The 1918 flu pandemic

A 'black plague'

He took me in his arms and carried me to see my dead sister before she was carried to the grave. He took me for a last visit to my mother for he thought that both of us would die. But we didn't. We gasped for breath, our chests and throats rattled with the passage of the hard-won air. We sweated and we shivered, we fainted and revived. Death waited for us but we survived.

From a 1967 radio documentary about the pandemic, The great plague. Hear and read this extract from the documentary.

In the early 21st century anxiety over the danger of avian influenza virus H5N1 revived memories of New Zealand's worst disease outbreak, the lethal influenza pandemic of 1918. In two months New Zealand lost about half as many people to influenza as it had in the whole of the First World War.

The 'Spanish flu', as it was often called, arrived in New Zealand in early October 1918, probably with returning troops. By the time it eased in December the death toll had topped 8600, including at least 2160 Maori. Worldwide, the flu is now thought to have killed as many as 50 million people.

At the height of the crisis, during November, the whole country held its breath: schools, factories, shops, theatres and hotels were closed. One man recalled how he: 'stood in the middle of Wellington City at 2 p.m. on a weekday afternoon, and there was not a soul to be seen – no trams running, no shops open – It was really a City of the Dead.'

The virus struck with little warning. Apparently healthy people could collapse within hours of the first symptoms appearing; some died within a day. Often, corpses turned purple or black, adding to the grief of survivors and evoking images of the Black Death of the 14th century. Across the country, schools and halls were turned into makeshift hospitals. Much of the burden of caring for the sick fell on volunteer caregivers, especially women.

Impact on Maori

 

Maori influenza pandemic memorial

The virus had an especially deadly impact on Maori, whose death rate, 4.2%, was about seven times that of Pakeha. Many people blamed sub-standard housing – Maori rural dwellings often had earthen floors and were damp and overcrowded. The small size and isolation of Maori settlements also compounded the misery. The flu spread so fast that remote communities had little or no warning of its arrival. In the absence of outside help, there were often not enough locals left standing to care for the sick.

Whole settlements were decimated. At Mangatawhiri in Waikato, about 50 out of 200 local Maori died. Whina Cooper recalled similar suffering at Panguru, Hokianga:

Everyone was sick, no one to help, they were dying one after the other. My father was very, very sick then. He was the first to die. I couldn't do anything for him. I remember we put him in a coffin, like a box. There were many others, you could see them on the roads, on the sledges, the ones that are able to drag them away, dragged them away to the cemetery. No time for tangis.

Even worse was the flu's impact on Western Samoa, then under New Zealand military rule. There, over 7500 – one in five people – died, at least partly because of the negligence of the New Zealand authorities in enforcing a quarantine.

Remembering the pandemic

See the media gallery to hear and read recollections from people who lived through the pandemic. These are taken from a 1967 radio documentary by Jim Henderson called The great plague. None of the interviewees are named in the documentary.