DEEP within the archives of Newcastle Museum in Honeysuckle is a special marble memorial plaque. It commemorates a now almost forgotten Newcastle woman who lived to help others and became a heroine in the Hunter's infamous Spanish flu pandemic of 1919. (Well before the present COVID-19 emergency, this other disease took millions, not thousands, of lives world-wide.)
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Her name was Mary Ann Dalby, but she is better known by the wording of the plaque as 'Ma' Dalby, or Mrs M.A. Dalby, because of her initials.
After her death, the marble plaque was donated by grateful citizens of Newcastle district to forever remember 'Ma' Dalby's "life-long services" in the cause of charity. The marble tablet states she was a volunteer worker for more than 50 years at (later Royal) Newcastle Hospital, once in the city's East End.
The RNH is now gone, demolished ages ago and replaced by John Hunter Hospital at New Lambton. Luckily, Dalby's plaque has been preserved at the museum, now temporarily closed because of coronavirus. It was considered worthy enough also to be remembered on a Monument Australia website.
In a fitting tribute to the plucky little shoemaker's wife, when she died in August 1924, three mayors of Newcastle helped carry her coffin from Christ Church Cathedral. The flags from all the ships in the harbour fluttered at half-mast. According to a family relative, it was acknowledgement from the port's seafaring community of the esteem in which their late friend, Ma Dalby, was held. That relative, Paul Roe, a historian, has long delved into family records and elsewhere to discover what a remarkable woman his great-grandmother was.
But first, some background to the 1919 pandemic. It's safe to say it's been almost forgotten by most members (except historians) until the present health crisis stalled global economies and the death toll abruptly rose.
Countries facing the contagion of 1918-1919, straight after the enormous loss of life in WWI, reeled under the effects of this unexpected disease. Even today, as the world continues to fight COVID-19, it's hard to get one's head around the 1918-1919 global mortality rates. The death rate reached an extraordinary 21 million deaths within six months. Since then, studies suggest the real number of fatalities could be 50 million people, or even 100 million. One estimate is that more than 600,000 people died from the Spanish flu in the US alone.
Australia, less than two decades after Federation, was also comparatively hard hit. The nation's population was not yet five million when the global crisis struck. People were shocked and the economy faced the prospect of a recession.
WWI had claimed 62,000 Aussie lives in four years, and yet up to 15,000 Australians, mostly in cities, suddenly died in about five months on home soil soon after. As many as 290,000 people may have been infected in metropolitan Sydney.
The disease arrived on our shores in early 1919. Death then came to many households with the spread of the Spanish flu blamed on servicemen returning from Europe. Troopships and vessels arriving in Sydney were moved to North Head Quarantine Station.
Officially, about 22,000 cases of Spanish flu were reported in NSW with 6387 people killed.
Newcastle, a seaport city, was far from immune. Anzac Day marches were cancelled in 1919 and all WWI commemorations were subdued. Newcastle quarantine station (now part of the Stockton Hospital site) swung into action. The station was established after 1895 to isolate crews of ships feared to have smallpox, typhoid or cholera. But the Spanish flu outbreak was like no other.
When the health crisis finally ended, everyone wanted to simply forget. Besides, the grim Great Depression and World War II soon followed.
Today's tale though has its genesis in a recent call from writer Cath Chegwidden who wanted to alert me to an overlooked story a neighbour had brought to her attention. I immediately paid attention, as Chegwidden knows a good yarn when she hears it, being the author of a bestselling local history book, Wallsend Proud - Then and Now.
"Have you ever heard of Mary Ann Dalby? Historian Paul Roe is her great-grandson and has written about her life and good work in the 1919 Spanish flu pandemic," she said.
"It's an inspiring story, a sort of Newcastle Mother Teresa.
"Dalby was the original pink lady at Newcastle Hospital, spreading compassion among patients. People relied on volunteers to visit the sick at home while the churches set up soup kitchens."
A little later I discovered Paul Roe had immortalised the moving family saga online telling how when WWI had brought great suffering, his great-grandmother threw her energies into patriotic efforts such as the Ambulance Brigade and Red Cross. When the influenza epidemic then struck, Ma Dalby now almost 70, "stepped into the breach again".
Roe writes that people reported seeing her walk for miles in the rain in her black bonnet to give out sewing and clothes.
The Waratah Asylum became an isolation hospital and the hub of her activities. With businesses virtually paralysed, women volunteers established a kitchen at Hamilton distributing necessities to families.
Roe's uncle recalled that she was always busy on errands of mercy, but that she wasn't afraid to take a stand. If Ma Dalby spied the father of a family drinking his pay away in the pub, she would hook him with her umbrella and tell him to go home.
Women were the backbone of these city auxiliary groups who fed and clothed families and visited the sick. In the midst of it was Ma Dalby.
Roe believes almost 500 people died in Newcastle alone during the pandemic. With hospital wards overflowing and knowing that more nurses were needed, Ma Dalby and other women provided voluntary home care, wearing only masks for protection.
Roe writes that Ma Dalby was also impulsively generous, being quick to give away shoes from the family shop to anyone in need and sometimes "her own personal things or even at times her children's clothes". In those days, there was no official welfare help. She kept helping people while mothering five children and sharing the running of the shoe business with her husband.
"Suffering the loss of two infant children only seemed to deepen her compassion," Roe writes.
Ma Dalby lived a long life of practical Christianity. As the Anglican Dean said at her funeral: "Every city needs a Mary Ann Dalby - the people's friend".
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