It is 100 years since Britain’s sports grounds were last used to treat the sick – none of us expected it to happen in our lifetime
In the last months of the first world war, a ship arrived at Manchester from the US, its passengers deathly ill. They were mostly southerners, infected with a powerful influenza that had overtaken them on their transatlantic journey and quickly turned into pneumonia. The matron of a nearby Red Cross hospital, Mrs Geldart, heard of their plight and took them in, at no small risk to the health of her own – mostly voluntary – staff. For the next 12 weeks her hospital struggled and suffered through the deadliest trial it had faced in four years of war.
Many patients did not recover. Those who did took rehabilitative walks on the oval sward of grass they could see from their ward windows. Their beds took up every available inch of floor space in the Old Trafford pavilion: the long room, the dressing rooms, the corridors, and even, when weather permitted, the roof. It was only a short stroll to the cricket pitch, and no one told the convalescents off for walking on it. Lancashire’s players weren’t using it.
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