Coronavirus diary, Monday 8 June

Headlines from the 1962 outbreak

A BBC Wales report has reminded  me of the last epidemic to hit South Wales, almost sixty years ago - smallpox.

I remember it well. In January 1962 I was a reporter on the South Wales Argus and a freelance correspondent for the national press. George Dymond, my uncle, a veteran journalist based in Cardiff, was a staff  reporter covering Wales. Between us we produced dozens of stories during the frightening, short-lived crisis.

My research, including our press cuttings, reveals remarkable similarities between that epidemic and our pandemic. Not in scale - in 1962 South Wales 19 died compared with the over 1400 in this outbreak - but in the reaction and the way the crises were tackled. 

Smallpox was even deadlier than coronavirus and in 1961 it was raging in Pakistan from where it spread to Wales and Bradford.

After arriving in Birmingham, a Pakistan man took a taxi to Cardiff. A few days later he was found to have smallpox and was taken to an isolation hospital in the Rhondda Valley. That was the start of the epidemic that affected that valley, Llantrisant and Cardiff. 

In those days the health service was different, the responsibility of  MOHs -  Medical Officers of Health and Public Health Inspectors. The key man in Caerphilly was MOH Doctor Nash who gave me daily 'briefings'. 

'Doc' Nash, loved for his friendly approach - he used to play the piano for patients  in The Caerphilly District Miners Hospital - was open and honest throughout the fraught weeks during the battle to stop the spread of the disease.

Queuing for vaccination, Ferndale, Rhondda, 1962. Photo: Hulton Archive

In three weeks, 900,000 people were vaccinated, I by Dr Nash himself at Caerphilly Council offices. 

One of his staff was among the victims. 

As in our current crisis, efforts were made to contain the outbreak by tracing contacts with victims. It was much more difficult in those pre internet, mobile phone and app days when fewer people had telephones.

Health staff asked patients to tell them where they had been and whom they had been in contact with, following up by meeting those named.

The last of the 19 victims - four to eighty year olds -  died on April 12th. The death rate was 40 percent, attributed to the age and health of some patients.

Unlike today, there was no lockdown. 

George Dymond's Daily Express story, headlined  Smallpox Valley stays open, explained: 'Doctors yesterday refused to put a ring around the Rhondda Valley to stop people pouring into the affected area.'

Dr Arthur Coley in the Welsh Board of Health's report into the epidemic said: 'There is no legal right. You cannot stop an epidemic by putting a ring around an affected area'. 

Lockdown was also rejected in Bradford in England where nine people died within a few days. The Daily Express headline, Bradford the frightened city, was refuted by Arthur Tiley, MP for Bradford West.

Speaking in parliament he said, 'Happily, there were only a few cases but there could have been fifty to one hundred. But what happens to the life of a great city if that should occur - it would grind to a standstill, not with a bomb dropped or a strike but with a germ which scientists defeated but did not destroy.'

The 1962 epidemic was one of the last stories I wrote as a reporter. A week later I was appointed Caerphilly urban district council's public relations officer.