You can get a sense of how much the world, and in particular attitudes to life, death and government, have changed over the last 100 years by reflecting on how people seem from the historical record (supplemented no doubt in some cases by personal memories of things our grandparents might have told the older amongst us when we were young) to have reacted to the “Spanish” flu pandemic.
There are obvious reasons for that of course, the biggest three probably being (a) the time overlap with a world war which itself brought death on an industrial scale, (b) the much greater prevalence of premature death more generally in those days from a range of causes and (c) the fundamentally more limited conception pre mid 20th century of what could and should be the role and the ambition of national government. But the difference is still startling.
One proxy for how much the pandemic occupied the minds of parliament and government in the UK might be the attention it receives in biographies of the leading UK politicians of the time. In Roy Hattersley’s biography of the then PM Lloyd George the flu gets one mention only - a few lines in passing on a single page, when DLG catches the flu himself and is confined to bed for nine days, Hattersley mentioning in passing that the epidemic claimed 150,000 lives in Britain. I also checked the indexes of biographies of the Asquith family (who to be fair had suffered major war bereavement) and of Bonar Law, and apparently the pandemic doesn’t get a single mention in either.
There are obvious reasons for that of course, the biggest three probably being (a) the time overlap with a world war which itself brought death on an industrial scale, (b) the much greater prevalence of premature death more generally in those days from a range of causes and (c) the fundamentally more limited conception pre mid 20th century of what could and should be the role and the ambition of national government. But the difference is still startling.
One proxy for how much the pandemic occupied the minds of parliament and government in the UK might be the attention it receives in biographies of the leading UK politicians of the time. In Roy Hattersley’s biography of the then PM Lloyd George the flu gets one mention only - a few lines in passing on a single page, when DLG catches the flu himself and is confined to bed for nine days, Hattersley mentioning in passing that the epidemic claimed 150,000 lives in Britain. I also checked the indexes of biographies of the Asquith family (who to be fair had suffered major war bereavement) and of Bonar Law, and apparently the pandemic doesn’t get a single mention in either.
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