Work Together

 
I had been preparing another post on the refugee crisis after watching a report on last night's evening news.  It focussed on some of the Syrian women trapped on Lesbos with their small children.  I was horrified by the imagery which was conjured by their words.  One woman told of how she made it to land from a terrifying dinghy voyage only to find that her husband had been crushed to death in the bottom of the overcrowded vessel.  She was young and had three children.  She had nothing of her husband's to remember him by and she had no idea what was going to happen to her.  I have said it before on this blog but I will say it again:  how desperate do you have to be to risk such a journey with small children?  How can any of us in the West really imagine what it must feel like?  None of our histories are immune from people migrations throughout the ages.  We all have a responsibility to help.

Then, as I was driving today, I happened upon the speech being made by Angelina Jolie Pitt on the BBC today.  It was part of a series of programmes for World On The Move Day and she expressed very eloquently exactly what I would have hoped to say.  Her speech and knowledge in the question sessions afterwards were very impressive.

 

I highly recommend listening to the programme. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36303688 for the article on the news page and http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07bqjgq to listen.

There is also an excellent series on The World At One on BBC Radio 4.  I have listened to it as often as possible and it really brings home the realities of life as a refugee.  A correspondent has been following the Dhnie family  for some time and reports regularly on their progress.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p037lrj7/episodes/downloads

 

Auntie

This week I took my children on a BBC Tour at Broadcasting House in London.  Despite the absence of CBBC - now based in Manchester - they absolutely loved it.  Photos with a "real" tardis and darlek.  Reading the weather on a newsroom green screen.  Sitting on the One Show sofa.

 

And interwoven with the up to date stuff, there were wonderful bits of history about the BBC.  From the Art Deco building to the stories of the war.  From the lists of famous people who have been through the doors to the invention of television in the basement.

 

So using the tenuous connection of "Auntie", I am using this genealogy blog today to make a simple plea for people to defend the BBC in its coming battle with the government.

 

You would think that politicians who are conservative would value all of the history and Britishness that we saw and felt on our tour.  Apparently not.  The current government is hellbent on bringing down the BBC in its current form.  If we allow it to succeed, we are allowing it to bring down nearly a century of our history.

 

The BBC has figured in all of our lives and the lives of many generations before us.  It has encompassed all the arts, sports and entertainment we could want and it has been a source of comfort, pride, joy and many other emotions.

 

I don't want to rant on about the economics or politics of the BBC's funding.  And I don't doubt there have been huge mess-up's over the years.  But where have there not been scandals in recent years?  Child abuse, going to war without a vote, MPs' expenses, bribes and corruption in the City, the banking collapse, the list goes on.

 

I just felt the need to say "Stand up for Auntie".  We must not let the saying "you don't know what you've got until it's gone" apply to the BBC.  We do know and we should be proud.  See below!
 

 

Pandemic

As you will have seen on the news, the world is currently facing an outbreak of the Ebola virus, centred in Africa.  It is a terrible disease and governments are right to be concerned.  It is a pity, though, that they were not concerned a lot sooner.  As so often is the case, the rest of the world has to feel threatened (or totally shamed - see Band Aid circa 1984!) before serious situations in Third World countries get the attention they deserve.

 

Today, the BBC news website carried an article about Spanish Influenza.  I can see why they did this - it was at the end of the First World War that the pandemic took hold plus it is an easy comparison to the Ebola outbreak.  The article is very informative.  I certainly knew very little about the outbreak in 1918/1919.  I definitely did not know that it is estimated to have killed fifty million people worldwide.

 

The most recent modern day media reference to the Spanish 'flu outbreak was in Downton Abbey, when it very conveniently took away the fiancée who was getting in the way of the Lady Mary/Matthew Crawley, will they/won't they plot.  [There she is above, poor Lavinia.]

 

I had been going, in this post, to question the wisdom of putting out the Spanish 'flu piece on the BBC website, for fear of stirring people up - after reading it, I felt informed but disturbed, to say the least.  It made me cross with the Beeb  and want to rant about tabloid style scare mongering.  However, when googling to write today's post, I stumbled upon a piece about how accurate Downton Abbey's portrayal of the 'flu had been. 

 

This article about Downton Abbey argued that the rather sanitised view of the 'flu shown in the episode was bad for public health information as it would lead people to believe that there was no need to be afraid of such pandemics in the future.  It mentioned the lack of fear apparently shown by others in the house towards those who had succumbed.  The willingness to visit, the willingness to nurse the patients, the lack of face masks.

 

So maybe the BBC have it right and are starting to make people aware of how a pandemic actually works.  Let's just hope that they have jumped the gun and we will not ever find out truly how a pandemic works.

 

In terms of family history, I suppose the main point of interest for 1918/1919 would be to identify which relations, if any, we have who succumbed to the Spanish 'flu.  It only occurred to me as I was writing that I do not have cause of death for a number of ancestors at that time.  And therein lies the financial rub.  As mentioned previously on this blog, it is not cheap to order death certificates in bulk.  We need to be very sure that we have the correct person before we do so and we should have, in my view, a definite reason for wanting to know their cause of death.  Perhaps the ones "worth" spending money on are our direct ancestors - the great, 2xgreat etc grandparents.  Many of them will have come from very large families so it would be expensive to order certificates for all siblings.

 

However, if you have relations who died in 1918/1919 but were not killed in the First World War, it may be worth finding out if they died in the pandemic.  After all...

 

“It really was a major event in modern human history........Outside of wars, there weren’t many events seen like it. So to downplay it at all is wrong." (MNN Post article)

 

We can only wait to see and hope that such an event will not be seen again.

 

You can donate to the Red Cross battle against Ebola at http://www.redcross.org.uk/ebolavirus