60 Deaths

There are names carved on to the oak of the Memorial Rail, in the Chapel at the University of Winchester, 60 of them former students of Winchester Training College (WTC) who died in the years 1914 to 1919. Of those names, 58 are of men who conform to the traditional idea of ‘War Dead’, but there are 2 who, by accepted definitions, should not have been included. Possibly those 2 names were added because, at the time of planning the memorial, the facts surrounding their deaths were not fully known or understood. It could equally have been that although the facts were known, they were still considered to be worthy of a place on the Memorial in their old College. The 60 men served in different parts of the world, and held different ranks in many different Regiments. They did not all die in battle but, however they died, their loss would have been felt keenly by their families and their communities.

Over half of the 60 deaths were on the Western Front. Of those, 27 died in France and 8 in Belgium. They were from Regiments which had their origins all over England.

Troops on the Somme Battlefield

The 14 deaths shown in pie chart 1 from the Mesopotamia and Anatolia theatre of war were all from the same Battalion of the same Regiment, the 1/4th Hampshires. There was also one man from the Hampshire Regiment who died in the Egypt and Palestine area, but the other three were all from different Regiments. The slice labelled ‘Other’ on the pie chart includes one death in India and 6 in England.

Apart from the deaths in Mesopotamia and Anatolia and that of Corporal Robert Ferguson, who died of illness in India, all the other deaths in the Died of Illness classification occurred in the U.K. Two of the 6 in that segment were Harry Payne and William Wrenn. They were the two former students on the Chapel Rail whose inclusion on the memorial is subject to speculation.

Harry Payne had served his country in Egypt and the Western Front before being seriously wounded and losing an eye. He was transferred back to the U.K. and after treatment, was discharged as being medically unfit for service on 5th September 1917. Harry died in 1919, one of the many young men who died from the Spanish Flu pandemic. Although he was out of uniform by the time he died, it is hard to deny him his place on the Chapel Memorial. The other former student who was out of uniform by the time of his death was William Wrenn. He enlisted in 1915 but by December 1916 he was discharged as being no longer physically fit for war service. Unlike Harry Payne, William’s discharge from service was not due to wounds received in a theatre of war, but rather he had developed a degenerative disease and died in March 1917 of Disseminated Sclerosis and Respiratory Failure. He had served his country although he never left these shores, and perhaps would have had as distinguished a military career as any of the others had his life not been cut short by an untreatable condition.

One, Lance-Corporal Charles Erwood, was the first of the 60 to die, in 1914, of pneumonia, also without ever setting foot on foreign soil. Corporal Cecil Dobson was one of the 6 who died in England, from wounds received on the Western Front. The only Royal Navy serviceman among the 60, Able Seaman William Harden, died in British waters, and the final one of this group was Captain Frederick Bishop, who died from influenza in the Spanish influenza pandemic.

Precautions being taken to prevent the spread of Spanish Flu

The 1918 influenza outbreak was first observed in Europe, the United States and parts of Asia, before swiftly travelling to all parts of the globe, including fairly isolated communities in places like Alaska. In the early twentieth century there were no effective drugs or vaccines to treat an influenza infection, a virus that attacks the respiratory system. Influenza outbreaks happen every year and vary in severity. Flu is easily spread and has the ability to rapidly mutate. The first wave of the 1918 flu began in the spring and was generally mild. A second highly contagious wave appeared in the autumn of 1918. Victims often died quickly after first showing symptoms, their lungs filling with fluid, causing suffocation.

One of the unusual characteristics of the 1918 pandemic was that it struck down many previously healthy young people, a group who you would normally expect to have more resistance to this type of infection. In the United States, in the first year of the pandemic, so many young people died that the life expectancy figure dropped by 12 years. More American soldiers died from the flu than were killed in battle, with 36% of the Army and 40% of the Navy infected. Still in the U.S., 99% of the deaths were in the under 65 age group, with nearly half of those being aged between 20 and 40. By the summer of 1919 the pandemic was coming to an end.

Research has been done in recent years to try to discover why this particular strain of influenza was so aggressive. In 2008 a group of researchers discovered 3 genes which enabled the virus to weaken a victim’s bronchial tubes and lungs enabling bacterial pneumonia to take hold. Other researchers, having recovered samples of the virus from the frozen bodies of victims, discovered that the infection caused a rapid progressive respiratory failure and death through a cytokine storm (an overreaction of the body’s immune system). That led to the postulation that the stronger immune reactions of young, healthy people would result in a more severe reaction to infection, whereas the old and very young with weaker immune systems would have a weaker reaction. There is no one accepted explanation for why the 1918 flu outbreak was so deadly. Another group of researchers, looking at the original medical reports from the period of the pandemic, found that the viral infection itself was no more aggressive than any other flu outbreak, but rather that there were special circumstances (malnourishment, overcrowded medical camps and hospitals and poor hygiene) which promoted bacterial superinfection that killed most of the victims typically no faster than would be expected. The movement of troops back to home bases around the world after the Armistice, would have exacerbated the rapid spread of the infection.

Frederick Bishop and Harry Payne both died of influenza, in early 1919, in different London hospitals, and Robert Ferguson died in India in January 1919 also from influenza.