The Spanish Flu of 1918 was a hugely destructive global phenomenon that infected a third of the world’s population and led to the death of an estimated 500 million people at the end of the First World War. Despite the lack of data regarding the economic consequence of a World War combined with a global pandemic, trawling through newspapers of the time suggests that businesses were extremely badly hit. It is not hard to imagine the difficulty many societies around the world would have faced in 1918.