Gertrude Bell, T. E. Lawrence and David Lloyd George each had their brushes with the ‘Spanish Flu’ influenza pandemic of 1918-19 and the grief, illness and long-term effects that accompanied it. Sir Mark Sykes, joint author of the secretively planned 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement which carved up the post-WW1 Middle East to Russio-colonial tastes, caught a fatal dose at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

The agreed British and American position in political circles was to play down the seriousness of the influenza epidemic and this is evident in Gertrude Bell’s letters, as she alerted her family to her illnesses and her need to pay doctors while almost casually brushing off her ill-health. She played the game well, abiding by the party line of not admitting to weakness to avoid stirring any greater unrest in a world still reeling from the upheavals of the Great War and a period of very wet, cold weather. Even the misnomer ‘Spanish Flu’ suited the western powers seeking to remove this influenza epidemic from public view and world leaders’ spheres of responsibility.