When Aberdeen was gripped by typhoid, all because of corned beef

On a routine day in mid-May, a member of supermarket’s staff opened a large tin of Argentinian corned beef to be carved on the shop’s gleaming new meat slicer machine. The meat looked fine and for the customers who bought it and other cold cuts, tasted fine.

But the corned beef was anything but fit to eat. And soon Sheena, just 16 years old at the time, would be among hundreds of victims of the largest typhoid outbreak in recent British history.

It would lead to more than 500 people of all ages having to be quarantined in hospital for weeks: scenes of families forced apart, of patients stuck behind glass and doctors and nurses in protective suits would be haunting taste of what would come years later, as the Covid pandemic struck.

While its impact would leave Aberdeen a no-go zone, where families were torn apart, businesses wrecked, and for some young people like Sheena, futures thrown into turmoil.

Relatives,visiting patients in Aberdeen City Hospital during typhoid outbreak, (Image: Mirrorpix via Getty Images)

As the world’s spotlight turned on Aberdeen, whispers and misinformation sparked near hysteria: in America, newspaper headlines told of Scots victims dying in the street and bodies piled on the beach.

While that was far from the reality, even now, 60 years since the outbreak swept the city, memories of the May 1964 outbreak – all down to a 6lb tin of Argentinian corned beef - remain vivid.

For Sheena, in her fifth year of high school, typhoid would be life-changing.

Some of the city’s first typhoid cases of typhoid had emerged just a few doors away from her home at 15 Albyn Street.

Health teams were still frantically trying to figure out what had caused it, when Sheena fell ill.

“The GP took one look at me and said ‘typhoid’.

“He had been in a Japanese prisoner of war camp and knew straight away that it was typhoid because it had been endemic there,” she recalls.

“I hadn’t enjoyed school and had been looking forward to leaving. I remember thinking ‘well this is good, I won’t have to go to school’.

“Then it got worse. It was hell.”

By the time an ambulance arrived to take her to hospital, delirium setting in.

“The ambulance men were wearing white coats. I thought they were giant seagulls that were trying to carry me away. I shouted to my mum ‘don’t let them burn me, bury me instead!’

“It must have been awful for her.”

Similar scenes were unravelling at homes around the city centre.

The first person to fall ill had developed symptoms on May 12, and the first definitive diagnoses made on May 20.

Before it was over, 503 people had been admitted to hospital with typhoid symptoms.

Infection control methods, health investigators and antibiotics were remarkably effective: in the end, there were three fatalities linked to the outbreak.

And with the Second World War still in people’s memories, it was handled with military precision: names and addresses of those admitted to hospital were published in the local paper and eventually announced as ‘all clear’.

Schools closed, football matches and theatre shows were scrapped, and there were twice daily news briefings to keep the public up to speed as numbers of those affected crept up day by day.

Although mostly contained to the city centre, the outbreak did encroach on other areas: in Montrose, where a woman who had visited Aberdeen had fallen ill, extra chlorine was added to the water supply, schools were given lectures on handwashing and food inspectors scoured hotels, restaurants and shops for tins of the prime suspect: corned beef.

Sheena Blackhall was 16-years-old when she caught typhoid (Image: Contributed)

Handwashing in the town was reported by one newspaper to have reached “mammoth proportions”, quoting one shopkeeper as saying: “Most people I meet have scrubbed their hands until they are raw”.

Back in Aberdeen, the medical officer of health, Dr Ian MacQueen, delivered grim daily briefings and stern statements of risk which, on hindsight, may have simply added to mounting hysteria.

Aberdeen, he said, was a “beleaguered city". He warned against paddling in the sea, Union Street was sprayed with disinfectant and public warnings around hygiene sent sales of soap and disinfectants soaring.

Sheena, meanwhile, had arrived at the City Hospital in Urquhart Road, one of three which had wards cleared to accept typhoid cases: “I was still raving when I got to hospital so they gave me an injection in my bum that knocked me right out,” she remembers.

“I woke up in a men’s ward because they had run out of space. There were only men’s pyjamas available that opened at the front, so I had to wear them pinned together with safety pins.”

As her illness progressed, she lost up to three stones in weight leaving her “like something from the death camps”.

The hospital would become her ‘home’ for the next three months, with patients kept almost entirely indoors, windows firmly shut and visitors kept behind glass.

The boredom was excruciating, she recalls. As word got out about who was affected, families back at home found themselves shunned amid fears they would spread it.

“My dad was manager of my sister’s bus company,” recalls Sheena. “When folk found out the manager’s daughter had typhoid, people cancelled their bus tours.

“It finished the business - a lot of businesses went to the wall on the back of typhoid.”

For Sheena, there was the distress of the death of one woman in her ward whose final hours were spent shouting in wild delirium, and the shocking sight of a teenage girl who suffered an adverse reaction to the mountain of antibiotics they had been given.

“Poor soul, she couldn’t stand anything touching her and they had to put a cage over her bed with the sheets draped over.

“When people came to take photographs of her, they were dressed like spacemen walking on the moon.

Discarded Tins of corned beef from Argentina, 31st May 1964. (Image: Mirrorpix via Getty Images)

“There were women with families at home, young mums with babies who would be howling all night, screaming for their children and gnashing their teeth.”

She recovered but there were lifelong repercussions.

“I had been preparing to go to art school, and during five years at school I had been gathering work in a big folder, including reproductions of art that I had bought.

“They took it outside and burned it. I lost it all.”

That along with the debilitating impact of typhoid and the long-term medication – she remained on antibiotics for a year – meant she struggled through her first year at Gray’s School of Art.

That led to her having to put her passion for art aside and moved to am alternative course.

“I became a teacher but I had wanted to do art,” she says.

“Between that and what happened to my father, typhoid had a huge impact on our lives. We were just one family – multiply that across the town.”

To help soothe some of the hysteria surrounding the outbreak, the late Queen made a morale-boosting visit in June 1964, but it would take months for things to settle down.

Aberdeen-based renowned bacteriologist, Prof Hugh Pennington, was a newly qualified hospital junior doctor working in London at the time of the outbreak.

He says those seeking the source of the outbreak pinpointed it fairly quickly.

“They compared what different people had in common,” he says. “At first the focus was on milk, but that idea fell away because not all the people who fell ill bought their milk from the same dairy.

“Many of them - but not all - had eaten meat bought from William Low, a relatively new business at the end of Union Street.

“And many of the cases were among young women, because at the time there was a popular diet based on eating corned beef.

“I don’t think even today they would be any quicker at finding out what the cause was,” he adds.

Their detective work concluded that a single tin of corned beef must have had a pinprick hole, allowing the contents to be exposed to filthy river water used to cool the cans during production in Argentina.

Leading bacteriologist Prof. Hugh Pennington

In Aberdeen, the contaminated meat was sliced by unaware staff on the shop’s carving machine. The bug then spread to other meats.

An inquiry was held within months of the first case being identified, and a string of food safety recommendations rapidly introduced.

Today, there are even stricter rules and regulations. But Prof. Pennington says even the tightest measures hinge on people handling food understanding the risks and being fully trained.

“Businesses are rather reluctant to bend the rules because of the damage to their reputation it would bring.

“And supermarkets have extra safety systems on top of what is required by law because of the risk of reputational damage,” he says.

But in a world of instant food deliveries, takeaways and a growing trend for home-based food businesses, he warns: “Some of the biggest problems are with small businesses, where staff might not be well trained.

“The smaller the business the more likely they are to be doing something wrong.”