November 1918 was a very special time, too, because the end of the Great War was expected almost any day, and a rumour spread at the Show on Friday 8 November that an armistice had been signed. A crowd gathered around Derry’s Brass Band to celebrate, but as the afternoon wore on there was no official confirmation. Then the hot nor’west day suddenly changed to a cold wet southerly, and one old lady I interviewed said that as a young woman she had dressed up in all her finery for the races and was caught by the southerly change and got soaked to the skin while waiting for a tram on Lincoln Road. That was the start of the flu for her, and for hundreds of other people in Christchurch. Other eyewitnesses who had been at the races remembered seeing people collapsing and being carried off by St John Ambulance stretcher-bearers. One lady told me the women’s rest room looked like a wartime casualty clearing station, with bodies lying everywhere, even on the floor. This flu struck suddenly, and was ten times worse than ordinary flu. People just collapsed and went unconscious. Other survivors told me they just felt pole-axed, and had to go to bed and were too ill and delirious to get up for days on end.

Dr Chesson later told the Epidemic Commission that the flu in Christchurch started during Show Week and really took off over that following weekend. The city’s hotels began to look like army hospitals, with extra beds in the corridors and staff run off their feet. The situation at the hospital was even worse, because so many of the nurses were coming down with the flu even as the number of new admissions was soaring.


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One of the best reads about how the the flu of 1918 hit and the impact on townspeople.