Spanish flu claimed over 100 lives in Navan a century ago

When he was writing a piece on the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918 for Volume Five of ‘Navan – Its People and Its Past’, Dr Peter Connell could hardly envisaged that he would be living through a similar international health emergency himself.

The most recent journal of the Navan and District Historical Society features a chapter by the Flower Hill native on ‘The Great Flu Epidemic in the Navan Area 1918-1919’, which reveals that over 100 people died from that flu 100 years ago.
The worldwide epidemic was – inaccurately – called the Spanish flu because during World War I, there was a great deal of press censorship. But Spain’s uncensored press reported extensively on the effects of the flu in May 1918, particularly that the country’s king, Alfonso, was quite ill, and it became associated with that country.
Peter Connell states that the first report in an Irish newspaper relating to the flu epidemic was in the Belfast Telegraph in May 1918.
During 1916 and early 1917 a flu virus was circulating in two large military camps – Étaples in France and Aldershot in England. It seems that this virus mutated and re-emerged in rural Kansas in the US in March 1918 linked to troop movements. It took hold in two large military camps: at Camp Funston at Fort Riley in Kansas and the other at Camp Oglethorpe in Georgia. Mass troop movements ensured that the now far more infectious virus spread rapidly from these camps to many other military bases in North America, to the civilian population and then across the Atlantic to Britain and France, primarily aboard troopships. From this heartland of the world war and world trade, it was then spread to several parts of the northern hemisphere by similar means between May and July 1918.
The flu made its first appearance in Ireland in early June 1918. A somewhat contradictory headline in the Belfast Newsletter – again reflecting press censorship and an attempt to play down the outbreak’s significance – read ‘An epidemic in Belfast – no cause for alarm’. (Has anything changed up there?!)
Dr Connell says the first death in Navan that in all likelihood was linked to the epidemic occurred in the Infirmary Hospital on 8th June. The death certificate of William Mason, an 18 year-old soldier from Glasgow, gives the cause of death as ‘acute pneumonia’ with ‘acute dilation of the heart’.
The fact that Mason was a soldier is significant. Ida Milne and others who have researched the Great Flu in depth link the spread of the epidemic to troop movements and suggest that ‘the constant movement of soldiers into Ireland … is almost certain to have been a factor’.
The beginning of August marked the end of the first wave of the epidemic. In Navan, as elsewhere in Ireland and across the globe, the epidemic struck in three waves with the second and third being much more deadly than the first. The second wave of the epidemic seems to have struck the town during the third week in October 1918, about ten days after a serious outbreak in Howth, Co Dublin. Between 12th and 26th October the number of patients in the hospital rose from 62 to 97 and the Master of the workhouse reported that owing to the outbreak of influenza the fever hospital was crowded with patients.
The first Navan fatality arising from this second wave of the epidemic was Elizabeth Caffrey, an unmarried woman of 35, who lived in St Finian’s Terrace. There were 13 deaths from influenza/pneumonia in the Navan area during the week of 24th October. In all there were 31 deaths in the Navan area that can be attributed to the epidemic in the two weeks between 24th October and 7th November.
The epidemic was at its height in the Navan area during the first week of November. The workhouse and fever hospitals which normally accommodated about sixty patients between them had 128 on 2nd November. Seventy of these were influenza cases and there were eight deaths.

The third wave

By the end of January 1919, it was apparent that a third wave of the epidemic had struck the country. In the first days of February, Robinstown RIC barracks was closed as the constables stationed there were all in Navan Fever Hospital suffering from influenza.
On 7th February, Sergeant John McDonagh died there and appears to have been the first fatality in the Navan area of the third wave. Evelyn Chandler, a single woman from Robinstown died on the ninth, indicating a serious outbreak in that area. The Chronicle of 8th March described the epidemic as being ‘again rife in Navan and district’. Navan Petty Sessions were cancelled on 5th March and some meetings and entertainments organised for St Patrick’s Day were postponed.
On 20th February, Cardinal Logue, Archbishop of Armagh, relaxed the regulations relating to fast and abstinence during Lent.
The flu spared neither class nor creed, Dr Connell’s piece shows, as he lists the victims and their occupations, from Patrick Finucane of the Ludlow Street drapery family, to Mary Reid, a 16 year-old servant girl from Kilmessan. Young and old, labourer of landowner, male or female, it made no difference.
Dr Connell says that a detailed examination of death certificates from the Navan Registrar’s District for 1918–19 identifies 112 deaths from influenza or pneumonia between June 1918 and May 1919. Given that it is accepted that not all deaths were recorded, that some of the deaths in the early days of the epidemic may have been attributed to other causes, such as heart failure, and that it has proved impossible at this stage to access death certificates for several weeks during the period, it is likely that the figure of 130 excess deaths accurately reflects the toll it took. To see this in context, it is not far off the number of men from the Navan area identified as perishing in WWI. One difference is that over 100 of the flu related deaths occurred in a seven month period between mid-September 1918 and mid-April 1919, rather than over the four years of the Great War.