History - Corpus

Ongoing trauma

19 November 2018 4 Comments

Barbara Brookes

postcard of NZ amputees — Postcard with photograph of New Zealand soldier amputees, about 1914–18

The 1917 War Pensions Amendment Act contained a chilling ‘Third Schedule’ outlining the payment ratio to a full war pension paid for certain kinds of disablement. Loss of two limbs, of both hands, or ‘very serious facial disfigurement‘, for example, qualified for the total pension. Amputation of the right arm at the shoulder joint led to an 85% entitlement while such an amputation of the left arm led to 80% entitlement. A differential entitlement for right and left hand continued throughout the schedule but men who had been certified as left-handed were entitled to the higher amount. Total deafness led to a 70% entitlement while loss of one eye was costed at a 50% entitlement. ‘Lunacy’ qualified for a 100% entitlement, if it could be proven. The Inspector General of Hospitals, Frank Hay, declared in 1919 that ‘a man of sound mind, fighting honestly for a cause, will face dangers and undergo great deprivations without losing his mental balance … It is different with those predisposed to mental disorder.’ Often, he suggested, in line with contemporary hereditarian thinking about mental illness, the latter were ‘feeble-minded persons’.

The First World War did much to break such hereditarian beliefs. The new kind of deskilled warfare – where men just had to wait in trenches before following the order to go ‘over the top’ often to their death – led to many breaking down with a new disorder, popularly known as ‘shell shock’. This manifested itself in numerous ways: various forms of paralysis, amnesia, inability to speak, tics, insomnia and horrific nightmares. Medical authorities at first feared malingering but the sheer numbers of men breaking down led to new treatments in the later years of the war. As early as May 1916, an Auckland osteopath was advertising his services for ‘shell shock’ and suggested he would treat ‘a limited number of returned servicemen’ free of charge. [Read more…] about Ongoing trauma

The last ambulance

12 November 2018 Leave a Comment

Lauren Rimmer and Jane Rimmer

The last surviving Rover Sunbeam ambulance from World War One is living out a long retirement about as far from the Western Front as it’s possible to get. Owned by Jason Rhodes, it is housed in his National Transport and Toy Museum in Wanaka, New Zealand.

In France, ‘Gutless Gert’ (as she was known), was used to transport wounded New Zealand soldiers. She was shipped to New Zealand in 1919, and after some time as a working ambulance based in Greymouth was sold to private owners. In 1966 Gert was found in a near-derelict condition in Northland, with a tamarillo tree growing through her bonnet.

Now faithfully restored and still in (careful) running order, Gutless Gert gets back on the road for special occasions. She was a special guest at the 2018 centenary Armistace Day commemorations held at Hawea (near Wanaka).

Lauren Rimmer and Jane Rimmer live in Hawea, New Zealand.

Thanks to World War One Ambulance website for additional information.

“All went lame; all blind”

12 November 2018 2 Comments

Sue Wootton

Regeneration by Pat Barker was first published in 1991. It is the first of three novels (known collectively as The Regeneration Trilogy) set during and after the First World War, and explores the experiences of British officers suffering from ‘shell shock’ who received treatment at Craiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh.

Regeneration centres on the radically new treatment provided at the time by the real-life psychiatrist and neurologist W. H. R. Rivers, whose approach was based on his research into nerve regeneration. Craiglockhart patients included the poets Wilfred Owen and Sigfried Sassoon, who also feature in Barker’s novel.

Regeneration is a terrific, absorbing read. In lucid, measured prose, Barker brings alive both the suffering of the soldiers and the specific challenges faced by hospital staff. She vividly conveys contemporary attitudes to war and patriotism, and medical theories about shell shock and its treatment. She also brings alive the setting of Craiglockhart, where, in real life, Wilfred Owen began to compose his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” in 1917. The title is from a line by the Roman poet Horace. Owen uses the whole quote to conclude his poem. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: ‘it is sweet and honourable to die for your country’.

This poem always bears rereading. It never loses its power to remind us that the choice to wage war has a terrible price. On the centenary anniversary of Armistace Day, a hundred years since the guns at long, long last fell silent on the Western Front, we can perhaps best honour those thousands who suffered by reflecting on Owen’s call to question the ‘high zest’ of adversarial political and patriotic rhetoric. This is a poem for peace. [Read more…] about “All went lame; all blind”

Remembering Black November 1918

5 November 2018 Leave a Comment

Geoffrey Rice

One hundred years ago this month New Zealand suffered its worst peacetime disaster and its greatest public health crisis. It had taken four years of the First World War to kill 18,000 New Zealand soldiers, but in the space of only two months an estimated 9,000 New Zealanders, mostly civilians, died from the pneumonic complications of pandemic influenza. Pakeha (Europeans) died at the rate of 5.8 per 1000, but the indigenous Maori population died at almost eight times that rate, or 49 per 1000. Doctors at the time estimated that about half the population caught the flu, and most recovered, but some small towns suffered almost 90 per cent morbidity and when there were too few able-bodied adults to organise care for the sick, high death rates resulted.

Influenza 1918: the Samoan experience

5 November 2018 Leave a Comment

John Ryan McLane

A blunder which amounts to a crime.”

In 1918 the Samoan archipelago was split between American Samoa (a United States territory) and Western Samoa (previously a German colony but under New Zealand governance from 1914). The 1918 influenza pandemic killed a quarter of Western Samoans, while leaving American Samoa unscathed. Why were their experiences so different?

In late 1918 a second wave within a single pandemic of influenza was spreading throughout Asia and the Pacific. On 30 October 1918 the Union Steamship Company’s Talune left Auckland for its run through Polynesia. The new, more lethal influenza variant had arrived in Auckland with the spring, and several crew members were ill. On 7 November the Talune reached Apia, the main port of New Zealand-occupied Western Samoa.

“With Them Through Hell”

5 November 2018 2 Comments

Sue Wootton

11 November 2018 will mark one hundred years since the official end of the First World War. Over 18,000 New Zealand combatants were killed in the conflict, and many more were wounded or fell ill. Their experiences were so harrowing that most survivors, even years after returning to civilian life, would never speak of what they had endured during the ‘war to end all wars’.

Serving alongside them in that hellish world were the men and women of the New Zealand medical corps. A century on, Anna Roger has written a comprehensive history of this ‘other army’, which was charged, not with ending lives, but with saving them. The result is a rich tribute to the courage and compassion of those who worked “in appalling, perilous conditions and for inhumanely long hours” to alleviate the suffering of others.