FT266

The morning of 13 July 1980 was a fresh one, promising a glorious summer Sunday for the annual Hollinwell Show in fields by the small Nottinghamshire mining town of Kirkby-in-Ashfield. The highlight would be a competition involving around 500 children in 11 junior marching bands, for which they had all been practising their music and routines for months. No one could have guessed that this would become, in a policeman’s words, “like a battlefield with bodies everywhere”. Precisely what happened was endlessly and acrimoniously debated in the following weeks by medical and welfare experts, government scientists, local council officials, witnesses, the afflicted and their relatives. [1]

Most children had got up especially early and were brought by coaches from as far as 65km away. They arrived tired, restless and certainly nervous for the nine o’clock start. Almost immediately, they formed up, their leaders fussing over their uniforms and moves. The competition meant a great deal to each group and their hopes were riding high. It promised to be a long day, and it began with a long wait as the judges made their final inspection. There was no more time for rehearsals, only for last-minute checks. 

Just after 10:30, the children and some adults began collapsing. They were ferried by dozens of ambulances to four local hospitals, where about 259 children were examined and nine were detained overnight. Symptoms included fainting, running eyes, sore throats, dizziness, vomiting, trembling, weakness, numbness and a metallic taste in the mouth… but neither all at once nor all felt by the same person. Besides the felled musicians, 15 adults, two babies and some horses were affected. Horses? We’ll come to that. 

Let’s begin with the moment that chaos broke out. An organiser for one of the bands, Terry Bingham, said: “We were ready for the display when one or two children collapsed. Then a few more went, and a few more. We called off the event but others fell as they came out of the arena. Then spectators started dropping. [2]

Another witness said: “Some kids were catching their friends as they fell, and then they were falling down themselves… No one could understand what was happening.” 

One of the girls affected, Petula Merriman, 14, said: “We were on the field in full uniform for an inspection… I’ve never had to stand to attention that long before. As we marched off, I tried to grab hold of my drum but just fell on the floor. My friends were collapsing all around me.” Another of the afflicted, Kerry Elliott, 10, said: “I went all weak and got pains in my stomach and then I fainted. Everyone was falling down and some were crying. My stomach was all tight and aching. I felt better when I came round in hospital.” Kerry’s 7-year-old brother, Steven, was similarly affected. Enid Holmes, secretary of the ‘Creswell Craglanders’, said she had “noticed some children had blobs on their backs and legs” when she loosened their uniforms. Two other bands reported water-filled blisters – which the locals call ‘blebs’ – on children’s skin. [3]

Of the adults who also fell ill during the panic, some were taken ill while accompanying their children to the hospital, and others collapsed in wards at their bedsides. Terry Bingham said his own eyes began stinging and watering as he drove six kids to hospital in his car: “I had chest pains. It was like nerve gas poisoning,” he later told reporters. 

Margaret Palethorpe, a 37-year-old mother of five children, three of whom were among the collapsed, said she felt pins and needles in her tongue and lips. “I collapsed and lost the use of one arm.” Linda Elliott, mother of Kerry and Steven, “felt strange” as she comforted her children on the way to hospital, where she too collapsed. “My arms and legs felt like sponges and it was like cramp in my stomach. That’s all I remember until I came round.” Mrs Edna Wells, chairman of one band, the ‘Ashford Imperials’ (facing page), said she tried to keep the children talking. “I was helping them but I was taken ill too.”


FIRST THEORIES
The first thought of many of those standing around the arena staring in disbelief at the numbers of children keeling over, was ‘food poisoning’. Someone – perhaps well-intentioned – broadcast urgent messages over the public address system warning people not to eat the ice cream or drink water until the source of the trouble was found. No one is certain whether this announcement happened before, during or after the collapses began. [4]

When the police moved in with health officials a short time later, they took samples of food and drink from all the stalls. Even as they did so, it became clear this theory was not tenable; many of the children had only consumed supplies which they had brought with them in their coaches. The results of tests on the food samples became a formality and proved negative in all cases; similar tests by the Severn-Trent Water Authority, which supplies the area, found the water had “no bacterial impurity”. This did not save the ice cream men, who for several days afterward were subjected to taunts and jeers in the housing estates around Kirkby-in-Ashfield. 

A second theory, better favoured, proved to be longer-lasting. “Gas Cloud KOs Children”, yelled the front page of the Daily Mirror the next day. Public opinion was firming around the idea that the children had been poisoned by a chemical insecticide used by farmers in spraying crops. Some people believed they saw a cloud of insecticide drifting across the showground; others speculated about the dust raised by the feet of several hundred marchers. This seemed to be confirmed by a spokesman at the Queens Medical Centre, Nottingham, who said that the children taken there had symptoms “consistent with exposure to fumes of some kind”. [5] In a Western Mail report, Terry Bingham claimed that after his release from hospital he had steamed open a letter from the hospital to his own doctor. The written diagnosis, he says, was “inhalation of organic poison”. The article alleges that a similar verdict was seen on the bed-chart of a girl patient [6]

However, every lead turned up blank. Police tracked down the farmer who owned the adjacent field: it had not been sprayed for more than 10 years. Other inquires – at the course and nearby woods owned by Nottinghamshire Golf Club, local farmers and the Forestry Commission – also cast doubt on pesticide spraying. In any case, said the Nottinghamshire Fire Service, this was not even a possibility: “The wind was in completely the wrong direction.” 

As news of the mass collapse spread via the nation’s radio and TV bulletins, the local police were telephoned by a man in Scotland who suggested that people had been affected by high-frequency radio waves. “Seek and ye shall find” is a prime law of phenomenology. Lo! A high frequency transmitter was found nearby at a Gas Board depot. This line of inquiry, too, was eliminated. In the search for a likely source of debilitating fumes, the police sniffed hopefully in the direction of a fire at a plastics factory, some miles away, that caused an estimated £1 million worth of damages. Again, the wind was blowing in the wrong direction for this to be a candidate. 

At first, a supposed ‘mystery bug’ was blamed for the ‘blebs’. One doctor nominated the Coxsackie virus as the culprit, as it was known to cause water-filled blisters and to be active locally. This too was thought extremely unlikely to be the cause of so widespread and diverse a reaction. 

Some overseas Associated Press reports – datelined 15 July – mentioned “invasion from Outer Space” among other theories. The Daily Telegraph, just over a week later, revealed that the police had indeed investigated reports that a UFO had landed in the field adjacent to the show, although the exact relationship of this to the mass collapse was not elaborated upon. No evidence for any ‘landing’ was found, but it is, nevertheless, interesting to note as an indication of the desperation or seriousness with which the authorities were looking into every possibility.


THE H-WORD
Looking back, it’s clear that the area health authorities and the police acted very quickly; however, while several theories about what had happened were made more or less likely by speedy investigation, the conclusions of the investigating experts were not always well received. Indeed, the whole case might well serve as a study of the gulf in interpretation between the authorities and the local public over the term “mass hysteria”. Parents, in particular, took especial offence at the implication that their children were somehow pretending or mentally unstable. 

Throughout the case, there was a lively discussion of ‘epidemic hysteria’ in the media. The H-word was uttered very early on; the day after the outbreak in fact, by two doctors – Dr William Thomson in the Daily Telegraph; and Dr John Nicholson, a spokesman for the British Psychological Society, in London’s Evening Standard – who both emphasised the subjective nature of “mass hysteria”. [7] Dr Nicholson also pointed out that such things are fairly common in a teacher’s experience, if only on a smaller scale and mainly among girl pupils. Apparently, the only guidance given to British doctors in these circumstances is to give “firm reassurance” to the unfortunate victims. 

Having eliminated the improbable, the authorities edged towards the unthinkable. At an evening press briefing, Chief Inspector Ogden admitted: “The whole thing is a complete mystery. A gymkhana was held in the same field later without trouble.” Dr John Wood, director of health for the Kirkby area, added that he was becoming convinced that “mass hysteria” was, indeed, the only possibility, since tests had “virtually eliminated the alternatives”. To which C.I. Ogden added: “A large number of small children had been parading and standing to attention for some time. They would also be under some pressure due to the occasion.” He too concluded that hysteria spread after the first few had toppled over. 

“Tests indicate that the cause was nothing more serious than mass hysteria,” was the verdict of the Daily Telegraph on 16 July. This apparent casual dismissal prompted angry reactions from parents and organisers, highlighting the divide between public and professional use of the term. Michael Hunt, a Hollinwell organiser whose three children were treated in hospital, exploded: “It’s a pathetic explanation. We are not going to be fobbed off.” 

In January 1980 – six months before Hollinwell – the social historian Brian Inglis wrote an intelligent and compassionate article on hysteria generally for the Guardian. His purpose was to disabuse us of the idea “that hysteria, in epidemic form, is a kind of insanity; that it affects only weak-minded or self-indulgent people, usually silly girls (girls accounting for 70–100 per cent of victims in schools according to the British Medical Journal); and that consequently it is not a real disease, but something to be ashamed of.” [8]

It was a reaction to precisely this picture of “mass hysteria” that galvanised the afflicted adults and parents of affected children; they resented, as they saw it, being labelled “weak-minded” or worse. At first, parents – looking for an alternative target for their anger – hit out at the show’s organisers. The chairman of one band was also critical of the four judges for the long period of standing to attention. “It was disgusting the way the judges kept the children waiting so long… no wonder they passed out,” he told the Mansfield and North Nottinghamshire Chronicle and Advertiser. Some witnesses even contradicted the notion that tension and the long wait were aggravated by the heat. According to one witness, Mrs Maureen Reville, “There was no hysteria. People did not collapse all together. It was cool enough a day for most of us to have had our coats on.”


HYSTERIA BY PROXY
To confuse matters further, the Hollinwell incident was followed by a train of possibly related casualties. During the night following the mass collapse (13–14 July), five of the children released from hospitals were readmitted when their symptoms recurred. Then, three days later (16 July), four people from the Worksop area, a few miles to the north, collapsed with Hollinwell-type symptoms; none of them had been affected by the initial outbreak on the 13th. The weekend after the Hollinwell collapse – on 19 July – one of the Hollinwell bands, the ‘Ashfield Imperials’, collapsed again, during a five-mile (8km) charity march at South Normanton. “Traffic fumes and a long march” were blamed. 

Two weeks after the Hollinwell collapse, 19 children were taken to hospital, struck down in Leicestershire by the “band bug”. They had travelled by coach from Lincoln to Leicester, and were treated for “heat exhaustion” at Newark. That same weekend, five young band members were taken to hospital after they collapsed during a two-mile (3.2km) procession at a fête at Tipton, West Midlands. All were aged 14 and said to have “fainted in sweltering conditions”. Two others were picked up by the ambulances. And at Manton, south of Nottingham, five girls from the ‘Kilton Concordes’ band – who had also collapsed at Hollinwell – fell ill during a charity event. They were the only band affected on this occasion and quickly recovered once off the field. 

If Hollinwell was indeed mass hysteria, could these later cases be “mass hysteria by proxy”? 

For the anti-hysteria lobby, there was a serious question about the way the ‘illness’ was transmitted from the children in the arena to others outside it. We have to account for the two babies who became ill, the adults, the spectators, and several horses; to some they seemed like evidence that this could not be ‘fobbed off’ as hysteria. A stricken horse was mentioned among the first radio news bulletins; and the Sunday Times (20 July) reported that, in the following gymkhana, five horses became ill and one had to be destroyed. This was later denied by the organisers and C.I. Ogden, who led the police inquiry. Even if these incidents were true, their link to the events on the 13th is pure conjecture. This paradox is only resolved if you factor in a ‘cover up’ conspiracy. 

Sloppy and excitable reporting dogged the event and undoubtedly contributed to the overall confusion. For example, the Guardian reported that traces of blood and protein had been found in samples of urine taken from some of the children, possibly indicating kidney damage. Which hospital this information came from is not stated, but it was grist to the conspiracy mill. At a news conference the next day, Dr Malcolm Lewis, director of Nottingham Public Health Laboratory, said that tests on blood and urine samples for organic-phosphorus poisoning had all proven negative. Most newspapers added that “a complete battery of tests” by the Kirkby public health authorities had found no traces of agricultural chemicals or toxic agents. [9]

These findings (or lack of them) were greeted with scorn by offended parents and show organisers. “[They] are rubbish,” fumed Terry Bingham. “There has been a cover-up. Some people are still feeling ill, so how can it have been hysteria?” In response to the allegation of cover-up, the exasperated medics of the Ashfield District Council published their own findings (or lack of them). This did not satisfy their critics either. Viewer reaction to a BBC TV documentary made 23 years later included such comments as “Mass hysteria is a way of covering up the truth”; “No one will ever convince me that just one child fainting could cause over 200 to come down with those symptoms”; and “If, as they say, it was mass hysteria, why did it affect babies and adults as well as the children?” [10]

By now, the clamour included people with more political motives; Dennis Skinner – one of three MPs who called for a government inquiry – called the “mass hysteria” verdict “an insult to the intelligence and another cover-up by the Establishment”. [11] Arthur Peacock, of the Mansfield Ecology Party, wrote to a number of journals calling for the uncovering of “a major public scandal”. “Everyone but Ashfield Council,” he declared, “can see it is ludicrous to put the blame on mass hysteria.”


LAST THOUGHTS
How did it happen? The evidence, as summarised by Denise Winn in her Observer article (for which she made her own investigations) is that “two children collapsed first, then two more…” and the rest followed in a mounting wave of involuntary mimicry.  However, no report or investigation seems to have discovered or named those hapless first victims. There are some clues in the original reportage. 

Firstly, there is the matter of what triggered them. Remember the ill-considered broadcasts warning people not to consume the ice-creams or mineral waters? Tucked away in the acres of local media coverage was a comment that, quite early on that morning, the show’s organisers had themselves made an announcement about the dangers of eating some “joke jelly babies”. [12] This warning could well have set the tone for the day, the later announcements fanning the embers, so to speak. Police never found out who made the ice-cream announcements; indeed, there was a suspicion that they might have been imagined in retrospect. 

The second possible trigger has to do with the two very young babies involved. According to the Sunday Times, Margaret Palethorpe, the mother from whom we heard earlier, said she thought she was the first person to feel ill. Two of her five children were in the ‘Woodland Gladers’ band. It’s pure speculation, but I can imagine her two already anxious children spotting their mother becoming ill and beginning to wobble themselves. The occasion of Mrs Palethorpe’s unease is quite clear. As her children’s band was waiting for inspection, she changed the nappy on her three-week-old baby and was startled to find a mass of ‘blebs’ on him. [13] Quite unintentionally then, she might well have been the prime catalyst in the drama. The mother of the other baby involved, Susan Bonsall, had also panicked when she could not rouse her sleeping two-week-old baby; a panic made worse by the chaos going on all around her. 

Although we know more about the Hollinwell collapse now, none of it has resolved the matter conclusively. The pro- and anti-hysteria camps are still as far apart as ever. 

NB: This article is an extract from a chapter on British cases from a nearly completed book on the history of mass hysteria and social panics in schools around the world, by Dr Bob Bartholomew and Bob Rickard. More complete references are given in the book itself.

Notes
1 The main sequence of events was reconstructed from the following reportage and my notes taken as the incident unfolded: D.Mail, 14+15+16+17+21+26 July; D.Mirror, 14+16+17+23 July; D.Star, 14+15+16 July; D.Express, 14+15+16+21 July; D.Telegraph, 14+16+21 July; Times, 14+15+24+26 July; Western Mail, 14+16 July; Guardian, 14+15+17 July; London Evening Standard, 14 July; Mansfield and North Nottinghamshire Chronicle and Advertizer, 17+31 July + 14 Aug; Sun, 28 July; Sunday Times, 20 July; Observer, 20 July; (Wolverhampton) Express & Star, 28 July; Shropshire Star, 14 July; New Scientist, 31 July + 28 Aug. All in 1980. An early version appeared in FT33:22–27 (Autumn 1980).
2 Terry Bingham was frequently and wrongly referred to as an organiser of the event; he was secretary to the ‘Zingaris’ band from Clay Cross, Derbyshire. D.Express, 15 July 1980. The ‘Clay Zingaris’ went on to win the Junior World Championship in 1984: (marchingelite.co.uk).
3 Oliver Gillie & Toni Turner: “Mystery Epidemic may have been Sparked off by ‘The Blebs’”, Sunday Times, 20 July 1980.
4 Denise Winn: “Hysteria tests on festival victims”, Observer, 20 July 1980. According to Ms Winn’s research, “The panic spread when alarming mess-ages, such as ‘Don’t eat the ice cream. It’s been poisoned.’ and ‘Don’t stand on the grass. It’s been sprayed.’ were relayed across the Tannoy.” 
5 A hospital spokesman later said their initial diagnosis “has since been ruled out by chemical tests”. Guardian, 17 July 1980.
6 Western Mail, 8 Aug 1980, which articulated the fears of the anti-hysteria lobby that, deliberately or not, the local authorities were involved in a sinister cover-up and the children had been poisoned by phosphorus compounds.
7 Although the Sun headlined “Children KO’d by ‘Hysteria’” on 16 July 1980, they favoured the “anti-hysteria” lobby in much of their reporting.
8 Guardian, 15 Jan 1980.
9 In 2003, BBC TV journalists revived the idea that fungicide poisoning was the culprit. “New theory on ‘mass hysteria.’” BBC News, 23 Sep 2003 (news.bbc.co.uk). Accessed 17 May 2010. They allege that Tridemorph had been sprayed on the nearby fields at the time of the episode, even though this contradicts all the official investigations made within days of the event. I’m not sure how they square this with the selective nature of the collapse or the ‘opposite’ wind direction. Tridemorph was for years sprayed across England and around the world without reports of anyone collapsing. Often applied to cereal crops, it is capable of skin and eye irritation. It was eventually banned in England, in 2000. See also note 10.
10 The 2003 BBC documentary was made by their regional TV magazine Inside Out:East Midlands and called “The Hollinwell Incident”; first broadcast on Monday, 22 Sep 2003. The BBC’s info page on the programme carries three viewers’ responses.
11 Don Concannon and Frank Haynes in the Guardian, 15 July 1980. Dennis Skinner in D.Mirror, 16 July 1980.
12 Oliver Gillie & Toni Turner, op.cit.
13 Ibid.

HOLLINWELL'S PRECEDENTS

1961
Welshpool, Powys, Wales. 
92 children are sent home from school “complaining of feeling sick”. 

1964, February
Coventry, West Midlands.
400 students and one teacher from three different schools are affected with breathing problems and nausea. The cause was never found.

1965, 7, 11 & 12 October
Blackburn, Lancashire.
90 girl pupils of St Hilda’s Church of England Secondary Modern School, Blackburn, collapse crying and complaining of dizziness, pains in chests, numbness in limbs, difficulty breathing, and fainting. Tests fail and they recover. The school reopens on the 11th and within minutes, 63 girls – many from the first incident – collapse again. The following day, one more girl collapses. Only later does a significant detail emerge; the day before the first occurrence (ie. 6 Oct) many of the same girls had waited for three hours outside Blackburn Cathedral for an official visit by Princes Margaret, and had fainted there too.

1965, 7, 11 & 12 October
Portsmouth, Hampshire.
Simultaneously with the St Hilda’s outbreak, 70 girls fall ill at St Luke’s Church of England Modern School in Portsmouth; and then again on the 11th when their school reopens, 30 pupils are “seized with giddiness and sickness”. The next day, 118 girls are absent after several small “recurrences”.

1965, 13 October
Halifax, Yorkshire.
Within days of the events at Blackburn and Portsmouth, 20 girls are sent home from a grammar school. “Boys in the adjoining school have not been affected.”

1965, 13 & 14 October
Daventry, West Midlands.
Simultaneously with the Halifax outbreak, 70 pupils, mainly girls, from the Secondary School in Daventry fall “mysteriously ill”. Two other schools in the area report 46 of their pupils falling ill on the 14th.

1965, 14 October
Callington, Cornwall.
Nine boys sent home from a grammar school.

1965, 14 October
Oxted, Surrey.
250 children from the County Secondary School sent home or stayed home, ill.

1967, 6 March
Whitchurch, Bristol.
At least 500 people at a 24-hour pedal-car race at the disused airport feel “stinging pain” in their eyes. Nearly all are treated at two Bristol hospitals for streaming eyes and burns to faces and hands; 200 return the following day for additional treatment.

1969, September
Deptford, south-east London.
77 boys at a canteen at West Greenwich Secondary School collapse with vomiting and diarrhœa. Within the following two weeks, two other boys from the school are admitted to the same hospital. Their illness is said to “have nothing to do with the food poisoning outbreak”.

1969, September
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Northumberland.
Barely a week after the Deptford outbreak, more than 100 children, aged between five and 10, from four different schools across the city of Newcastle come down with authentic food poisoning. In contrast to the investigative difficulties in suspected ‘hysteria’ cases, the cause of this poisoning is quickly established; all the affected schools had their lunches supplied from the same kitchen.

1972, 8 July
Hazelrigg, Northumberland.
The case most like Hollinwell. 1,200 people gathered to watch six marching bands parading at the annual fête suddenly feel ill. A young drummer stumbles out of formation and, within minutes, six more girls collapse, clutching their abdomens and weeping. 168 band members and a handful of adults are examined at five hospitals. Doctors notice that, after a short time away from the parade-ground chaos, the symptoms vanish.

1973, August
Workington, Cumberland.
126 pupils from Harrington Infants’ School complain of headaches and sickness,
blaming a “foul and elusive smell”.

1973, August
Esher, Surrey.
Seven teachers and 135 children from Hinchley Wood Primary School fall ill. Headmaster Bill Kinnock says: “The illness is peculiar in that it seems to be restricted to my school. No one at the Secondary School next door has been affected. It has nothing to do with school meals, which come from the Secondary School’s canteen. And a lot of the children taken ill do not stay for lunch.”

1973, October
Bournemouth, Hampshire.
15 girls at the Wentworth Milton Mount School are laid low by a “feverish illness” blamed on a “mystery bug”.

1974, May
Selby, Hemmingborough & Ricall, North Yorkshire.
77 pupils of Cliffe School coll-apse with severe stomach pains and sickness. This is the eighth consecutive year that this “mystery illness” has struck. The long-suffering headmaster makes inquiries and finds two other primary schools have also been affected.

1975, August
Rocester, Staffordshire.
20 children at Ryecross School, near Uttoxeter, succumb to mysterious bouts of sickness and fainting.

1976, Summer
Tywardreath, Cornwall.
30 pupils fall off their chairs at the village school with knotted muscles, rolling about the floor in agony, clutching their heads. At a hospital in Truro, a doctor concludes: “It was probably psychological.”