Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - The Village of Heroes

Episode Date: July 3, 2020

It looked like any ordinary roll of cloth, but it brought the dreaded plague to the village of Eyam. First it killed the tailor, then resident after resident succumbed. To stop the spread of the disease to neighbouring towns the people of Eyam agreed to isolate themselves and let the plague run its deadly course. This terrible act of sacrifice is still remembered centuries later - but what does it tell us about how far people will go to save the lives of strangers?Read more about Tim's work at http://timharford.com/Tim's latest books 'Fifty Inventions That Shaped The Modern Economy' and 'The Next Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy' are available now. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin At the beginning of September 1665, a role of cloth from London, a rod in a village village named Iam. Iam was a lively mining and farming community surrounded by the bleak and beautiful hills of the English Peak District. It was a world away from London, which, with a population of about half a million people, was one of the largest cities on the planet. And it was a world away from London's great plague, an outbreak of the terrifying disease that was in the process of killing 100,000 Londoners. The role of cloth was received by a tailor's assistant, George Ricca's, sniffing the material

George noted an unpleasant smell, and concluded that the cloth had become damp. He unrolled it and hung it in front of a fire to dry. As he did that, hungry fleas sprang off the cloth. They began to look for their next meal, and George Vickers was close at hand. Within a week, he was dead. Of the plague. Plague is caused by a kind of bacteria carried by black rats and their fleas. An infected flea finds its insides blocked up by the bacteria's secretions, which means that infected fleas are endlessly trying to feed on the blood of rats, gagging on the meal, and vomiting it back into the

bite wound. The vomited blood, of course, is now infested with plague bacteria, so the rat becomes infected too, ready to spread the disease to other fleas. Meanwhile the flea ravenous because it didn't manage to keep down its meal, hops onto another rat, and tries again. Eventually, the rats all die. By which time the bacteria bloated fleas have turned to biting other things, such as George Vickers. The outbreak of plague in an isolated village such as Eam must have filled the villages

with dread. They would have already heard the apocalyptic news of the deaths in London, and they would have known that plague is deadly. It can cause pneumonia, blood poisoning, and most notoriously, buboes, painful swellings have infected lymph nodes in the neck, the armpit, or the groin. The buboes are so distinctive as to give the disease one of its names, bubonic plague. Plague can be treated today. But in 1665, there was nothing to do but wait a few days to see if you died painfully, which, about half the time, you would.

But what happened next is a story that they still tell in the villagivium and a story with more than one lesson to teach the rest of us about what happens in the face of a pandemic. I'm Tim Halfard and you are listening to Corsionary Tales. On a bleak and beautiful hillside, 15 minutes walk from the church at the centre of the home, in the middle of a field by the Riley Farm, there's a low stone wall that traces an area roughly the shape of a teardrop and roughly the size of a family room. The wall circles a tiny graveyard and the name on every grave stone is Hancock. Over the course of eight days Elizabeth Hancock lost her husband and all six of her children to the plague. Nobody could help her for fear of catching the disease themselves, so Elizabeth dragged each member of her family up the hill near the Riley Farm and buried them there in the

field by herself. They say that the people of the next village over, Stony Middleton, stood on a hill nearby and watched her, but their dead not come closer. This year, a lot of journalists have written stories about Eam. Not many of them grew up in the area, but I did, about 10 miles away. We'd visit Eam on school trips and hear the tales the folk of Eam told. They aren't stories you easily forget, not when you're standing on that lonely hillside, looking at the gravestones of the Hancock children. But it's not only the suffering that sticks in the memory, it's the sacrifice.

Before I tell you about it, let me tell you a little more about IAM's surroundings because they're going to be important. IAM, as I mentioned, lies in the English Peak District. It's a beautiful part of the world where low, rounded hills are accented by bleak moors and stark, grit stone cliffs, which we locals call edges. The Peak District was the UK's first ever national park, not because it was the grandest or the most majestic piece of the British countryside I think, but because it's an oasis of wilderness surrounded on all sides by cities and large towns, Manchester, Sheffield, Stoke

on Trent, Derby, and my own childhood hometown, Chesterfield. And that wind swept countryside, surrounded by dense populations, was to be more than a backdrop for the drama that was to unfold. It was to shape the fate of Eam. Because when the plague arrived in Eam, one thing became clear. It couldn't be allowed to leave. Manchester, Sheffield and the other nearby towns were plague-free. They had to stay that way. The plague was at first a slow-moving crisis. George Wickers had died early in September, and the deaths continued throughout the winter, but the plague only truly erupted in June the next year. Three people died on the twelfth of June, five people died on the 15th, more were falling ill, something

had to be done. The man to do it was the young village priest, Rector William Mompison, just 28 years old and new to his job, but he formulated an extraordinary plan. On the 24th of June, 1666, William Mompison gathered the villagers together, outside in a sheltered little spot that had come to service their socially distanced church. The priests told them what they must do. They must all stay in the village until the plague had gone, or until all of them were dead. It must have been tempting to flee, but the villagers faced down their fear. They agreed to quarantine themselves, to save the rest of northern England.

The village wouldn't be without help. The folk of nearby Stony Middleton would come and leave supplies at what became known as the Boundary Stone, a rock with six holes drilled into it. Villagers of Eam filled the holes with vinegar as a disinfectant, then they left coins in the vinegar as payment. Villagers of Stony Middleton would collect the money and leave the food. Nobody needed to get too close. Nobody outside Eam wanted to. The Duke of Devonshire, a wealthy landowner who lived at a palace just a few miles away called Chatsworth House, promised to supplement that with free food and supplies in gratitude

for the self-sacrifice of Eam. But ultimately, the villages of Eam would be on their own, trapped together with the rats and the fleas in the relentlessly spreading plague. In July and August 135 villages would die. Among them were Elizabeth Hancock's husband and six children, every single remaining member of a large family called the Thorps and Catherine Catherine Momperson, Williams' wife. It's hard not to compare ourselves to the villages of Iam. There are unmistakable echoes, the placing of goods at the boundary stone is much like our modern practice of leaving groceries on the doorstep of elderly relatives or neighbours, ringing the doorbell and then stepping six feet back. But the heroic story of Iam sits uncomfortably with our own response to the pandemic.

Look at the TV or surf the internet, and it won't be long before you encounter someone who doesn't seem to care. There was the professional soccer player for Manchester City, yes the same Manchester that the people of Eam had sacrificed themselves to protect. If newspaper reports had to be believed, and he apologized rather than denying them, he decided during the UK's lockdown that it would be okay to invite a friend to his home and a couple of prostitutes. A couple of miles from Eam lies the idyllic Kerbar Edge. The local police tweeted drone

footage, shaming people who'd driven there from a nearby town to walk their dogs. It was a little over the top, but the police were worried about minor infractions, escalating into widespread breakdown. The police chief's council in the UK warned that the virus could bring out the worst in humanity. Our self-centeredness seemed so pathetic in the light of what we know about the people of Eam. They willingly stayed in their playground village. When we are simply asked to shelter in our virus-free homes, what happens? One family decided to make a sightseeing drive from London to the picturesque lake district, a 500 mile round trip all the way from one corner of England to

the opposite corner. The police stopped them and issued a press release calling them clowns. What have we become? What would the people of Eam think of us if they could see us now? My answer might surprise you. We're telling ourselves two stories here. One is about the astonishing self-sacrifice of the people of Eam who volunteered to isolate themselves with a deadly plague. Who, like Elizabeth Hancock, found themselves digging graves for their spouses and their children. The other is about the spoiled selfishness of modern society,

of those who won't make the slightest change to their own plans to eat, drink, and sunbathe, regardless of the deadly risks they're imposing on the vulnerable people around them. Both those stories have a little truth in them, but both those stories are leading us astray. We often tell ourselves that in a crisis, the thin veneer of civilization cracks. They'll be looting and disorder, or as the UK police put it, the worst in humanity. If there's an earthquake or a hurricane, it's as important to get the army on the scene to drive off the looters as it is to get food and medicine. The truth is rather different. In a crisis, few things are more certain than the fact that most people respond with decency

and solidarity. International aid experts even have a list of disaster myths. Disasters bring out the worst in people with looters and bandits roaming free, a myth. People are helpless and can't take responsibility for their own safety, a myth. At the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe, the received wisdom was that when civilians were bombed, their morale and perhaps civilization itself would shatter like the glass in their windows. Winston Churchill believed this, so did Adolf Hitler, so did their generals. They were wrong. Every schoolchild in the UK knows the story of the Blitz spirit. Of howers, Hitler's Luftwaffe dropped bomb after bomb over London in late 1940, Londoners refused to be cowed. The glass did indeed chatter, but the British upper lip remained as stiff as ever.

One pub put up a sign. Our windows are gone, but our spirits are excellent. Come in and try them. Other shops, their frontages torn apart, advertised, More open than usual. 80 years later, we still feel nostalgia for how people pulled together. These stories are true, but as the writer Rutger Breggman points out in his new book, Humankind, we forget how surprising the stoic response was, and the lesson was ignored. The Allies made the same mistake when contemplating their own bombing campaign of German cities.

There was little sign that morale had been dented in London, or other English bomb hit cities such as Birmingham or Hull. Yet Churchill's friend and advisor, Frederick Lindemann, told him that morale was cracking, and that when Germans it is worth thoroughly bombed, it would break the spirit of the German people. Predictably, it didn't. Decades later, carpet bombing didn't break the spirit of the North Vietnamese, either. We're social animals. When times are tough, we look out for each other. animals, when times are tough, we look out for each other. The story of the blitz spirit is inspiring. What's depressing is that we keep forgetting it, more than depressing, too, sometimes.

It can be tragic. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the response of the police, the media, and nearby areas was all shaped by the sad fact. They just couldn't believe that the citizens of New Orleans might pull together to look out for each other. One story vividly told on the new flood lines podcast involved Fred Johnson, the head of a community group, Black Men of Labour. The morning after the hurricane, Johnson took a look at the damage, then went to the

Hyatt Hotel where the authorities were coordinating their response. The mayor was stationed there, as with the command centres for the National Guard, the Army Corps, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Fire Department and the police. Fred Johnson bumped into the police chief, Eddie Compass. "'I need your help, I need your help,' said police chief Compass. He was agitated, he was shaking Fred Johnson, but it was natural to ask for help in such a crisis, and Fred was a community leader. He had a whole group of volunteers he could call on, so what did the police chief want

him to do? Organiser vacuations of flooding areas perhaps, or distribute food and water? No. The chief of police wanted Fred Johnson to gather all the men he could, and stand guard in front of the Hyatt Hotel, looking tough to scare away the gangs of armed looters that the chief was convinced were on their way. So Fred Johnson rounded up as many tough-looking guys as he could, and they spent the day guarding the Hyatt Hotel. A military response to a humanitarian disaster. The huge mob of armed rampaging looters

never did show up. Nor was it clear that that mob ever existed. It was just one of the terrifying and usually false rumours about New Orleans. Why were there so many rumours? Racism must have played a role. About two-thirds of the city's residents were black. That will only have sharpened our tendency to think badly of each other anyway, because the rest of the country was too scared to go and help. The Red Cross, for example, waited a month before entering the city, a month, they thought it was just too dangerous. The media favoured dramatic stories, but those stories are often about the exceptions. That family who drove from London to the Lake District and back were, admittedly,

pretty dumb. But that family stuck out precisely because, in a country of 65 million people, there were very few people arrogant and selfish enough to pull the stunt. At some points, it seemed that the only people breaking the rules were senior political figures themselves, most of the rest of us respected them. The government expected far more people to chaf against lockdown rules than actually did, they had forgotten the lesson of the blitz. Such stories only perpetuate the disaster myths by making bad behaviour seem more common than it is. They may even have the counterproductive effect of encouraging more bad behaviour. If we're told that others are acting selfishly, we

might feel inclined to be selfish too. When Yossarian of the novel Catch22 was challenged, what if everyone decided to look out only for themselves, his response captured the idea. I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I? Psychologists, led by Professor Robert Chaldeini, have studied this insight in the petrified forest national park in Arizona. When visitors were told that the forest was being endangered because others were stealing fossilized wood, they stole too. When tourists were told, truth truthfully that the vast majority

of visitors were leaving the wood untouched, they did likewise. I would not be at all shocked to learn that scolding reports about unnecessary journeys only encourage more unnecessary journeys. Most people aren't villains. And the more exaggerated stories we tell ourselves about wrongdoers, the more wrongdoing they'll be. None of this means that we live up to the heroic tale of Eam's self-sacrifice, but then perhaps the villagers of Eam didn't quite live up to that tale either. Many of the stories we'd tell about Eam come from a book by a local historian,

William Wood, who was writing in 1840, nearly two centuries after the plague hit Eam. Wood admitted himself that his account was more local legend than solid history. We know that the village was isolated from the outside world. We know that more than 250 villagers died, and we know that Catherine Mompison, the vicar's wife, was among them. But what we don't know, and indeed what seems more myth than reality, is that the villagers volunteered to isolate themselves. Constables from nearby Sheffield were policing the boundaries. Why were they needed if the idea of the quarantine came from inside the village? And why do William Mompison's letters not mention anything about volunteering

for quarantine? What seems more likely is this. There was a terrible public health emergency. The lives of the citizens of Sheffield and Darby and Manchester were all at grave risk, and so the authorities stepped in to require the quarantine, and the villagers courageously accepted the situation. A few broke the rules and made their escape, they've tended to be ignored because they don't fit the heroic narrative. Most decided to tough it out. That is heroic enough, isn't it? On the 1st of November 1666, Abraham Morton died. He was the 260th villager to die of the plague and I am, and the last. The village had been in quarantine for four months and living with a plague for more than

a year. The cost had been grievous. But Eam itself had survived. And before long, it was thriving once again. From our perspective, the villagers of Eam seem like heroes of a different age, yet our own age has it share of everyday sacrifice, and perhaps we're not as different from them as we fear. They weren't saints. We aren't contemptible sinners. We're human, and being human should be good enough. This episode drew on reporting in Patrick Wallace's feature on EM in 1843 magazine. James Meeks, description

of the Black Death in the London Review of Books, Rutka Breggman's book, Human Kind, and the Atlantic magazine's Floodlines podcast. For a full list of our sources, please see the show notes at timhalford.com. This cautionary tale was written and presented by me, Tim Haafard, with help from Andrew Wright, the show was produced by Ryan Dilly with support from Marilyn Rust. The music, mixing and sound design are the work of Pascal Wise, the scripts were edited by Julia Barton. Special thanks to Mia Label, Carly Miljory, Heather Fein, Maya Canig, Jacob Weisberg, and Malcolm Gladwell.

Corsionary Tales is a Pushkin Industries production.