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- (27y,10m)
Occupations : 1). According to Arlene Dickerson - Billiard Marker.
2). On Francis Elizabeth's Birth Certificate - Labour Agent.
3). On his Death Notice - Trader.
4). According to his namesake son - Trader / General Dealer
at Teyateyaneng - His partner Mr Hickling.His death notice MGH: D970 - Free State Provincial Archives - gives his
father as Frederick Mathews Dickerson.Other sources record Matthews Frederick.
Note ! If the death notice is true - Died 27/10/1918 at 27y,10m,0d then his
calculated birth date should be 27 December 1890.Dimmie Farrow tells:- Frank's sister, Mabel Frances, always spoke of him as
being her favourite brother ("my baby brother") & I remember the sadness when
the news came when he died. We were in England with my father's family because
he was "in the trenches" in the 1914-1918 war. It was just before the end of
the war & in the terrible Spanish Flu epidemic which killed so many people. I
remember so clearly the cable coming & my mother's grief. I was 9 yrs old, &
we had heard so many stories of this dear young brother of hers. Her father
Matthews Frederick, had died in the year before (1917) & I remember how she
told us that she had heard him calling her & how she had started up in her bed
in the middle of the night & called to him, "I'm coming" & in the morning the
cable came to tell of his death, & how he had called to her before he died.George Geddes Dickerson tells:- Uncle Frank was a keen cricketer and is known
to have played against a touring MCC side, presumably for Border.Frank died from the deadly Spanish influenza in the epidemic of 1918.
An investigation into the global epidemic of influenza in 1918, which killed
an estimated 40 million people, has shown it almost certainly started in an
army camp in France in the middle of World War 1. This outbreak, the most
lethal epidemic in modern times, has been called Spanish flu and occured
apparently simultaneously in places as far apart as South Africa, India and
Indonesia. Up to a billion people are believed to have been infected and
millions died in one of the greatest mysteries in medical science.One doctor at Fort Devens, near Boston, Massachussetts, said the victims
"rapidly developed the most viscious type of pneumonia that has ever been
seen. Two hours after admission they have the mahogany spots over the cheek
bones and a few hours later you can begin to see the cyanosis extending from
the ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard to distinguish the
coloured man from the white. It is only a matter of a few hours then until
death comes and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate. It is
horrible." It certainly was horrible. Most historians could tell you that more
people died from 'flu than on the battlefields of World War 1. That's about
all. In contrast to the tens of thousands of books about the war, there are
just a couple of dozen or so about the much greater killer. Here are the
figures. There were 9.2m combat deaths during the four years of war, and 15m
related (starvation, revolution,etc) deaths. But estimates for 'flu casualties
run in excess of 100m. In Cape Town they ran out of coffins: bodies were
buried in mass graves, wrapped in blankets. There are stories current in local
families of the ox-wagons going through Karoo villages every night, loading up
the day's dead. Unseen by doctor or nurse. In many parts of the world there
was simply no record kept of deaths. The scientists found the gene sequence
for the 1918 'flu virus. But they still don't know what made it so lethal.
Meanwhile they're thinking of looking for tissue samples from the 1890 'flu.
Did that, perhaps, confer immunity so that the 1918 victims were mostly the
young and strong and not, as one would expect, the elderly and weak? The
search continues.
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