes in a year. Staff at Evans Medical, Liverpool, are working overtime to meet new Ministry orders.”
Such was the emergency that the Ministry of Health called on other countries to help make up the shortfall in vaccines. “Two million doses of smallpox vaccine from the United States and Argentina are being flown to Britain. Half a million doses from the United States were due to arrive by today. Another half million from there and a million from Argentina will be delivered by tomorrow morning.
“The Argentine Embassy said the doses were a gift – a Ministry of Health spokesman said they appreciated the generous gesture.”
The outbreak – caused by a visitor from Pakistan, where “an epidemic had been raging for months” – prompted MPS to call for a full-scale inquiry. “When the Commons reassembles on Tuesday, Mr [Enoch] Powell, Minister of Health, will face questions from MPS of all parties. Among them, Mr Gower, Conservative MP for Barry, Glamorgan, will ask for the reintroduction of compulsory vaccination and the compulsory medical examination of immigrants from countries where smallpox or other dangerous diseases have been identified.”
Meanwhile, as families queued for jabs, The Sunday Telegraph’s in-house GP called for calm. “Smallpox is always cropping up in this country,” he wrote. “Three years is about the longest we have ever gone without a smallpox scare.”
That wasn’t the only infectious import the nation had to deal with, though. “The latest craze to take the fancy of energetic dancers in New York night clubs,” the paper reported, “is the Hully Gully. It is a group dance demanding a little more discipline and skill than the Twist, the movements of which were first illustrated in a British national newspaper by The Sunday Telegraph.”
For the Hully-gully, “the movements are called out, as in a square dance, but there any similarity ends.” It was also said to incorporate elements of the Twist, “a dance that has put some Americans in hospital beds”.
The spin-off “began a few months ago in a ballroom in Harlem, where some consummate twisters were ‘fooling around, looking for something new’.” After an appearance on a national television programme, it was “on the classic American path to becoming a craze”.
From his spot on the Harlem dancefloor, our reporter watched as a man “made a half-somersault and did his ‘ twisting’ on his hands during the warm-up first movement”. Then a “caller” cried out a succession of steps for the dancers to follow: “The Chicken, the Mashed Potatoes, the Slop, the Peg Leg, the Madison… most of the names were self-explanatory. When the Marilyn Monroe was called, the Hully Gully line broke into an exaggerated performance of a Hollywood’s sirens walk.”
However, this latest dancefloor phenoemon did not take hold on the public imagination, rapidly going the way of the smallpox outbreak.
PAUL CLEMENTS