Historian Roger Bingham looks at past epidemics in light of the Coronavirus crisis:

BEING an island has not immunised Britain from worldwide pandemics.

Exhumed skeletons show that our Dark-Age ancestors succumbed to Justinian’s Plague of 541AD which started in Egypt. It caused a general depopulation which in Lakeland cleared the way for immigrants like the Vikings who, place-name evidence indicates, settled down close to existing Anglo-Saxon villages without the need for murderous land-grabs.

Britain’s most devastating plague was, by far, the Black Death. Originating in Asia, it arrived in Dorset in June 1348. Although there were very few travellers, it nevertheless swept through England, via Cumbria, into Scotland by 1349. At this stage, seeing their Sassenach enemies laid low, the Scots decided to invade the northern counties. But they lost their chance and Cumbria was spared devastation when 5,000 of Scotland’s warriors, mustered at Selkirk, were eliminated by the contagion. Nevertheless, 45 per cent of England’s population perished which contributed to there being 2,000 ‘deserted Mediaeval villages’. Possible local deserted settlements are at Crosscrake, Haverbrack, Helsington, Docker and, supported by archaeological evidence, at Dalton, near Burton-in-Kendal.

Though other conditions could be responsible, ‘visited by the plague’ invariably referred to the ‘bubonic’ plague (signified by bulbous lymph nodes). In 1598 it caused Westmorland’s worst natural disaster when there were 2,500 estimated deaths in the Kendal Ward, including 519 in the town itself - a quarter of its population. Seventeenth century ‘visitations’ included 157 deaths in Heversham parish in 1623, but fortunately the 1665 Great Plague of London spared the North West. More specifically, in 1746, 27 child deaths in Milnthorpe were attributed to smallpox.

Kendal’s biggest 19th-century health shock was caused by cholera, which in 1831 resulted in 49 fatalities from the water-borne disease. Yet hygiene was not specified in official precautions like: ‘Don’t eat green vegetables; take, as a vomit, three spoonfuls of mustard powder in half a pint of water with as much salt as will melt; heated platters should be applied to the stomach’.

The 20th century’s deadliest pandemic was Spanish flu in 1918. In November alone it took 19 lives in Kendal, including recently demobbed soldiers. At Burton, a family of young children lost both their parents; another fatality was my grandmother, Ethel Bingham who, aged 30, expired after giving birth to a daughter who also died.

In the 1940s and 1950s scarlet fever and poliomyelitis created widespread alarm. But the worst post-war pandemic was Asian flu from which, in 1957, 14,000 Britons died. At Milnthorpe, the staff of Stoneclough Surgery long claimed it was their biggest ever crisis. They were hit early as they served many boarding schools where the ‘flu arrived when pupils, often from overseas, returned from their summer holidays’

One Heversham Grammar School boarder was Peter Brooks, the current cartoonist of The Times, whose first published cartoons appeared in the school’s magazine depicting the epidemic.