A snippet from ‘Current news among Friends’

17 January 1919

‘The autumn term at Leighton Park School will be memorable for the startlingly sudden onslaught of the influenza fiend. On to a very full school, very keenly at work and play, it swooped, and in three or four days over 70 of the 90 boys were in its clutches. Nearly half the teaching staff also went down at once with it, and all the domestic staff at Grove House; School House was almost as hard hit. Seemingly impossible feats in nursing and cooking were accomplished for some days. For three weeks the survivors carried on a kind of intermittent school in the central buildings; the curriculum included lectures, and curious composite classes in mathematics and literature, interrupted by “orderly” work.

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