THIS GREAT DAY.

Auckland Star, Volume LVIII, Issue 221, 19 September 1927, Page 6

THIS GREAT DAY.

SEPT. 19.—THE GREAT PLAGUE OF LONDON.

(By CHARLES CONWAY.)

Two hundred and sixty-two years ago, on September 19, 1665, the Great Plague of London, which had been raging for several months, reached the height of its destructiveness, and during the week ending on that day 14,000 persons perished, an averaga of 2000 per day. . The official Bill of Mortality, which was published weekly, recorded only 8297 deaths for the seven days in question, but this figure did not include the large nuuber of Nonconformists who were buried secretly nor the still larger number of victims whose bodies were picked up on the streets, of which no record was or could be kept by the overworked drivers of the dead carts?. The estimate of .14,000 deaths was given to the French Ambassador by the Duke of Albertnarle, who pluckily remained in London, when all the rest of the Merry Monarch's Court fled, to take charge of the government of the stricken city, and he was better able than anyone else to make a correct estimate of the unrecorded deaths.

Tl»e plague of 1665 was not the first calamity of its kind to exact a heavy death toll among the citizens of London, but it was by far the. worst, [ both in mortality and duration. "Every few years from Saxon days the city had been visited by terrible epidemics, and the people of London had profited very little by their past experiences. The narrow winding streets of the old city provided a fruitful breeding ground for disease. Botting refuse and the sweepings of the street, houses and stables were piled near inhabited quarters and poisoned the air; while foul streams like the Fleet River, defiled from overhanging houses and nearby alleys, were no better than open sewers. The dead were thickly buried in the graveyards attached to the churches, which numbered one hundred and ten in the one square mile area of the city, and the living drew from wells water for household use which had percolated through the burial grounds. There seems but little doubt that the visitation of 1665 came from Holland, where there had been an outbreak of the plague in the preceding year, and as a result ships arriving in the River Thames from Dutch ports had been subjected to a strict quarantine. The pestilence first appeared in London in December, 1664, but during the winter there were only a few cases, and although there was a vague suspicion of danger no great alarm was felt until the following April. On the 26th of that month an official notice was published announcing that the plague had established itself in the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields and directing the public to exercise every care to prevent an epidemic. Infection spread rapidly in all directions, week after week the death rate increased, and everyone who could do so fled from the city. Every night there was an endless procession of dead carts collecting the corpses, which were carried outside the city walls and flung into great pits without covering or any form of burial service. Business came to a standstill, persons who were well at noon were dead before nightfall, and whole families were taken in a day, leaving their houses open and uncared for. No cure or remedy could be found, and the plague ran its course practically unchecked, carrying off over 110,000 victims. The epidemic continued, but in ever-decreasing volume, until September, 1666, when London was swept by the Great Fire, which destroyed more than three-fourths of the city ayd carried away the last vestige of the disease which lurked then in its borders.