Scotch College

Yet again winter looms and yet again the doctors urge us to get our flu shots. ‘We are long overdue for a full-scale epidemic’, they warn, ‘or even a pandemic.’

A generation ago, in 1974, mid-winter influenza hit the school hard. Each day, about 12% of Senior School boys and masters were away, while in the Junior School ‘at one stage late in June and early in July numbers were reduced by about a quarter’.

A generation further back again, in 1950 and 1951, flu set back the training of the First VIII, while the school play, with forty or more parts, was ‘an easy target for the influenza epidemic. We managed to find substitutes for the casualties after some frantic zero-hour searching.’

Eight-five years ago, in 1918–19, a world-wide influenza pandemic killed between 20 and 40 million people (more than died in the World War that had just ended). Although influenza’s usual pattern of morbidity is as a killer of the elderly and young children, this ‘Spanish Flu’ was most deadly for the age groups in between.

At Scotch, it curtailed boarders’ leave, kept whole classes away sick, and even closed the school for a month.

A thousand-bed hospital had to be set up in the Exhibition Buildings during the emergency. Its Secretary and General Manager was William Howard Clowes (1903).

Among the Old Boys the flu killed were Hugh Curtis Clarkson (1915), who was attached to the 6th Field Artillery Brigade and died at Rouen, France, on 4 November 1918, aged 21, and Louis Ernest Leviny (1882), who died in the Capetown City Hospital on 3 June 1919, aged 53.

The Archives are compiled by Dr Jim Mitchell, Co-Archivist.
Phone: 9810 4293
Email:jim.mitchell@scotch.vic.edu.au