Meningitis in the East End
Amid the debate about standards in the NHS, it is easy to forget that what we now see as a great British institution is a mere 50 years old. Many readers will remember the time when a trip to the doctors was an expensive luxury and when the days before universal inoculation meant epidemics of diseases like scarlet fever and diptheria were a serious threat.
Go back a further generation and a poor and crowded East End suffered badly as life-threatening diseases swept the big cities, taking a heart-rending toll of the youngest and weakest.
The hardship of life for many East Enders is chronicled in the book Memories of Childhood on the Isle of Dogs 1870-1970. It tells of the August 18, 1890, entry in the Cubitt Town School diary, where the headmistress wrote that the milk was having to be boiled to combat the scarlet fever spreading among the pupils. By September 5, she was logging an epidemic of measles as well and by October 6 the school was threatened with closure. Six years later measles, today a curable and preventable hazard of childhood, was keeping 120 kids out of the school – eight of them died.
It was a pattern repeated throughout the East End as families struggled amid crowded and insanitary conditions – conditions perfect for diseases to take hold and spread. Local man James Mee, who was born in 1915, writes: “They were only little houses… three families in some of them. Places were bug-ridden, not because people were dirty, but if you’ve got people living and sleeping in one room how could they keep decent?” Often the answer was to send sick children right away, for the protection of the rest of the family as much as themselves.
Catherine Lerpiniere was born in Wharf Road on the Isle of Dogs in 1897, the youngest of nine. Hit by scarlet fever then rheumatic fever, she was sent across the river to Shooter’s Hill fever hospital. She was relatively lucky. Many infected East Enders were simply put aboard a tug at North Pier, in Coldharbour, and taken to one of the fever ships moored in the Thames for isolation and almost certain death. John Gaskin was born in 1891 to Robert and Clara of 79 West Ferry Road, Millwall. In 1901, he contracted smallpox and was taken to an isolation ship. He died shortly afterwards, within sight of his Island home. The ten-year-old’s body was buried at sea.
These days, when overeating is an increasing health problem for children, the standards of nutrition in the early 1900s make shocking reading. James Mee recalls school dinner being a slice of bread and marge. He writes: “Miles of kids around the age of three and four could hardly walk because they had rickets – that’s a thing you never hear of now.” For further reading see Memories of Childhood on the Isle of Dogs 1870-1970, published by the Island History Trust, Island House, Roserton Street, London E14 3PG. Tel: 0171-987 6041.