WHAT’S THE STORY?

RECENTLY we told you about the outbreak of bubonic plague that killed half the population of Marseilles in 1720, but 55 years earlier the City of London was hit by plague at a time when the city was crowded, unsanitary and downright disease-ridden, making perfect conditions for bubonic plague to spread and kill.

By the time the Great Plague of London was mostly over in 1666, around a quarter of the population of 400,000 were thought to have died. No one knew the exact figures but the official death toll was put at 69,000 – a figure that some experts fear the current pandemic will reach in the whole of the UK. With London having been the biggest of the centres of the coronavirus pandemic in Britain, there are obvious parallels with 1665, as we shall see.

WAS IT THE WORST-EVER PLAGUE TO HIT LONDON?

POSSIBLY. We told you recently how bubonic plague originated in China around the time of Christ but only came west when merchants started to trade with China in the late 13th century.

Rats infected with fleas carrying the plague organism yersinia pestis arrived in the Mediterranean, and the Black Death, as it soon became known, spread swiftly around Europe from 1348 onwards. Modern research shows that between 30% and 50% of the entire population of Europe died from plague in that first great pandemic and London was very hard hit – modern research indicates that half of the city’s 70,000 people died.

From 1348 to the Great Plague of 1665 there were about 20 outbreaks of bubonic and other forms of plague that affected London, killing up to 20% of the citizens on some occasions. By 1665, Londoners knew what to do when plague arrived – pray and hope for the best.

Only royalty and the rich could afford to take what might be called the Cummings way out.

They would head for the countryside far from the city, returning only when the plague had abated.

WHAT HAPPENED?

THE 1665 outbreak began in a poor area of the city’s suburbs known as St Giles. It spread from there to all parts of London and its environs, and with no cure or even a palliative treatment, tens of thousands died in agony and often in isolation.

A record of the time described its advent: “In May it burst forth with frightful violence in St Giles, and, spreading over the adjoining parishes, soon threatened both Whitehall and the city.”

Early on in the outbreak, London’s thriving theatres and other public entertainments, such as “sports” like bear-baiting, were banned to stop the disease spreading. Sound familiar?

The 1665 lockdown was draconian: any household with a victim had to go into quarantine for 40 days and had a red cross painted on the front of the house to warn people away. The words “Lord have mercy upon us” were chalked or painted on the houses.

Eerily prescient, the authorities gave out the death toll each week.

Each London parish recorded its deaths, which were added up and printed in lists called mortality bills.

The outbreak peaked in one week of September 1665 which had the highest total of plague dead: 7165 people in 126 parishes, with just four parishes disease-free. The next biggest cause of death was fever with just 309 dead. Although the number of deaths declined massively, the plague was still killing people in London in 1679.

WHO TOLD US ALL ABOUT IT?

SAMUEL Pepys was then a young civil servant in the Navy Board who was in charge of getting supplies for the fleet, and his reports kept in his diary from 1660 to 1669 give us a vivid account, probably the best such records, of life in London during the Great Plague.

He first encountered it in June: “I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there – which was a sad sight to me.”

He heard that chewing and smelling tobacco could ward off the plague: “It put me into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll-tobacco to smell ... and chaw.”

Pepys was angry at becoming almost inured to death.

In October, he wrote about coming “close by the bearers with a dead corpse of the plague;

but Lord, to see what custom is, that I am come almost to think nothing of it”.

There was also misinformation on the part of the authorities.

In August, Pepys wrote the true figure of the dead this week is near 10,000, not 6000, explaining “partly from the poor that cannot be taken notice of through the greatness of the number, and partly from the Quakers and others that will not have any bell ring for them”.

Pepys was sure that keeping a clear and happy mind was key to avoiding death.

He wrote that the death of friends, and even his physician, “doth put me into great apprehensions of melancholy.

“But I put off the thoughts of sadness as much as I can.”

It has to be said he took to drink as well, and famously recorded that he had lived “merrily” during the plague time.

His most melancholy entry in 1665 was this: “The plague is making us cruel as dogs to one another.”

HOW DID IT END?

IT seems almost trite to say it, but there was still plague around the city when the Great Fire of London occurred from September 2-6, 1666, soon after the Royal family returned to London.

So many old buildings were destroyed, and new wider streets and safer buildings and spaces created after 1666, that it is widely accepted that the plague was beaten not by lockdowns or quarantines, but by the fire.