When the Spanish Flu Hit Langley 

Social distancing, self-isolation, and quarantine. Wash your hands and don’t touch your face. Each of these terms and instructions is now sadly familiar to all of us. The current Covid 19 pandemic has us worried about older friends and relatives, anxious about the economy, and wondering when we’ll be able to resume activities formerly taken for granted

All of these concerns would have been easily recognized by Langley residents a century ago. In the spring of 1920 the global influenza pandemic, inaccurately known at the time as the Spanish Flu, had been underway for over two years. Its effects were devastating. Those who contracted the virus saw their skin turn blue (due to compromised blood circulation) as their lungs filled with fluid, often resulting in suffocation. Victims of the flu could appear outwardly healthy one afternoon and be dead the following morning.

A century later, the Spanish Flu’s true place of origin still remains unknown; England, France, China, and the southern United States have all been identified as possible candidates. Initially identified in the final year of the First World War, the disease’s progress was both quick and relentless. Conditions on the Western Front made this inevitable. Large numbers of soldiers lived in close quarters – in trenches, dugouts, barracks, and military hospitals – making what we now call social distancing impossible. Many soldiers travelled frequently between various areas of the front as well as across the English Channel. The flu became rampant in France, Belgium, and England before spreading elsewhere on the planet.

The virus hit Canada in August 1918, appearing first in the port cities of Halifax, Montreal, and Quebec City. It had been carried by soldiers returning home after being wounded on the Western Front. It then travelled across Canada via the nation’s two transcontinental railways, reaching communities both large and small. Community transmission was exacerbated a few months later as newly conscripted troops travelled by rail to Vancouver and Victoria prior to embarking for Vladivostok to serve in the nation’s Siberian Expeditionary Force.

With many of its doctors and nurses then serving in uniform overseas, Canada was ill-equipped to deal with the pandemic. The science of epidemiology was in its infancy. The dominion had no federal health ministry to coordinate a national response. There were few established quarantine measures, no testing, and no known treatments. Quarantines were eventually imposed, but in a rather haphazard fashion. Poorly-informed local governments rather than qualified federal or provincial medical officers often made key decisions. Much of the country’s economy was paralyzed as industries lost their markets or proved unable to fill orders for their products due to a lack of manpower.

In an effort to stop the spread of the virus, many schools, churches, and theatres were closed. Sporting events were cancelled. Home-made masks were hurriedly sewn together. Home remedies became popular. Ineffective potions were put on the market and eagerly purchased by citizens desperate for treatment or a cure.

At the time of the pandemic Langley was a small, largely agricultural community in which the vast majority of residents lived in widely-spaced or isolated single family homes. This, more than anything else, saved it from experiencing the full horrors of the disease. Even so, the community was far from immune to its effects and the challenge of dealing with those who had contracted the disease was daunting.

Langley had no hospital. There was just one doctor (Albert McBurney) to serve its entire population, which then numbered about 3,500. It fell to family, friends, neighbours, and the occasional nurse to attend to the ill. As Murrayville resident Benny Anderson recalled:

Mrs. Robert Monahan was a practical nurse and when we had the flu bad in 1918 she went from house to house to nurse the sick. She saved my mom and dad’s lives. She would put a pot of onions on the stove, bring them to a boil and make a poultice of them to put on the patient’s chest. She stayed in the house for three or four days to make sure everything was going well. Her husband, Bob, made sure there was lots of wood to keep the house warm.

In Langley, as elsewhere, the young and healthy (rather than the older adults) were particularly vulnerable to infection. Although the majority of fatalities occurred among people aged 20 to 40, children were by no means immune. Youngsters were fed a concoction of raw onions, cinnamon, and garlic. Sulphur was routinely burned on kitchen stoves, the resulting fumes mixing with those from formaldehyde lamps lit in a vain attempt to destroy the virus.

Florence Cassidy, whose family’s farm was where the W.C. Blair Recreation Centre now stands, was aged 14 when the pandemic struck. She recorded her thoughts in a series of letters to her brother Harry who was then serving overseas as a cadet in the newly-formed Royal Air Force. Writing to Harry on November 12, 1918 (the day after the Armistice came into effect), Florence noted:

They think the schools will open on Monday here. They are open in Vancouver but I guess it’s very likely they will open here too. I will be so glad when they open because it really is just terrible at home. I have not finished one week’s lessons yet, instead of three so I must get busy now and just study very, very hard. The school up at Abbotsford has never been closed at all and the flu was much worse up there than it was here. They will be ahead of us up there.

Verna Miller [my chum] has taken the flu and is quite sick but I had a letter from Vera yesterday and she said that if they took care of Verna she would very likely be ready to go back to school again. She’s in high school and doesn’t want to miss any work.

Florence bitterly observed how the community’s plans to celebrate the Armistice had been negatively impacted. Although many residents gathered at Murrayville’s Five Corners to burn the Kaiser in effigy, plans for an indoor dance at the Community Hall had been halted:

Mr. Gosling offered the big hall and music free for a dance but they wouldn’t let him have it on account of the flu. I don’t think it would have been a bit worse than standing out on the cold ground and having a good time that way.

Florence also reported to Harry that the McDonalds of Murrayville (who had recently lost three members to illness and the conflict in Europe) were unable to join in the festivities. Someone in the family had fallen ill with the flu and the household had been placed in quarantine.

I was talking with Gracie McDonald tonight and she said they weren’t able to be out to the corner [Five Corners] but they burned a Kaiser up there themselves. You know they are just getting over the awful “flu.”

In a subsequent letter (December 3rd), Florence advised Harry that the situation in Langley had not improved. If anything, conditions were getting worse:

Well, that pesky flu is around here again. All the schools in the municipality were closed a week ago yesterday except the high school and on Monday it was closed [too]. Miss Stein and Miss Agar both have it up at Brown’s. They are getting better now though. They were crazy to close the high school because no one there had it. I guess every one of us might as well give up andtake our year over again and if I do I’ll have some sense and ditch [my] agriculture [course]. We have lessons to do of course but I can’t study these days.

There was a woman [Elizabeth Larmon] at Milner who died the other day with the flu and she left five little children. It’s a terrible plague.

Despite the obvious seriousness of the epidemic, then, as today, young people were tempted to downplay their own vulnerability. Many resented the restrictions placed on their activities and movements. Understandably, young people missed having regular contact with their friends and feared falling behind in their schoolwork. According to Florence:

The Abbotsford school is having a closing and a big dance at night but Mamma wouldn’t or rather won’t let me go because she’s scared I’ll get the flu. Makes me mad. She won’t even let me go to town to get some Christmas presents.

Florence’s mother Maria’s concerns were wholly justified. A high-school friend of Harry’s had died of the flu just a few days earlier. As Maria wrote in a letter to her son:

I know you will be sorry to hear that Bessie Green is dead. She was teaching school in Alberta and took the flu. Mrs. Green started last Saturday to go to her but got a telegram on the way that she was dead. The body will be brought here for burial. There are so many sad deaths since this epidemic broke out.

Langley residents would continue to perish for months to come, one of the last fatalities being Lieutenant George Sellers’s widow Ellen, who died in Vancouver in March 1920. The couple’s two orphaned daughters were subsequently sent across the Atlantic to be raised by aunts in Britain.

Before it disappeared in the mid-1920s the Spanish Flu would claim the lives of over 55,000 Canadians, a number more or less equal to the nation’s military losses during the Great War. Staggering though the numbers were, they pale into insignificance when placed against the global statistics. Although the exact number of lives lost worldwide will never be known, scholars believe that 2.5 to 5% of the planet’s population (between 50 and 100 million people) lost their lives to the pandemic.

(Warren Sommer is the author of several books about Langley including Canucks in Khaki: Langley, the Lower Mainland, and the Great War of 1914 to 1918, available by contacting [email protected] or by calling 604-888-0017).