There will be blood
No-one puts Winnie in a corner
I have changed my mind. I was wrong. Someone should write a book about being wrong, like Kathryn Schulz. Anyway I was wrong about thinking I should go so swiftly to a paid version of this. So I'm holding my horses, biding my time, keeping my shirt on for now. Many many thanks to those of you who have signed up.
A few years ago, I went to a business hotel in Leeds, and to an unremarkable meeting room off the lobby. The room was not remarkable, the meeting was, because these were the early days of the inquiry into how thousands of people were infected with contaminated blood and blood products, and into how so many of them died and so many of them are still dying and living crippled lives. I wasn’t in a good mental place that day, and I found the meeting unspeakably upsetting. I realise how self-indulgent that sounds when there were people there talking about how their husbands, fathers and brothers had died because the government gave them blood tainted with HIV and hepatitis C.
I remember thinking that the inquiry was well run. There was nothing but kindess and compassion from the inquiry chair, Sir Brian Langstaff, and it was impressive and seemingly efficient. It was also overdue. For decades, government after government has behaved shabbily towards the (mostly) haemophiliacs who died and were diseased through no fault of their own, but because they were dependent on Factor VIII, a clotting product derived from plasma. A brief guide to haemophilia: it overwhelmingly affects males, and it is violently painful and terrible, because when you lack a clotting factor, you can have internal bleeds that are excruciating. When Factor VIII was developed in the 1970s, it was a revelation and a revolution: haemophiliacs could now simply inject themselves at their kitchen tables and also inject themselves to prevent agonizing internal bleeds. Factor VIII was a medical success story. Except that for many years, some of the plasma that the UK bought from the US (it takes a lot of plasma to make highly concentrated Factor VIII, and the UK didn’t have enough so it bought it in) had come from — amongst other dubious sources — US prisoners, as well as people infected with hepatitis and HIV.
I wrote about this criminal scandal in Nine Pints. I call it
criminal, because it was known that the blood products were contaminated, and they continued to be used. I wrote about a school called Treloar, which had a special unit for haemophiliac boys.
In a BBC documentary, a former pupil named Ade Goodyear reminisced about life at Treloar. Being there didn’t fix your hemophilia, but if you felt the buzzing or tingling or heat that meant a bleed was coming, you could get treatment quickly and expertly. You never had to miss class again. Your schoolmates, unlike Goodyear’s at his previous school, were unlikely to beat you up just to see what that did to a hemophiliac. (When Goodyear’s previous headmaster introduced him by saying, “You must not hit this boy,” his fate was fixed.) At Treloar there were thirty-five hemophiliac boys who knew what it was like. You weren’t judged. Treloar was a haven.
At Treloar, Goodyear told the BBC, “we went into the office in the medical center in groups of five.” The atmosphere was relaxed but weird, because they had heard rumors. All schools have rumors, but not usually the kind that might kill you. “The doctors cautiously informed us that ‘you may have heard that Factor VIII is not as clean as it should be.’” Then, with artless horror, “we were told who had HIV by the words ‘you haven’t, you have, you have, you haven’t,’ and so on.” The boys asked how long they had got. Two years. Maybe. Of those five boys in that room, Goodyear is the only survivor.
Of 85 boys at Treloar who were infected, 79 died. In all, 380 children were infected with HIV, some toddlers.
The inquiry will report in the autumn. I will be watching.
This week I went on a rare visit to London to attend an event at the Lloyds Register Foundation Heritage Education Centre. The HEC are the kind people who have given me generous funding to do my book and in return I report for them on my research and travels. The latest report is a podcast I recorded with Dr Sam Willis at the Society for Nautical Research, about Harry Tate’s Navy and the fighting fishing trawlers of both world wars. The link is here.
It should be of no interest to anyone but I actually went out, too. I don’t really go out any more. Apparently this is common: that since the pandemic people’s social circles and outgoing habits have diminished and retreated. Mine certainly have. I don’t drink any more, so pubs aren’t too interesting. But that doesn’t account for why I don’t profit from Yorkshire’s theatre and opera and dance and arts in general. I must get better. Anyway, I got a reasonably priced ticket to go to A Show in London. I lived in London for ten years and only went to shows when visitors came to town. This time I almost bought a ticket for Dirty Dancing because no-one puts Baby in a corner, but then I had a word with myself and instead booked a ticket for Orlando (thanks Jack Sommers for the top tip about the TopTix app. Also, read his Substack, it’s good). I wasn’t fussed about seeing Emma Corrin, particularly, as I think her performative non-binaryness is tedious along with her “transwomen are women and anyone who disagrees is a bigot” stuff. But I loved the Sally Potter film, and I like Virginia Woolf.
Verdict? The acting was good. Emma Corrin was off, and I don’t know who the understudy was, but she was excllent. But the script was just too pleased with itself. And I left at the end thinking, “and?”. What was I supposed to have learned? That it’s a bit shit to be a woman? I found the play empty. I wish I’d gone to Dirty Dancing.
And this is why you will never be employed as a theatre critic, Rose.
Animal Hero of the Week
This week, a bear. A black bear cub that was bought by Lieutenant Harry Colebourn in White River, Ontario, Canada, from a hunter who had slaughtered the cub’s mother. She cost $20. Colebourn called her “Winnie” after Winnipeg, where he was living. Colebourn was on his way to join a regiment and to go to Europe to fight in WW1. He had intended to let the cub loose, but his fellow soldiers took a liking to her. The cub slept under Harry’s cot and then when she grew, outside his door. And when Colebourne was shipped overseas to England, Winnie went too, with the Second Canadian Infantry Brigade, who were based on Salisbury. Winnie became the brigade mascot, and here is a picture of Winnie and Harry.
But Harry had to go to Europe to fight. Many fighting units had mascots, but they were mostly dogs, although one had a coyote. Winnie was not judged suitable for travel, so her lieutenant put her in the care of the London Zoo, and when he survived four years of fighting and returned home, he thought that was the best place for her, and donated her to the zoo.
And there, one day, a man named Alan Alastair Milne came with his young son Christopher Robin. And Christopher loved Winnie so much, he named his teddy bear after her. And when AA Milne came to write a children’s book, he named his bear after Winnipeg, a cub from Canada. Winnipeg lived in London Zoo until she died at the age of 20, in 1934. And was she stuffed, the usual fate of heroic animals? No. But her skull was preserved and given to the Royal College of Surgeons and for some unfathomable reason thought interesting enough to go on display at the Hunterian Museum in 2015.
I did not know how Winnie came to be in London Zoo, thank you, I often tell the story about him to younger visitors while queuing to get into Westminster Abbey, since AA went to school there.
That infected blood scandal is so upsetting, those poor innocent boys had enough to put up with as it is. I expect it was very hard to write about but I'm glad you did.