Fathers in the services and mothers on war work meant a widespread concern on the part of canine worriers for a supposed large number of ‘lonely dogs’. Volunteer neighbours should at least offer to take them walkies.
Then there were happier tales. The Our Dumb Friends’ League’s Paddington Shelter reported ‘five white ferrets brought to the shelter because the owner was leaving for the Army and felt they would not be happy with anyone else’. And a number of Angora rabbits were rescued after delayed action bombs had been exploded or made safe.
In March 1940, PDSA News told the story of the Revd M. Duke, who had left the living of Saint Mary’s, Doncaster, for Emmanuel, a church in Paddington in west London. ‘His cat, Whiskers, who had accompanied him to London turned up in Doncaster ten weeks later, where it had left a number of kittens,’ said the report. ‘The only explanation I can think of,’ said the vicar, ‘is that cats have some power of distant communication.’
There were plenty more stories about evacuated cats with amazing homing instincts, including a ten-year-old tabby who voyaged from Saffron Walden to Surrey, another who got from Devon to Surbiton, and yet another who travelled from London to Brighton guided by some impossible feline instinct.
‘Peter’, a three-and-a-half-year-old Siamese, belonging to Mr and Mrs Jenkins of Surbiton, walked home from Devonshire, a distance of 187 miles. It took him three months, ‘but he arrived safely on the front-door steps of his home’.
‘Rota’, a pet lion from a circus ‘won in a bet’ as a cub by its owner, Mr George Thompson, managing director of Rotaprint, lived in a substantial cage in the garden of 49 Cuckoo Hill Road, Pinner, in suburban north London. Neighbours complained about the roaring. ARP Wardens demanded to be armed. Rota ate 50 lb of horseflesh a week. On 31 May he went to the London Zoo. His adventures were just beginning.
A posh cat had a narrow escape via human intervention. In spring 1940 in as yet unbombed London, two office girls in their lunch hour found ‘a frightened tabby’ wandering in Curzon Street, Mayfair. They took it to a shop in nearby Lansdowne Row run by a Miss Marjorie Ashton, who had an ‘Animal Guard’ sign prominently displayed in the window.
Other than being in obvious immediate distress, the tabby was evidently well cared for. It was fortuitously wearing a NARPAC blue-cross-red-circle disc on its collar inscribed with a reference number – which, after some urgent telephoning, quickly divulged an address not too far away in fashionable Eaton Place, Belgravia.
The fortunate tabby seemed all set to be reunited with its upstairs owner but at the tradesman’s entrance of No. 47, the downstairs housekeeper refused to acknowledge it. The family cat, she insisted, had already been ‘despatched in a hamper’ by railway van to its mistress, Lady Juliet Rhys Williams. She was the daughter of the romantic novelist Elinor Glyn and the wife of a prominent Liberal politician, herself an ardent social reformer. Once described as the ‘cleverest woman in England’, Lady Juliet was not clever enough to hang on to her cat.
Lady Juliet was apparently taking refuge at the family estate at Miskin Manor, Glamorganshire. The distressed tabby must have somehow escaped from the ‘hamper’ between Belgravia and Paddington station. It was on its way to Wales in a more robust container the next day.
The wider war was not entirely forgotten. In March 1940, the fate of the gallant Finns, having resisted the Soviets for five months, grabbed the attention of British animal lovers.
The RPSCA had sent the intrepid Lt-Col Gartside to the Baltic and opened a fund for the animals of ‘tragic and unspeakably heroic Finland as they faced the shells, bombs and bullets of the cruel Soviet masses’. Nothing was worse than mistreating animals. Russian horses captured by the Finns, it was reported, ‘showed signs that their normal rations were anything but satisfactory’. There were tales of the Russians training dogs as canine mines to blow up Finnish tanks.
Madame de Gripenberg, wife of the Finnish minister in London, appealed on behalf of ‘the faithful little Finnish Spitz dogs, so clever as messenger carriers and in their ability to find their masters in the snow, the small horses, sturdy, swift and intelligent, the reindeer used to draw sleighs of wounded men.
‘We hope and believe that even in this period of financial stringency there will be many who will find it in their hearts to help the RSPCA to help the animals in Finland.’ By the time these words appeared in print, the exhausted Finns had already sued for peace. There would be plenty more of Europe’s animals to succour in this war.11
Concern for animals began at home. The Government was shaping up for a long siege. That spring 5,000 civil servants of the Ministry of Food were decanted to the faded Edwardian seaside resort of Colwyn Bay in north Wales, to fight the good fight with memo and rubber stamp from requisitioned hotels and boarding houses. The Meadowcroft Hotel on Llannerch Road was to be the headquarters of the Animal Feeding Stuffs Division. It would function, de facto, as the Ministry of Pets.
Meat was declared rationed on 11 March 1940. It was done by price rather than weight, to the value of 1s. 10d. per person per week. Cheap cuts became premium cuts. For carnivores, it was to be a tough time. Sausages, of dwindling meat content, were not rationed and nor was offal (liver, kidneys, tripe, oxtail, kidney, heart etc.) but that did not mean you could get it.
Tinned pet food such as Chappie and Kit-e-Kat were not restricted (yet). The Cat urged the vegetarians among their readers to donate their physical meat ration to cats’ shelters.
Advice crowded in from all sides on the feeding of pets, from newspapers, from welfare groups, from manufacturers. NARPAC had issued a booklet, Wartime Aids for Animal Owners, which stressed a balanced diet for cats and dogs, containing its proper quota of ‘energy-giving’, ‘body building’ and ‘protective’ foods. A large Pekingese weighing 10 lb needed 5–6 oz of carbohydrates, 1 oz of protein and a ¼ oz of fat at each meal, while for a 25 lb Scots Terrier and a 60 lb Airedale the amounts had to be proportionate.
‘This country has not reached a stage when the wholesale destruction of household pets is necessary,’ counselled the RSPCA. Its handy leaflet Feeding Dogs and Cats in Wartime advised, ‘Potatoes are plentiful and if you put in extra tubers when digging for victory you will not have it on your conscience that shipping space is being taken for food for your animals.’ Starchy potatoes could be made palatable with gravy concocted from bones. Perhaps.
Other suggested canine diets consisted of stale bread and oatmeal, ‘made into thick porridge’ and mixed with meat scraps from the table, or stale bread mixed with ‘chopped cabbage, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, turnip, carrot or other green leaves’ moistened with ‘soup or gravy made from bones or scraps’. Gravy from to-be-human-consumed stewing meat could be offered to pets, ‘a sacrifice that every owner would be prepared to make’.
Proprietary foods, ‘Red Heart, Kit-e-Kat, Ken-L Ration, Chappie etc.’ were available in glass bottles, said the Society, although being a charity, it could not make recommendations.
Cats, the Society advised, ‘will usually eat the food recommended in the above diets, provided there is included some meat gravy, sardine oil, or oil liquids made from fish trimmings. The Ministry of Food will not permit the use of Cod Liver Oil as food for household pets.’12
The pacifist Louise Lind-af-Hageby meanwhile could find comfort in how the war had inspired ‘the majestic rise of the vegetarian life, once supposed to be chosen by sentimentalist weaklings and the gastronomically foolish. The potato and the carrot have assumed enormous importance.’
Too much so for some … The Cabinet Food Policy Committee decided at the beginning of May that impending shortage was going to mean reductions of foodstuff all round for ‘non-essential’ livestock. Horse racing should be reduced and greyhounds limited to one meeting per week per track as a statement of intent, if nothing else. Hunts would be rationed to one sixth of the pre-war level of feed for hounds (including beagles) and one tenth for hunters.
Pig and poultry keepers were already getting one si
xth of pre-war levels. Game and silver fox farms were strictly rationed. Zoos were severely curtailed – one third of pre-war consumption for London Zoo, one fifth and later one tenth for private zoos of pre-war levels. The hunt for horseflesh for the carnivores was constant. Getting fish was ‘very difficult’. Two ‘big hungry sea lions’ were shipped to America. Carrots for fruit eaters were grown at Whipsnade. An adoption scheme was launched, initially for ZSL Fellows, rapidly expanded to anyone who wanted to send money for food – typically hard-to-get but unrationed fruit.
‘Adolf’ the aardvark (thus named as a baby in 1936) was one of the first to be adopted. He was renamed ‘Charlie’ but people seemed to prefer his earlier incarnation. Dorothy L. Sayers, the animal-loving crime writer, adopted a porcupine.13
Wheat for dog biscuits was reduced by two thirds of pre-war amounts. The ‘Milled Wheaten Substance (Restriction) Order’ made on 2 May, biscuit-loving dogdom’s bane, forbade the use of such products for anything but human food without special licence.
The National Milk Scheme would be launched on 1 July, to provide expectant and nursing mothers and children under five with daily milk at a fixed price of 2d. a pint, or, if necessary, free. Otherwise for adults it was two pints a week. There was nothing spare for pets.
Hungry humans knew who it was to blame. Anti-pet whispering became a clamour. Grumpy farmers were already advocating the destruction of domestic pets – while their own working dogs were exempt from licence. Tail-Waggers advised that there were ‘dreadful people’ abroad leaving lumps of poisoned bread in the streets and advised dog lovers to carry a lump of washing soda in their pockets ready to push down a poisoned dog’s throat.
How to reduce dog numbers was becoming a direct concern of the Government. Raising the cost of the dog licence was considered in Whitehall in May. But it was noted by HM Customs and Excise for the Minister that this ‘would fall on the lower classes’ who fed scraps to their pets. ‘It is the pampered and well-fed dogs of the better-off classes that make inroads into feeding stuffs that might be better used,’ he was told. How true that was. There was trouble ahead.
Concern was noted meanwhile in The Animal World among tortoise owners about the high price of lettuces. It was suggested they be given ‘bananas or oranges’ but such luxuries were by now beyond reach: ‘Some will take pieces of apple but many do not seem to appreciate this.’
On 7–9 April 1940 the Germans overran Denmark. Danish bacon and butter was now off the British housewife’s menu. German naval and air landings rapidly seized southern Norway. British and French troops hung on perilously in the north. On 7 May, ‘the Norway debate’ in the House of Commons made it clear that Neville Chamberlain, moth hunter and bird lover, must go.
On 10 May the Germans invaded Belgium and the Netherlands. Another food larder had fallen. Pet fanciers had their own view of events. When Holland fell The Aquarist magazine regretfully recorded: ‘Away goes our last source of imported stock.’ It had been the origin of such fancied fish as golden orfe, golden rudd and golden carp.
‘Our hobby,’ said the journal, ‘can give a peace obtained by few’ – and was the only pet hobby which could be kept going in an airtight room.
Winston Churchill formed a coalition government in London. By the 13th the Germans were across the River Meuse. The next day the new home defence force was announced for men between the ages of 15–65, to be called the Local Defence Volunteers. A quarter of a million offered their services within twenty-four hours. There was nothing phoney any more about this war, for humans or for pets.
There was a war already raging in Downing Street. ‘Bob’ and ‘Heather’, the Dover-sole-rewarded Treasury felines of the appeasement years, were still in charge. Churchill’s youngest daughter, Mary, recalled the fate of the incumbent(s) when her father took over: ‘He was treated with great kindness but we disrespectfully named him Munich Mouser since he was a holdover from Neville Chamberlain.’ In fact there seem to have been two appeasement era cats.
Mr Churchill meanwhile had formed a special relationship with the Admiralty cat he had encountered on his return to the Government eight months before. He had named him ‘Nelson’. Already he was a bit of a newspaper celebrity.
The Washington Post’s London correspondent sensed the tension at the heart of power. ‘Nelson will follow his master shortly to Downing Street and make a problem of protocol. How, it is asked, will the Munich cat react to Nelson? Will he follow Chamberlain next door to his new home at No. 11 leaving the field at No. 10 to Nelson? Or will he refuse to abdicate and call for a show-down?’
It was the former. Lady Mary Soames recalled that Nelson chased the ancien régime cat (or cats) out of Downing Street pretty sharpish, though maybe not entirely. Secret Government files reveal that Bob ‘became the pet of Downing Street staff’ when the Treasury was hit by a bomb in late 1940 and Heather lost a fight with a rat in a Treasury storeroom in 1941. Bob seems to have survived skulking round the garden entrance while Nelson took up official residence.
The Cabinet Office in nearby Great George Street had acquired a rival cat, ‘Jumbo’, sometime in 1939, who had an official weekly maintenance allowance of 1s. 6d. for food under the name ‘Mr. J. Umbo’. Jumbo’s death certificate, dated 8 June 1942, signed by the ODFL vet at the Eccleston Street Animals’ Hospital, is preserved in the National Archives.14
11 A strange story surfaced in 2011 from wartime German files about a Dalmatian called ‘Jackie’ owned by Tor Borg, a Finnish businessman. In late 1940 his German-born (but anti-Nazi) wife, dubbed the dog ‘Hitler’ because of the way it raised a paw in the ‘German salute’ whenever the Führer’s name was mentioned. News reached Nazi diplomats in Helsinki, who were not amused and sought ways to bring Borg to trial for insult.
12 The prescription of free ‘welfare foods’, cod liver oil and orange juice, for children and expectant mothers was introduced in December 1941. It was a serious offence to give it to cats but some mothers (but not all cats) found it hard to resist.
13 Which at 1s. a week was one of the cheapest creatures to feed. A lion cost 15s., an elephant £1. Most expensive were the sea lions, some of which were sent to America. Visitors were further encouraged to bring kitchen scraps, acorns and stale bread. Such measures in effect kept the London Zoo going through the war.
14 Cats seem to have been at the heart of Britain’s war leadership, in contrast to Adolf Hitler’s doggy entourage. According to the biographer of his mistress, Eva Braun, the Führer ‘was allergic to cats’. And look how it all turned out.
Chapter 10
The Dunkirk Dogs
The Belgian Army surrendered on 28 May 1940. Across the Channel, the British Expeditionary Force began its long retreat to an embattled pocket on the northeast French coast. An extraordinary episode in the story of wartime domestic animals was about to unfold.
Throughout history, armies have always attracted dogs. There’s something about field kitchens perhaps, or general, barking excitement. And young men respond with equal puppy-dog affection, compounded by loneliness and a longing for an affectionate companion. It was the same with the British Expeditionary Force, especially in retreat. Second Lieutenant E. J. Haywood was a young infantry officer. He recalled the mournful slouch through Belgium in May 1940:
We passed through village after village. Dogs were whining and running about, vainly looking for their owners. Other dogs had been left tied up, and barked furiously at us, or howled dismally.
To my great annoyance, a contingent of dogs of all shapes and sizes decided to join the procession. These wretched dogs were obviously strays from Bambecque, and were evidently prepared to forget their newly acquired problems of food and shelter in the transient joy of a walk that had more canine flavour than usual to enliven it.
I cursed them all bitterly and fruitlessly, for, as they yapped and frisked about, they advertised our approach.
Edward Oates, a Royal Engineer, remembered shooting the dogs: ‘The dogs were just roaming
about, there was nobody there, and they were getting dangerous, you see. They were getting hungry and snapping a bit.’
Sapper E. V. B. Williams (an RSPCA staff member now serving in the Royal Engineers) took a kindlier approach. He recalled seeing the ‘pitiful procession of refugees, pushing handcarts piled high with personal belongings and sitting on top a small dog quite content and taking stock of its new surroundings. But in some way or another it never took us long to make friends with these gallant pets. Also in quite a number of cases we were able to give these animals a painless end. This was the ultimate fate of our little camp follower, “Sapper”. She was a small black and tan terrier who wandered into our camp the day we had landed in France. She was about seven weeks old when she joined us and was with us the whole time until things got too hot.’
Poor Sapper did not make it to the beaches – it appeared she got a British bullet between the eyes. But there were plenty of pets who did make it. The RSPCA reported: ‘Large numbers of dogs were gathered with the retreating British troops in the Dunkirk area.’
As Royal Navy destroyers came alongside and the ‘little ships’ took bedraggled men out to the bigger ships offshore, amazingly, animals were scrambling into the sea and onto the rescuing ships – ‘knowing with the sureness of canine instinct that the men who had so-far befriended them in their appalling need would not desert them at the last,’ as the RSPCA’s post-war history put it.
The story would be told of ‘Boxer’, a brindled Bulldog who was taken to France by his owner, Capt. C. Payton-Smyth of the Royal Army Service Corps, when the BEF shipped out. In the débâcle, Boxer, who hated water, became separated from his master and had to be physically thrown onto a rescuing ship. They were later happily reunited.
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