Owen’s wry remarks, though clearly calculated to amuse, were typical of British attitudes to the ‘Spanish flu’ that summer.Īlthough in May the sudden emergence of flu in Madrid had made the front page of the Daily Express, by June it was regarded as little more than a footnote to war and had been relegated to the inside pages.Īs The Times’s medical correspondent put it: Imagine the work that falls on unaffected officers. I have quite decided not to! Scottie, whom I still see sometimes, went under today, & my servant yesterday. The thing is much too common for me to take part in. The boys are dropping on parade like flies in number.Īt first glance, Owen’s bold capitals and self-conscious underlinings read like genuine alarm, but as the next passage makes clear Owen is being ironic and, far from taking the disinfectant measures seriously, considers the flu something of a joke.
The hospital overflowed on Friday, then the Gymnasium was filled, and now all the place seems carpeted with huddled blanketed forms…. Quite of the Batt and about 30 officers are smitten with the Spanish Flu. ‘ STAND BACK FROM THE PAGE! and disinfect yourself’, he begins his letter to Susan Owen. Then a 20-year-old lieutenant in the Second Manchesters, Owen had just been deemed fit for duty after a lengthy convalescence in Scotland following an attack of neurasthenia, a nervous condition brought on by the stresses and strain of trench warfare, but as Owen waited in north Yorkshire for the orders that would return him to northern France his thoughts were seemingly on another disease entirely. On 24 June 1918 the war poet Wilfred Owen crawled into an army-issue bell tent in a windy field near Scarborough and began composing a letter to his mother, Susan. The result was that, as dread increasingly became attached to influenza, it destabilised medical attempts to regulate the civilian response to the pandemic, undermining Owen’s and the Northcliffe press’s emotives of stoicism. As a protean disease that could present as alternately benign and plague-like, the Spanish flu both drew on these discourses and subverted them, disrupting medical efforts to use the dread of foreign pathogens as an instrument of biopower. This was especially the case during the final year of the conflict when war-weariness set in, leading to the stricter policing of negative emotions. Drawing on the letters of Wilfred Owen, the diaries of the cultural historian Caroline Playne and the reporting in the Northcliffe press, I argue that the stoicism exhibited by Owen and amplified in the columns of The Times and the Daily Mail is best viewed as a performance, an emotional style that reflected the politicisation of ‘dread’ in war as an emotion with the potential to undermine civilian morale. Instead, I put emotion words, emotives and metaphors at the heart of my analysis in an attempt to understand the interplay between propaganda and biopolitical discourses that aimed to regulate civilian responses to the pandemic. This paper argues that such an approach tends to overlook the crucial role played by wartime propaganda. Social historians have argued that the reason the 1918–19 ‘Spanish’ influenza left so few traces in public memory is that it was ‘overshadowed’ by the First World War, hence its historiographical characterisation as the ‘forgotten’ pandemic.