General

So what were the newspapers saying in 1918/19? Well pretty much the same as today. There aren’t many differences. We are suffering the same fates; lockdown, shortages and the deaths.

The Bedlington Urban District Council gave our ancestors some useful advice which was published in the Morpeth Herald on 22 November 1918: 

The Influenza is prevalent and a large majority of cases at first appear to be amongst school children of school age and therefore it made the call to close all the schools in their district for 2 weeks and longer if necessary. The exclusion of children from places of entertainment and suspension of concerts and dancing for adults was regarded necessary. It was also essential that people stop visiting infected households. A leaflet was sent out to residents to help control the disease. The report then went on to state that there were three types of disease:-

1 – Mild influenza.

2 – Tonic Septicaemia – Affects the throat, temperatures remained high for days which could prove fatal.

3 – Pulmonary Type – This bought complications and often proved fatal.

Dr Roper of Alnwick wrote in the Morpeth Herald on 8 November 1918 that a fresh epidemic had broken out. It started in the rural district and the town had been visited by a similar epidemic in June and he had hoped that they might escape it this time. However, it has started in the town again. He advised that the elementary schools be closed for 2 weeks. The new epidemic was severe in nature; pulmonary complications being common and often proving fatal. Regarding precautions; it would be good if everyone with a cold, cough, headache and backache could stay at home. Coughing and sneezing should be done in a handkerchief and cotton ones boiled or paper ones burnt. He did not think that disinfecting the room was of much use as the infection was carried by the person and spread by breath and droplets from the nose or throat. The incubation period was about 40 hours. 

On reviewing an inventory of the contents of Bamburgh Castle dated 16-18 July 1792, I became intrigued by one of the entries. In the Surgery, alongside equipment that you may expect like knives, splints and needles, there was “1 Electrifying Machine”. I was aware that electricity was used for medical purposes, but the date was much earlier than I had imagined.

It was during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I that her personal doctor, William Gilbert, experimented with a range of materials to see which would generate an electrical charge. His work and observations were to influence numerous European inventors. Electrostatic machines, which generated static electricity in glass tubes, were invented in Holland and German and were forerunners to the inventions by the more famous Benjamin Franklin in the mid-eighteenth century.

But what would such a device be doing in Bamburgh Castle? In the 1700s Bamburgh Castle was owned by the Forster family, having been gifted the Castle by King James I in 1610. Upon the death of Dorothy, the last surviving Forster heir, her mournful husband, Lord Nathaniel Crewe, set up a charity to restore the now ruinous Castle and to support the villagers of Bamburgh. It was after his death that this money was placed into trust. It was under the Lord Crewe Trustees, and Dr John Sharp as trustee, that the Castle became a surgery for out-patients, hospital and free school. Dr Sharp died in 1792, the year the inventory was taken.

In the homes of the gentry, electricity had been used since the mid- eighteenth century for the amusement of guests; ‘friction machines’ would give shocks to male and female guests alike. However, the use for medical purposes was new. In 1747 John Wesley, founder of Methodism, suggested that electrical treatment could be a ‘universal panacea’ for all diseases, this was rejected by mainstream medicine at the time. The first recorded treatment with electricity in London was at Middlesex Hospital in 1767, with the use of specialised equipment.  The same machinery was also purchased a decade later by that other great London infirmary, St Bartholomew’s Hospital. 

What the first use of this electrifying machine was, or indeed, who was the first, rather brave, patient at the hospital in Bamburgh Castle, are perhaps now lost to history. However, the fact that such a machine was in a rural corner of Northumberland at this time, gives a fascinating insight to how the words “1 Electrifying Machine” can lead us to wanting to know a whole lot more.

References

NRO 00452/B/5/2 (‘An Inventory of Castle Furniture’, an inventory of Bamburgh Castle.

16 July 1792-18 July 1792)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrotherapy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin%27s_electrostatic_machine

http://www.history.alberta.ca/energyheritage/energy/electricity/electricity-through-the-eighteenth-century.aspx

https://thecozydrawingroom.com/2014/06/22/a-shocking-way-to-entertain-guests-during-the-regency-era/

https://www.bamburghcastle.com/castle/

http://www.lordcrewescharity.org.uk/history/dr-sharps-bamburgh-charities

https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-electricity-1989860

Many myths and tales of folklore have obscure origins, one such appears to be the story of the Warkworth Hermit. 

Whilst obscure, much of the notoriety of the tale can be traced to the publication of the ballad published in 1771 by Bishop Thomas Percy. Percy was born in Shropshire and studied at Oxford, he was ordained in 1751 and eventually became Rector of Wilby in Northamptonshire, as well becoming the personal chaplain of the Earl of Sussex. Percy was a worldly man and had many varied and wide ranging interests, including reading on a huge number of subjects. This in turn led to his composing of verse with which he was to have some success. It was however, the discovery and collection of older verses which was to provide the greatest element of Percy’s success. 

While visiting his friend Humphrey Pitt at Shifnal in Shropshire, Percy noticed a battered volume lying on the floor, under a bureau in the parlour, pages of which were being used by the maids to light the fire. It proved to be a seventeenth-century collection, which Percy rescued from the flames. In due course, it provided the basis for Percy’s anthology, “The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry” which was published in 1765 and became the source of his enduring fame. Not only did the collection influence Percy’s own works, particularly his “Hermit of Warkworth”. The publication of it was to begin a fashion for the rediscovery of historic ballads, and for the revival of Ballads in general, which was to become a key element of the Romantic movement. One of Percy’s own compositions, simply entitled ‘Song’ was later set to music and described as ‘perhaps the most beautiful Ballad in the English language’ by none other than Robert Burns.

In 1765 Percy became the Chaplain and Secretary to Lord Northumberland and tutor to his son, Algernon. It might be in light of this move that he had begun to focus more on his adoptive home of Northumberland and so wrote the ballad of the Warkworth Hermit. It was certainly around this time that the spelling of his name, which had been ‘Pearcy’, then ‘Piercy’, became ‘Percy’, perhaps to copy the name of his illustrious patron. It was Lord Northumberland’s influence that allowed Percy to become Dean of Carlisle Cathedral and latterly Bishop of Dromore in County Down. It is in County Down that Percy died and it was in the Cathedral there that he was buried in 1811.

The manuscript collection that Percy saved now bears his name; it is known as the Percy Folio and is held by the British Library. Little is known about its origins, or who owned it before Humphrey Pitt. None of its owners appear to have treated it well; even Percy marked and annotated the pages. While it was probably compiled in the seventeenth-century, some of its contents date from the twelfth. Editions of the folio are available via the British Library’s catalogue online and the Internet Archive:

http://explore.bl.uk

http://archive.org/