It was all the idea of a certain Captain T. C. Colthurst, who would later tell an audience how, in September 1939, he was moved to take action after seeing the bodies of dogs that had been thrown into the Regent’s Canal in north London. He was ‘Animal Guard No. 1,’ he announced proudly. By October there would be thirty of them.
‘Animal Guards are Needed Now!’ announced Animal and Zoo News. ‘Who will volunteer? Any adult woman or man over military age is eligible. It is to the Animal Guards throughout the country that we shall turn if our herds of cattle are contaminated by gas. And it is the Animal Guards who will care for our domestic pets if they fall victim to war.’
It was publicist’s dream. Pathé Gazette made a newsreel showing guards in swaddling anti-gas suits lovingly rescuing a fashionably dressed suburban woman’s Great Dane, which had been ‘wounded by shrapnel’. A cosy chat was given on the BBC by Mr Christopher Stone, the honey-toned, Old Etonian Radio Luxembourg disc jockey. ‘Do not have your pet destroyed,’ he pleaded. ‘At the beginning of the war a certain number of people did this. They have regretted it ever since. So far, thank God, the raiders haven’t come but you do see, don’t you, how important it is that this great plan for the benefit of the animals should be able to work smoothly?’
He mentioned an ‘eel, the pet of an elderly lady’ and a number of ‘mongeese brought to our ports by sailors’ as having been candidates for registration – which further ‘brought to light all kinds of curious pets, fowls, ducks, goats, lambs, monkeys, small bears, and even a lion cub,’ as he would write later.
A news-sheet appeared. Issue No. 2 of the NARPAC Bulletin announced: ‘A great army of National Animal Guards is organising throughout the country. These voluntary Guards, of which it is hoped there will be one in every residential street, are intended to act as contact officers between first-aid posts and animal owners in each locality. The National Animal Guards will invite owners to register all animals and will provide identity discs. Animal Guards are recognised as doing work of national importance and will wear distinctive armlets.’9
All this was months before the Local Defence Volunteers (thereafter the Home Guard) would come into being. Animal Guards? What on earth were they? In fact they were unpaid volunteers with no official status, no preference for petrol, telephones or reservation from military call-up. They did not even have the legal status to destroy a wounded animal without a vet’s signature. Nevertheless they would have a rank structure and a six-man (and three women) Grand Council – a kind of pet lover’s Supreme Soviet.
According to a rose-tinted, post-war account: ‘Offers of help poured in and in the course of a few days over 40,000 people had offered to become National Animal Guards. The process of enrolling them, of arranging them in local groups under Chief Guards, and of fitting such groups into coherent regional organizations, gathered speed. The Guards all wore a white armlet with the now familiar NARPAC symbol, a blue cross in a red circle.’
The triumphalism of late-1939 was extreme. ‘For the duration of the war all the animal welfare societies are supporting the National A.R.P. Animals committee,’ it was announced in the Bulletin. ‘It will have under its care at least six million dogs and cats as well as huge numbers of other animals.’
There was more. ‘The PDSA has placed its Jumble Department at the Committee’s disposal. This jumble collection is the only one officially authorised on behalf of animals,’ it was announced. This was a coup. The RSPCA consulted their lawyers – jumble was charity lifeblood.
The Duchess of Hamilton was equally furious. She had recently made a genteel appeal in the press: ‘Who will help by offering a free country home to a dog or a cat belonging to evacuated London people and to those called up for service?’ What was wrong with that?
NARPAC had become very cross: this was breaking the common front. They had sent someone round to Animal Defence House to give her a ticking-off. But the Duchess could give as good as she got and told Committee chairman H. E. Dale in December, ‘This country has gone to war in the cause of freedom. We strongly resent, as will all earnest friends of animals, any dictatorial attempt to suppress and curtail animal welfare activities.’ She knew who to blame for the September ‘massacre’ as she called it – the Home Office and their horrid ‘grey pamphlet’ (‘Air Raid Precautions for Animals’) with its fatal advice.
Furthermore the organization of ‘a great army of animal guards’ was doomed to be ‘as embarrassing a failure as the ARP organisation generally,’ Her Grace insisted. That was the Ferne blackout rumpus. Mr Dale replied feebly: ‘I assure you we have no dictatorial ambitions.’
So the patrician ark in Wiltshire stayed beyond the socialistic clutches of NARPAC. Something else was stirring at Ferne. ‘The officers and men at a wireless station somewhere in England, have owing to the efforts of one of their police staff, come forward with an extraordinary offer to help and several evacuees have been placed with them,’ reported The Dog World in November. It was all very unofficial. Could refugee pets serve the war effort themselves? It turned out they could.
There had been no rush to recruit pets directly to the aid of the nation’s armed forces. Dogs had served the British Army well on the Western Front in 1917–18 as messengers, but in this new, mobile, more technical war what might their place be? Mr H. S. Lloyd, the Crufts champion breeder, was working on a Home Office contract to conduct experiments with police dogs. In November 1939, one of his dogs was tried out as a guard in a test staged at RAF Northolt, the airfield west of London.
A bigger trial followed – with a view to finding suitable breeds and training methods for canines to protect ‘detached posts such as RDF [radar] stations where the guard personnel stayed consistent – and to whom the dog would respond and stay loyal’. ‘I could get a lot of material from the “Lost dogs homes” and train these,’ Mr Lloyd told the War Office.
It was not a success. One dog was ‘so fierce it was a danger to the general public, whether innocent or guilty.’ Another was so friendly ‘it could not be relied upon even to bark at the approach of an unauthorised person’. One dog proved friendly with the men at the guard post but although he ‘occasionally barked in the night, it was by no means certain he would so at the approach of an intruder’. This was not going to get the war won.
8 The evacuees would have plenty of choice because 1939 was a big year for dog films. They might have enjoyed Peace on Earth, an MGM cartoon parable released that year, in which the human race extinguishes itself in war and animals take over. Of UK productions, Owd Bob was still going the rounds, joined in July by Border Collie, a Cumberland-set semi-documentary, narrated by its hero ‘Jeff’ and followed promptly by Sheep Dog, which took the formula to Wales and featured ‘Mr Tom Jones’ the shepherd, his horse ‘Tufty’ and dogs ‘Scott’, ‘Guide’ and ‘Chip’.
The big news from Hollywood was The Wizard of Oz, in which Dorothy Gale’s dog, ‘Toto’, was played by a brindle Cairn Terrier bitch (real name ‘Terry’). Alsatian star ‘Rin Tin Tin (III)’ had outings that year in Law of the Wolf and Fangs of the Wild. Yorkshire author Eric Knight meanwhile was in the middle of writing the short story, ‘Lassie Come Home’, that would be filmed in 1943 to establish the most famous dog movie franchise of all.
More urbane dogs in the Bolton audience would have enjoyed Myrna Loy and William Powell in the 1939 release, Another Thin Man, featuring the famous Wire Haired Fox Terrier ‘Skippy’ as their pet ‘Asta’. Already his appearances in the series and in other films had created a huge interest in the breed in both the US and UK.
My own 1939 favourite would have been the peerless Society Dog Show, in which Mickey Mouse enters Pluto. While Mickey grooms his mutt, Pluto starts swooning over ‘Fifi’ the Peke. Things get worse before they get better. In contrast, pre-war feline movie stars were thin on the ground.
9 The equipment of a National Animal Guard comprises:
One armlet
One house poster
One registration book
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100 identity discs and split rings
A number of NARPAC handbooks
Approved adjustable elastic cat collars
One official collecting box, numbered and sealed
Chapter 7
Hunting Must Continue!
All the concerns thus far had been about animals in cities. Of course there were plenty more in the countryside – where the nation’s agricultural economy was being urgently mobilized for war. Food rationing was coming. What would that mean for animals? Petrol was rationed from the very start. A NARPAC badge was no guarantee of getting any. People must learn all over again how to get around by horse.
Very soon the return of horses to both town and country was generally noted – pulling tradesmen’s vans while evacuated townies in the country had resorted to the pony and trap. It would be noted: ‘Governesses’ carts were getting £40. They could not be given away before the war.’
Urban horses, like pets, were not going to be officially evacuated. Nor could they be taken into shelters. Detailed instructions on how to control horses during air raids were meanwhile put out by NARPAC. Garages and stabling were designated as street shelters plus emergency standing in parks and playing fields in London was scouted out by Captain Hope, the assistant editor of Riding magazine.
Colonel Stordy could report on 11 September that the many railway horses in the capital were in good protective order and that the means of removal of maimed or dead animals was in place. ‘The King has permitted the use of the Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace as an emergency horse standing, large enough for about 20 animals, and a first aid post,’ he said. ‘A horse ambulance also is stationed in the mews.’
There was another aspect of equine activity far from the big city that enjoyed royal patronage: hunting. Foxhounds and hunters were not pets but they were civilian animals, inspiring deep sentiment among those who tended them and bitter divisions within the animal ‘welfare’ world. And so horse and hound (and fox) have their places in this story.
Goaded by a small but vocal anti-hunting lobby, the Masters of Fox Hounds Association had made soundings in early 1939.What would war mean for hunting? Would there be rationing, or mass mobilization of horsepower for the Army? A public opinion-winning move would be a voluntary reduction in dog packs (expressed as ‘couples’ – pairs of dogs) and oat-consuming hunters.
The MFHA circulated members on 29 August with instructions ‘in the event of war’, while admitting, ‘cub-hunting [the season had begun on the 4th] may only be carried on under very great difficulties. But it would be prejudicial to the country to stop it altogether.’
They recommended that ‘Cubbing should take place where conditions allow, in order to kill as many foxes as possible, but it should not be looked on as a form of sport as long as the war lasts.’ Meanwhile masters should, ‘consider reductions in their establishments generally.’
When war came, Horse & Hound magazine had no doubts. ‘Hunting must continue!’ it proclaimed on 22 September. With men being called up, the sporting paper insisted: ‘Women huntsmen will carry on so that, after the forces of evil have been run to ground, we can continue once again with the traditional sport of our fathers.’ It was suggested that evacuee children should follow hunts and visit kennels to see for themselves the importance of hunting in country life. ‘War or no war,’ reported The Tatler, ‘it is on record that the Quorn have been killing their fox a day.’ A page of photographs depicted a special day’s hunting organized for the officers of the Life Guards.
The Field lamented, ‘War is upon us at the very commencement of cubbing.’ The magazine’s correspondent out with the Croome for its first austerity hunt of the season in November 1939, noted: ‘No brave scarlet and gleaming toppers, instead rat-catcher interspersed with khaki, unclipped horses and a sadly depleted field.’ The writer however knew what mattered: ‘But let us forget the troubles of this mad world. Wars and rumours of wars retreat into insignificance when hounds are running.’
Hunting was also important in British military life. The place of the horse-borne pursuit of foxes in modern war was harder to define than in 1914 when it was both the cradle of valour and a source of cavalry mounts. Soon after the outbreak of this new war, the 1st Cavalry Division had been sent off to Palestine to do nobody knew quite what. The British Expeditionary Force had been shipped across the channel propelled entirely by internal combustion engines plus a number of mules. By late 1939 its men were coming home on leave. Would they bring back adopted foreign pets?
The Ministry of Agriculture reminded everyone how smuggled dogs had caused serious rabies outbreaks at the end of the First World War and there should especially be no regimental pets belonging to ‘colonial or dominion troops, which had been the source of so much trouble in 1914’.
It posted a stern notice: ‘Soldiers and airmen are reminded of the dangers of allowing stray dogs and cats to attach themselves to them. They must be handed over to military police for disposal.’ And early in 1940 there was an Air Ministry order amending King’s Regulations, ‘to prevent the movement or importing into this country by air of dogs and cats’. There must be no flying pets.
In the same British Expeditionary Force however, now in France, there were reportedly officers keen to keep up the old traditions by importing packs of hunting dogs from Britain, as Wellington’s officers had done. The French Minister of the Interior refused to make any of the countryside available. He told them, a little coolly, that the French treated the war seriously.
The Royal Artillery Foxhounds, with the exception of seven couples, were destroyed soon after the outbreak of war, but one hunting historian states: ‘Major Montacute Selby-Lowndes took a pack of beagles to France with the British Expeditionary Force,’ while the whipper-in of the Royal Artillery Hunt, Captain Frederick Burnaby Edmeades, ‘managed to smuggle a couple of harriers with them to France and enjoyed several weeks hunting until apprehended by the Gendarmerie and hauled before the Army Commander.’ All very dashing but it was not modern warfare.
When an MP asked in Parliament on 2 October whether the Minister of Agriculture ‘should take advantage of the present situation and bring this savage and destructive sport to a complete close?’ it was a marker of the way things were going politically. The chairman of the British Field Sports Society wrote the next day to the agriculture minister, Major Sir R. H. Dorman Smith, to say: ‘Where would the eighteen or so mounted yeomanry regiments found today get their horses were it not for hunting? Mounted regiments may yet come into their own in this war.’
Lord Burghley, Master of the East Sussex Hounds (then a junior minister at the Ministry of Supply), wrote to the Minister on the 4th: ‘What I hear from fellow masters is that they are making large reductions on their packs to keep the show going until the end of the war so that one of the greatest and happiest facets of our country life may not be lost and centuries of careful breeding destroyed in a moment.’
The story of field sports and war was to be a tortuous one. Lord Burghley would have a special place in it.
Of course the countryside was much more than a sporting playground. It was where food came from to feed the nation – or at least some of it. Half of the bulk feedstuff for Britain’s cattle was imported. It had long been cheaper than home grown. The sea lanes were not yet contested, but they surely would be, as they had been by German submarines in 1917–18, when greedy dogs were blamed for eating all the food. A prominent Tory MP had declared if he had his way, he would have ‘every Pekingese dog in the country killed and made into meat pies’.
This time round planners knew that, should war come, importing killed meat in refrigerated ships was a more efficient means of getting protein into the country than importing grain to fatten British herds. Sheep meanwhile ate British upland grass.
To survive the siege there would have to be fewer cattle in the nation’s fields, but eating more home-grown feedstuff coming from more land, which had yet to be put under the plough. There was nothing to s
pare – not even chickenfeed.
Every source of protein was vulnerable. Eggs came from Poland, even China. ‘It is too early yet to frame a definite policy in respect of pigs, poultry or eggs, in view of the large amount of cereals [maize and barley], required for these forms of production, a large proportion of which has in the past been imported,’ the Agriculture Minister Reginald Dorman-Smith announced on 19 October 1939.
But there had to be some sort of action. There were sudden local shortages. Foodless pigs and chickens were being slaughtered wholesale. By the winter of 1939–40 there was generalized panic that the larder was emptying. Anything with a mouth or beak that could not itself be eaten, even those that could be, seemed to be an enemy within. Animal-loving Louise Lind-af-Hageby despaired at the ‘stupidity’ of it all when she wrote a little later:
Those clamouring for the killing of animals knew already that the number of cattle had been severely reduced, that hens had been killed on an enormous scale, there had been a clamour for the trapping of ten million moles, that the pigeons of cathedrals and Trafalgar Square had been threatened with extinction. In some people’s minds, the idea of winning the war had become associated with exterminating every nonhuman creature.
Crows, jackdaws, sparrows, starlings, pigeons and rooks were being trapped or shot in their thousands. For the lowlier rural orders, according to one authority, ‘the war seemed a splendid excuse for the legalisation of poaching’.
When partridge and pheasant shoots became unviable (beaters had been called up), The Field magazine suggested hunting grey squirrels, which had been declared a pest under 1939 emergency legislation. But not necessarily to eat:
Shooting men can get a deal of fun in dealing with him. And in helping to rid the country of an animal in whose favour it is difficult to say anything, they will be doing work of national importance.
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