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: 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).

Bangladesh cyclone + and then there were none

There are fears that disease may strike Bangladesh following last Monday’s cyclone, which killed at least 200 people in the country and in the Indian state of West Bengal. Nearly half a million are homeless and there is an acute shortage of clean water.

Bangladesh suffered the deadliest storm in history in 1970 when 115 mile an hour winds funnelled a terrifying 40 foot wave onto what was then East Pakistan. The people never had a chance in their flimsy houses on flat, low lying land, and up to a million died. Whole villages disappeared, as if, said an eye witness, they had been sucked up by a giant vacuum cleaner. For more details see A Disastrous History of the World.

The last survivor of the Titanic, Millvina Dean, died yesterday, aged 97, in a Hampshire nursing home on the 98th anniversary of the ship’s launch. Miss Dean, the youngest passenger aboard at nine and a half weeks, was being taken by her family to start a new life in America.

She owed her life to her father’s quick thinking. The scrape with the iceberg had not seemed too serious to many on board. One survivor said it felt similar to what happens when a vessel touches the dock wall before berthing, but Mr Dean realised the danger and got them out of their third class accommodation onto the deck. Miss Dean’s mother and her two year old brother were also rescued, but her father perished. Only one in four of the third class passengers survived. The family came back to England and Miss Dean spent most of her life in Southampton. (See also my blog of April 15)