Coronavirus watch: lessons from past plagues, my interview with Radio Cornwall

What can the plagues of the past tell us about coronavirus? The dreadful Black Death, that killed around 40% of England's population; bubonic plague that returned not just in a second wave, but time and time again over three centuries; the mysterious sweating sickness that nearly killed Anne Boleyn before she married Henry VIII; cholera - a scourge in the 19th century.

You can find my interview with Debbie McCrory of BBC Radio Cornwall here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C2SLrEEkds&t=103s

Coronavirus Watch: the plagues of Devon

What can the plagues that have hit Devon over the centuries tell us about coronavirus? My piece in DevonLive

https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/illnesses-diseases-plagued-devon-before-4155942

Coronavirus watch: the plagues of Southampton

The Black Death was the deadliest epidemic in British history. Did it enter the country through Southampton? Coronavirus has brought a resurgence of interest in my book, A Disastrous History of Britain, and here's the piece I've written on 'the plagues of Southampton' for the Southampton Daily Echo.

https://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/18468017.black-death-entered-country-southampton-look-past-pandemics/

It tells the story of the plagues that have afflicted Southampton, Winchester and the region from the Black Death, through bubonic plague and cholera to Spanish flu.

Coronavirus watch: the plagues of Wiltshire

Interviewed by BBC Radio Wiltshire's James Thomas on the plagues of Wiltshire from the Black Death through smallpox, plague and cholera to coronavirus.

Drawing on my book, A Disastrous History of Britain (The History Press), we discuss what we can learn today from these earlier epidemics and I tell the story of how plague, briefly, made Salisbury the capital of England.

The interview is in two parts. Here's the link - 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p08cfv0q. 

The first clip is at 1hr 13mins and the 2nd at 1hr 50 mins.

Or you can find them on youtube: part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVbcEBLl5ZY&t=98s 

part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qucCu6dfY9s&t=81s

Coronavirus watch: the plagues of Britain - Bristol

As I posted before, covid-19 seems to have led to a resurgence of interest in my 'Disastrous History' books, especially 'The Disastrous History of Britain.' (The History Press).

Here's my story in the Bristol Post about the plagues that have afflicted the Bristol area over the centuries, from the Black Death to Spanish flu, and about what lessons we can learn from them. 

The Black Death was the deadliest epidemic in British history, and Bristol is a prime suspect as the place where it first entered the country -

https://www.pressreader.com/uk/bristol-post/20200518/281801401152777.

Coronavirus watch: was this Britain's first major epidemic?

Over the centuries after Stonehenge was built, the descendants of the people who created it largely disappeared from Britain. They were farmers of Mediterranean appearance with dark hair and olive skin. 

The great stone circle was finished about 2500 BC, but examination of 150 ancient skeletons from all over the country suggests that over the next 500 years, our Mediterranean-type ancestors had dwindled to about 10 per cent of the population.

They were replaced by the 'Beaker people' who seem to have originated in Central Europe. In the absence of any evidence of a major conflict, some archaeologists suggest that they brought with them a disease or diseases to which the native people had no resistance. Some have even suggested it might have been bubonic plague, which returned with such devastating effect during the 300 years or so from 1348.  (See my posts of  3 and 25 April.)

If the theory is right, it would mirror what happened to the Aztecs, the Incas and the Maya, who were conquered not so much by Spanish conquistadors as by the smallpox and other diseases they brought with them.

Coronavirus watch: second waves - a lesson from history

The Black Death, probably bubonic plague, was the deadliest epidemic in British history, carrying off up to 40 per cent of the population. What a relief it must have been when it finally petered out in the early 1350s.

But in 1361, the disease was back! In what became known as the ‘children’s plague.’ While the Black Death killed more older people, this epidemic was especially hard on those born since the earlier plague had departed. It was less devastating than the Black Death, but it still carried off perhaps one person in five.

There were another four serious plague outbreaks before the end of the century, and the disease struck regularly over the next 300 years so that overall it reduced Britain’s population by maybe half.

All sorts of cures and preventions were tried - bleeding, carrying nosegays of flowers or herbs, sealing windows with waxed cloth, the constant burning of aromatic woods or powders. But with the disease being passed on by fleas of the black rat, none of them worked. The best plan was probably to run for it, away from the towns and cities, as many of the wealthy did, but even that wasn’t foolproof, though, as generally happens, the rich survived better than the poor.

For more, see my book A Disastrous History of Britain (The History Press)

Coronavirus watch: Lockdown - 1665-style

During the Great Plague of 1665, which killed perhaps one person in five in London, lockdowns were a bit more brutal. People found to be infected were locked up in their houses with their families.

In its early stages, the government also closed ale houses and brought in some restrictions on street-vendors. But the death toll grew alarmingly, even though there were suspicions that many plague deaths were being attributed to other causes.

The more prosperous folk were relieved that the disease seemed to be hitting only the poorest districts, and in May, London theatres were still packed. But as more and more people died, in June, warders were put around the worst-hit area to try to stop the inhabitants getting out. Still the disease spread, and the King and court upped sticks.

By the end of June, the theatres were closed, and the streets were jammed with coaches as most of the aristocracy fled, though the Lord Mayor stayed, conducting business from inside a glass case.

In July, the disease really took hold, with more than 5,500 deaths, and the diarist Samuel Pepys (pictured) set his affairs in order, mindful that ‘a man cannot depend on living two days’. August and September were the worst months. London was a ghost town, with only ‘poor wretches’ on the street, and Pepys noting that he could walk the length of usually-bustling Lombard Street, and see only 20 people.

By September, most of the doctors had gone, the Royal College of Physicians was deserted, and there was not a lot of sympathy when it had its valuable treasures stolen. The authorities were supposed to provide food for those shut up in their houses, but by now the money had run out, victims were beginning to resist, and the practice had to be abandoned.

The usual sounds of one of the world’s great cities had been replaced by the endless tolling of bells and the rumbling of the carts collecting corpses to the cry of ‘bring out your dead!’ Grass grew in the streets, and Pepys lamented ‘how empty and melancholy’ they were, while a puritan preacher said that every day he heard of the death of at least one person he knew.

For more, see London’s Disasters (The History Press).

Coronavirus: renewed interest in the historical perspective

Is it the coronavirus epidemic that has stirred up renewed interest in my book A Disastrous History of the World (Little, Brown), which appeared in the US as Disaster! (Skyhorse)?

A Mexican blog has been drawing on the sections on the early plagues of Athens, Rome and Byzantium, quoting the Spanish language edition – Historia mundial de los desastres (Turner). https://imparcialoaxaca.mx/opinion/418240/de-pandemias-y-otras-desgracias/

A Barcelona newspaper also gave the book a mention https://www.elpuntavui.cat/cultura/article/19-cultura/1761002-historia-mundial-de-los-desastres.html

This Romanian blogger concentrates on the chapters on plagues and diseases – discussing, among others, smallpox, cholera, typhus, malaria, sleeping sickness and flu.

https://alexciotir.wordpress.com/2020/04/14/pandemie/

While this Romanian article covers what I wrote about the great European famine that occurred during the ‘Little Ice Age’ of the early 14^th century, and killed, according to some, up to a quarter of the population.

https://adevarul.ro/locale/alba-iulia/marea-foamete-ucis-sfert-populatia-europei-rolul-avut-mica-era-galciara-disparitia-hranei-1_5e83403b5163ec4271567d29/index.html

 The Romanian language edition of the book is Cele mai mari dezastre din istoria omenirii (Polirom).

The plagues of Britain: the Black Death

The Black Death has the dubious distinction of being in all likelihood the worst disaster in British history. Probably a lethal cocktail of bubonic, pneumonic and septicaemic plague (though not all historians agree), it carried off perhaps a third of the population after coming to England from the East in 1348.

Spread by fleas carried on the black rat, and perhaps originating in Central Asia, it was first noticed in the West Country, and may have arrived at Melcombe Regis, now effectively part of Weymouth. Across the country, so many priests died that there were not enough to hear people’s final confessions, so the church said people about to die could unburden themselves to a lay person, and in extremis, ‘even to a woman’.

One of the consequences of the appalling mortality was a dramatic decline in respect for authority – particularly that of the church. The clergy often banged on about how the plague was God’s punishment for people’s bad behaviour, but the line did not go down very well, and at Yeovil, for example, the local bishop found himself besieged in his church by an angry crowd armed with bows and arrows.

London was by far the biggest city in the country, and there, as in other places, the numbers of dead overwhelmed the authorities, and many bodies were just shovelled into mass graves. Food supplies started to dry up as carters refused to come to the city, and Londoners had to go out into the countryside to search for supplies. This lack of social distancing helped spread the pestilence.

For more, see my book A Disastrous History of Britain (The History Press).

Coronavirus's ancestors: the plagues of Ancient Britain

Many epidemics must have afflicted Ancient Britain without leaving any mark on history. Perhaps the first that any historians speak of with any confidence came in AD 166 when Roman Britain, particularly London, may have been attacked by the Plague of Galen (named after the physician who described it), brought back by soldiers who had been fighting in the East.

It could have been smallpox or measles. No one is sure, but some historians believe it played a part in a major decline in London’s population, exacerbated by a great fire or a series of fires.

Nearly six centuries later, the ‘father of English history’, the Venerable Bede (pictured above), a monk in Jarrow, recorded a number of epidemics. Were they bubonic plague or some other disease? Again no one really knows.

Bede wrote of a sudden ‘severe plague’ falling on the Britons in 426-7. It ‘destroyed such numbers of them, that the living were scarcely sufficient to bury the dead.’ In 664, he says that ‘a sudden pestilence…..depopulated the southern coasts of Britain’ and then spread right up to Northumbria where it ‘ravaged the country far and near, and destroyed a great multitude of men.’

This was such a shock, according to Bede, that it helped to revive heathenism, as many ‘forsook the mysteries of the Christian faith and turned apostate’. The next year, pestilence ravaged Essex, and in 681, a ‘grievous mortality ran through many provinces of Britain’.

For more, see my book, A Disastrous History of Britain (The History Press).

Coronavirus: a lesson from history

‘The plague,’ wrote Samuel Pepys, ‘made us as cruel as dogs one to another.’ The famous diarist lived through the Great Plague of 1665 which killed perhaps 100,000 in London, a fifth of the population. It also raged outside the capital. More than a sixth of the inhabitants of Cambridge are said to have died, a quarter in Norwich, between a quarter and a third in Dover, a third in Newark and some claimed it was one person in two in Southampton.

I have just come back to the UK from a short time abroad, and Pepys’ words leapt into my mind as I traipsed around a series of supermarkets looking at empty shelves. No pasta, no rice, no canned foods, no chicken, precious little fruit and veg. Even items like lentils, buckwheat and quinoa, which do not normally appear to be in great demand, had been cleaned out.

Back in 1665, the elite often got out of the cities. In Southampton, the deputy mayor and 16 other local officials were fined for deserting their posts. Infected people and their families were locked up in their houses. The authorities were supposed to provide food for them, but the money ran out, and as those being incarcerated began resisting, sometimes violently, the practice had to be abandoned.

Carts collected corpses with cries of ‘bring out your dead’ and as coffins and even shrouds got scarce, bodies were flung naked into plague pits. If you want to know more about the Great Plague, see my books London’s Disasters and A Disastrous History of Britain (The History Press).

What was the Black Death?

Did bubonic plague really cause the Black Death? This was one of the questions tackled in BBC TV’s Decoding Disaster, which went out under the Timewatch banner.

What is certain is that the epidemic was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, disaster in history, killing perhaps 75 million people in Europe and Asia from 1346 to 1353 – 30 to 40 per cent of the population. The conventional explanation is that it was bubonic plague, carried by the fleas of the black rat, along with pneumonic and septicaemic plague which could be transmitted from person to person.

Sceptics, though, have suggested there were just not enough rats to spread the disease on the scale that happened, so other ideas have been suggested – notably anthrax or some kind of haemorrhagic plague, like Ebola. Others maintain that with a death toll on this scale, a number of different diseases must have been raging at the same time.

At the time, top academics at Paris University came up with their own explanation: a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the 40th degree of Aquarius on 20 March 1345, but they were humble enough to acknowledge that some things were ‘hidden from even the most highly trained intellects.’

For the full story, see A Disastrous History of the World. See also my posts of 19 January and 31 March 2009, 1 September 2011 and 17 December 2013.

Storm god = top god

When you think of how terrifying and awesome storms can be, it is not too surprising that in ancient religions the top god was often the storm god whether it was Zeus brandishing his thunderbolt, Thor with his magic hammer, or Indra riding his multi-tusked elephant.

My new book Storm: Nature and Culture features some of the fascinating stories surrounding them - such as of how a wicked giant stole Thor’s hammer and demanded the hand of a princess in marriage as the price of its return. Thor disguised himself as the bride, and managed to escape detection at the wedding ceremony in spite of eating an ox and eight salmon. Then he grabbed the hammer and killed the giant.

The Maoris told of how the sky god made love so endlessly to the earth goddess that their children could never get out of her womb. Eventually one of the young gods managed to prise them apart, but this upset the storm god Tawhirimatea who had been quite happy inside his mother, and now became an unruly presence on land and sea.

Some rulers tried to imitate their storm god – such as a pre-Roman king of Alba Longa in Italy who declared he was more powerful than Jupiter. When it thundered, he ordered his soldiers to bang their shields to drown out the noise. He is said to have been struck dead by lightning.

Storms also play an important role in the Bible. A fearful rainstorm generates Noah’s flood, the mother of all hailstorms is one of the plagues of Egypt, Jonah is swallowed by a great fish after a storm at sea, and Christ calms a tempest on the Sea of Galilee. 

For more, see Storm: Nature and Culture published by Reaktion Books.

Wisdom and plagues

A Spanish website quotes from my account of a devastating plague that hit Rome in the second half of the 2nd century AD in my Disastrous History of the World. 

http://untipodeletras.net/2014/10/08/leer-en-caso-de-ebola-no-nos-convirtamos-en-rinocerontes/

One of those carried off by the epidemic, which raged for 15 years, was the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. The historian Edward Gibbon considered him the last great Roman emperor before the rot set in, and begins his famous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with Marcus Aurelius's death. (It is also the starting point for the film, Gladiator.)

The emperor refused to see his son before he died in case he passed on the sickness, and his last words were: 'Weep not for me; think rather of the deaths of so many others.' This philosopher emperor had already written in his Meditations that the pestilence was less deadly than falsehood and evil conduct.

One thing we are not sure of is what exactly the disease was. It used to be thought that it was bubonic plague, but some scholars now believe it was smallpox.

Plague hits Madagascar

Plague has struck Madagascar again. More than 40 people in five districts have been killed by the bubonic version, spread by rats’ fleas, while two have died from the even more lethal pneumonic type, which is spread from person to person and can kill in 24 hours.

Last year, the island suffered more deaths from the disease than any other country – 60. There has been a programme to exterminate rats and fleas in Madagascar’s prisons, but the Red Cross warned in October that there was danger of an epidemic, following a fall in living standards since a coup in 2009.

Health officials have gone to the areas affected to investigate, but the local WHO office says medicines are in short supply.

Most, though not all, scientists believe bubonic and pneumonic plague caused the world’s deadliest epidemic – the Black Death, which killed perhaps a third of Europe’s population and countless more in Asia from about 1334 to 1351. 

Britain's 20 Worst Military Disasters 7 - The Second Battle of the Medway

In 1667, England was in the middle of an austerity programme.    Tax receipts had been hammered by two major disasters, the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London of 1666.   One government cut involved laying up the Royal Navy’s great ships, and paying off most of their crews.

Unfortunately, there was a war with the Dutch going on at the time, and at the beginning of June, their commander, Admiral De Ruyter, detached a task force from his fleet with the mission of attacking the pride of the navy  in the Medway.

The English had sunk ships in the river, and stretched a chain across it, and they had guns ashore to stop the progress of the enemy, but unfortunately there was a shortage of gunners, supplies had been pilfered, and the Dutch came on regardless.

 They set three warships alight, and captured and took away two others, including the 82-gun Royal Charles – the pride of the navy, the ship that had brought Charles II back from exile.    It was, considered the diarist John Evelyn, ‘a dishonour never to be wiped off’, and was perhaps Britain’s greatest ever naval humiliation.

Black Death WAS plague - official

When I was at school, there was no doubt about it.   We were taught that the Black Death – perhaps the most lethal disease ever to afflict humanity – was bubonic plague.    Then some scientists came up with revisionist theories that it might have been an ebola-type virus, or anthrax, or some combination of infections.

Well now a group of Canadian researchers from McMaster University in Toronto believe they have proved the epidemic really was bubonic plague.   They analysed bones from the 14^th century, and were able to extract the plague bacterium, though in a different form from the one we know today.

They hope also to throw light on why the disease carried off so many.    From its first appearance in Central Asia in the 1330’s, it spread right across Europe and Asia, killing perhaps a third of the population.   In some places it was even more deadly.    Siena in Italy was said to have lost half of its people.  Nearby San Gimignano, with its famous towers, even more.

The Black Death was a dreadful blow to the prestige of the Church which had failed to warn the faithful that God was about to inflict this dreadful punishment on them.   It also produced a labour shortage, and as wages for the working class rose, the kings of England and France quickly imposed a wage freeze.

AIDS - 30 years on

It was 30 years ago this month that the world was first alerted to the threat of AIDS as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention received reports that five homosexual men from Los Angeles had a rare form of fungus-borne pneumonia known as PCP. 

Three decades on, there are some grounds for cautious optimism.    The peak year for deaths from AIDS so far was 2005, when 2.1 million people died.   The latest figure is down to around 1.8 million.  

The rate of new infections in 30 of the world’s poorest countries has fallen by a quarter or more from its peak, while more than 6 million people are now getting anti-retroviral drugs in less prosperous countries against just 2 million five years ago.   A new study has shown that these drugs appear to be very effective in preventing the disease spreading.

It is not all good news, though.   For every person put on effective medication, there are two newly infected, and as the world’s economy slows down, so has the amount of money being devoted to fighting the disease.

* This is the cover of my new book – Britain’s Worst Military Disasters from the Roman Conquest to the Fall of Singapore.   Out soon.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Britains-Worst-Military-Disasters-Singapore/dp/0752461974

Battling malaria

Fourteen African countries have joined forces to fight malaria, which still kills nearly 900,000 people a year – most of them young children in sub-Saharan Afirca – that’s more than AIDS and tuberculosis combined in those areas. No less than 86% of all the world’s malaria cases, and 91% of the deaths happen in the Dark Continent.

The African Leaders Malaria Alliance has raised nearly £2 billion to buy 240 million mosquito nets treated with insecticide. The aim, which cannot be faulted for ambition, is to stop nearly all malaria-related deaths within six years.

The announcement came just as the World Health Organisation was reiterating the concern that the malaria parasite was growing increasingly resistant to artemisinin, regarded as the most effective drug for combatting the disease.

Malaria is one of the oldest illnesses known to man, and has been infecting human beings for at least 50,000 years. (See also my blogs of April 11th and May 30th)