Her Grace’s letter was published on 12 August – the day Hermann Göring declared the ‘Eagle Attack’, the all-out offensive on southern England to crush the Royal Air Force. That same day Mrs Anne Walters, a farmer’s wife, wrote to Farmers Weekly to complain about huge flocks of sparrows eating corn in the fields – ‘the people’s food,’ as she put it. ‘My husband has a rook man,’ she said, ‘but the sparrows are worse. I should be glad to know what if anything is being done to prevent it.’
Not just sparrows were swarming in the air. The Germans had turned on the defenders’ airfields to smash the RAF on the ground and win air superiority. Bombs and bullets were now falling in the fields of southern England – along with shot-down aircraft and parachuting aircrew. The etiquette of offering tea to bailed-out enemy pilots was debated.
Huge aerial battles raged over southern England. A few stray bombs fell in the north London suburbs on the 22nd. The next day Farmers Weekly reported on the battle for the nation’s survival: ‘Stock casualties in Nazi raids, first big test of Animal ARP services.’ It had urgent news:
Most bombs in the intense Nazi raids of the past two weeks have fallen in rural areas. Farm livestock has come off lightly. First aid had been given to a heifer valued at £40, which had undoubtedly saved its life.
The next day Fighter Command’s most critical week began as ‘savage’ bombing aimed to knock out the airfields defending London. On the 25th a straying night bomber hit the City. Battle was also joined in the fields of Kent. As Farmers Weekly reported:
There has been no falling off in milk yields. Uninjured cattle show no after effects. One dairy herd lost a cow killed outright but an hour later the owner found the rest of the herd lying quietly around the edge of the bomb craters. Most liable to take fright were horses – which would career madly about the fields at the sound of low-flying machines.
The only way to get compensation was to salvage what could be for human consumption, the journal advised. ‘Dead beasts must be promptly bled – within 20 minutes of death, cut the throat and if possible disembowel it.’
NARPAC’s rural scheme of flying squads of vets and butchers appeared to be working. ‘Cattle and sheep had suffered because of their tendency to herd together,’ it was reported. Horses and pigs sailed through. Hardly any farm buildings had been hit. All livestock casualties were in the open.
It was tough generally being a farmer. Nazi bombs caused thin milk, it was reported on 30 August. A farmer summoned under wartime regulations for selling milk with low butterfat escaped prosecution when a Land Girl ‘gave evidence that the cows were nervy and jumpy after the first raid’. The case was dismissed.
Meanwhile the propaganda battle to ensure the survival of the nation’s pets raged just as fiercely. On 23 August the ‘Dogs of Britain Fighter Fund’ was launched. As Our Dogs proclaimed:
Dogdom’s direct contribution to the downfall of Germany has begun. You too can join the movement to provide Britain with another weapon in her plan to attack to defend.
The move was at the suggestion of Miss Veronica Tudor-Williams, famous breeder of Basenjis, the barkless African hunting dog. Mr C. Dowdewell, Airedale lover, contributed two guineas and Smoky Snelgrove Pekingese 10s. 6d in the first week, along with scores more patriotic dog lovers. A total of £5,000 was needed. The Kennel Club became the official sponsor.
Hungry dogs would need all the goodwill they could muster. Food was still the issue. The Bloodhound breeder, Lady Johnson-Ferguson, wife of a Scottish baronet, got into trouble in late August when she wrote to the Food Minister saying that she had special biscuits made of wholemeal flour for her dogs. Why couldn’t everyone else? It seems she was trying to be helpful.
A furious internal memo pointed out this was a clear violation of the Milled Wheaten Substance (Restriction) Order: ‘Lady Johnson-Ferguson is keener on keeping her dogs fed than winning the war.’ Her dogs had to eat something, though.
Country dogs had a better time of it. It was a question of finding food. Newly-married Mrs Joyce Ixer was in charge of a Spitfire repair depot, part of the Supermarine complex around Southampton, while tending a kennel of her beloved Alsatians (she had been smitten as a small child) at home with her husband. As well as bombing and invasion scares, she recalled over seventy years later, the daily task of getting meat from slaughtered New Forest ponies to feed them – which was kept in a running stream to keep the flies off. Her dogs thrived
That summer, novelist and journalist George Orwell spent some happy time at his rented cottage at Wallington with its clucking hens and rows of onions. He wrote in his diary for 18–19 August: ‘Two glorious days. No newspapers and no mention of the war. They were cutting the oats and we took Marx [the poodle] out both days to help course the rabbits, at which Marx showed unexpected speed. The whole thing took me straight back to my childhood, perhaps the last bit of that kind of life that I shall ever have.’
This was to prove the case for him and a lot of other pet lovers.
Chapter 13
Blitz Pets
On the morning of 4 September 1940, the War Cabinet Committee on Civil Defence met in London to consider: ‘Item 1 – The Restriction of Consumption of Food by Cats and Dogs.’
Sir John Anderson was in the chair. Lord Woolton, the newly appointed Minister of Food, had produced a short paper concerning not just pets but also ‘dog racing and the maintenance of zoos’. Protests from poultry keepers that their feedstuffs were being severely restricted were considered. Racing greyhounds were apparently consuming oceans of milk and mountains of rice too. What were these useless dogs doing to help the cause of national survival? But as Lord Woolton reminded everyone, any drastic steps to reduce the dog population would arouse ‘intense public clamour just as taxation of dogs did in the last war’. Interfering with the people’s pets was politically contentious.
The Committee agreed: ‘There should be no action [yet] to reduce the dog and cat population generally.’ But the fact that moves had already been made to reduce the use of human foodstuffs in the manufacture of dog biscuits to one half of pre-war levels should be stressed to ‘critics’ (meaning those grumbling farmers).
In Berlin that evening Hitler made an exultant speech at the Sportpalast. In retaliation for a pinprick RAF raid on Berlin, he declared London to be a target. Britain’s cities would be erased and the last island of resistance extinguished. That same evening air raids were made on port cities – Bristol, Cardiff, Swansea, Liverpool and Newcastle. The ‘Blitz’ had begun and domestic animals were in the firing line as never before.
As for invasion, the Führer promised not to keep the British waiting too long. He was ‘coming’, so he promised the enraptured audience, dog-biscuit shortage in England or not. The crowd screamed: ‘Hitler! Hitler! Hitler!’
That day GHQ Home Forces issued a briefing note: ‘Germany is presently engaged in an attempt to gain superiority over our fighter force. If a firm measure can be gained over the next few days then a full scale invasion may be attempted over a broad front in an area between Shoreham to Southwold.’
The Chiefs of Staff met in Whitehall on 7 September and concluded the Germans had completed their preparations. For the next few days the moon, tide and weather were all favourable. Regional commissioners were teleprinted: ‘You must assume invasion might be attempted at any time now though it is not assumed as a certainty. Civil departments to be so informed.’
At around tea-time that afternoon the first wave of bombers arrived over the capital, followed by a second, two hours later. The attack started in the East End before creeping westwards to central London, leaving more than 430 dead and more than 1,600 injured. It was the first mass raid on London (and the last in daylight) but it heralded the first of fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing.
Mothers and their children were evacuated all over again, not in a mass but in ‘a daily stream piloted to areas of relative safety according to the circumstances’ in an evocative post-war description. Families
were sundered, pets abandoned while whole streets were burning.
There was a renewed rush by pet lovers to the lethal chamber – but this time with no official encouragement to do so. A 23-year-old Mass-Observation diarist, Miss M. Rose of Grays, Essex, noted:
Tonight I have been registering animals for NARPAC. Very few people have ever heard of it, although one or two have trained their dogs to go to the shelters with them. At least 30% of animal owners say they will have their pets destroyed if the air raids should get any worse.
At the time Miss Rose was writing, late July, bombing of towns had not even started and in fact NARPAC had been strongly urging do-not-destroy-your-pets through the spring. Individual expressions of anguish are much harder to find than during the mass slaughter of September 1939.
For humbler Londoners, this time it seems to have been a case of outright abandonment of their animals. Christopher Pulling reported a despairing phone call from Colonel Stordy in the early hours of 18 September: ‘Dogs left behind in the East End have strained all their [NARPAC] resources, all the accommodation is full and they have had to slaughter wholesale. They are applying to the Home Office for assistance, particularly in the disposal of the carcasses.’
Mr Pulling could report that the Dogs’ Home, Battersea had responded with the minimum of fuss and bother and had found extra vans to round up East End strays. Harrison, Barber & Co., however, were being difficult in the disposal of carcasses. And so the PDSA would report, ‘again we had to open our grounds for the receipt of their bodies, this time receiving a further quarter of a million animals. Our Technical Officers will never forget the tragedy of those days.’ But this time it was more commercially organized.
In the enormity of civilian animal suffering to come, why reprise the oft-told story of a wartime pet who later found international fame and was awarded a medal? Because in a narrative dominated by dogs this story concerns a cat, and one who was there from the very beginning. It goes like this:
In 1936 a skinny, stray female London cat took refuge in the church of St Augustine’s and St Faith’s on the edge of St Paul’s churchyard (the surviving tower remains incorporated in the Cathedral Choir school).
Three times the church’s verger took the cat out – and three times she came back. Father Henry Ross, church rector, decided she should stay. He named her ‘Faith’. Four years later she gave birth to a black and white kitten, a tom, which was named ‘Panda’. After the Sunday announcement in church, the congregation sang ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. On 6 September Faith abandoned her basket on the top floor of the rectory and found a crevice near the crypt from which she would not be moved.
On the night of 9 September, German bombers targeted London in a mass attack. The East End was hit hard. Fires were burning around St Paul’s and both sides of Ludgate Hill were ablaze. Altogether, over 400 people were killed and 1,400 injured. St Augustine’s Rectory received a direct hit. The rector was in a shelter but next morning he hurried back. As a popular post-war account put it:
His home was a mass of burning ruins. His first question to the firemen was to ask news of his cat and kitten, only to be told that both must be dead.
He disregarded their orders to keep out of danger, and climbed over to a parapet from which he could see into the ruins where the remains of the recess in which ‘Faith’ had made her home should have been. He called the cat’s name, and to his unutterable relief heard the kitten’s faint mew … Sitting in it, serene and unafraid, he saw Faith with her kitten between her paws.
They were both completely unhurt. A picture of Faith was hung in the tower chapel with an inscription: ‘Our dear little church cat of St. Augustine and St. Faith. The bravest cat in the world. God be praised and thanked for His goodness and mercy to our dear little pet.’
That was the funny thing about cats. They were amazing survivors. And like Faith, mother cats were observed many times performing heroic acts of maternal devotion by moving kittens to perceived places of safety, one at a time. Did cats have some higher power? Our Dumb Friends’ League noted in their 1940 report: ‘Cats have some sixth sense which humans do not possess, that warns them of danger, and many casualties have been avoided by the fact that they have been able to escape before the house has actually been struck.’ That, or they find some crevice in which to stick it out.
Bombs demolished the Glendale Road premises of the Hampstead Society for the Protection of Animals, for example, ‘but six cats which had been in the Shelter all survived unscathed, apparently having sensed trouble and sought shelter, although nothing was left standing’.
Anglo-Indian Mrs Garbo Garnham (née Mander) was aged five in the Blitz, living with her mother Princess Sudhira Devi of Cooch Behar, in a pet-filled house in West Hampstead. She remembered her mother, ‘boiling sheeps’ heads for hours in the garden.’ Her older sister, Gita, drove an ambulance and would come back each night with bombed-out cats and dogs. We got homes for most of them,’ Mrs Garnham remembered, ‘but one little biscuit-coloured puppy had a fit and just died on the spot.’
Seeking respite in Birmingham, her mother, the Princess, swept into the Grand Hotel and demanded her entourage of pets be accommodated. They were.
Air attacks on British cities would continue for seven months. It was not to be NARPAC’s finest hour. There was a gathering cash crisis, bills were going unpaid and letters went out to regional vets imploring them to lean on their local authorities for financial assistance. As the bombing intensified, it fell to the charities to do what they could on their own initiative with their own resources – and still without real official recognition. Animal rescuers were the last to be allowed on to bombsites.
The Duchess of Hamilton’s freelance rescuers simply jumped in their ambulance and drove through the streets looking for animals in distress. One of them, the extraordinary Miss Rita Cannon, would record soon afterwards:
An old man stopped me with tears running down his face, saying his dog, after a severe raid, had been running wild for days. He had seen him on several occasions, but the poor, frantic creature would not come to him. Some children and two men offered to help me.
They found the dog after half an hour in the debris of a house. ‘I decided to come back later, alone,’ Miss Cannon wrote. ‘After trailing the dog over debris and through cellars in the end I was lucky, with a lasso.’
The Duchess was meanwhile scooping up refugees for her Wiltshire sanctuary. She rattled through the cases:
Dog belonging to Mr. B. Telephoned us. His house had been bombed, his wife, child and six-year-old black Retriever, ‘Jack’, had been buried under the debris. Mr. B. had dug the dog out, bruised but alive, 45 minutes after the Rescue Squad had given him up for dead. His wife and child were now living with him at new address.
They were going to the country on 5 November. Jack was tied up in the yard, which was not satisfactory. All the other societies had said, ‘have the dog destroyed,’ but Mr. B. said, ‘If the dog was meant to die he would have died under the debris.’ He was placed by us in a good home in the country.
And so it went on. There was the case of the Dalmatian bitch, ‘Trixie’, whose owner was ‘very poor, and unable to keep her’. There were two male Borzois whose owner’s house had been bombed, wife and family evacuated. ‘Blackie’, a Cocker Spaniel, was the subject of complaint by the horrid air raid warden for general nervousness under fire. And there were plenty more cats. As the Duchess wrote:
There were some very special cats, such as ‘Timoshenko’ [in January 1940, Semyon Timoshenko took charge of the Soviet armies fighting Finland in the Soviet-Finnish War] so named on account of his great courage and daring. He was one of twenty-four sad and miserable cats who arrived one cold, snowy night at Ferne – soon after a very bad raid in the City.
A few days after he arrived he escaped from the cattery and joined on to a pack of about thirty-eight dogs large and small – who were taking their afternoon walk (Timo knew no fear). He is now an institution
and sleeps curled up in the arms of a young spaniel and in the mornings they wash each other’s faces with great solemnity.
The RPSCA too sought to get pets out of the firing line. Its 1940 report told how ‘many balloon units’ had asked for cats as mascots, and also as a way of keeping down rats. ‘The Society saved quite a number in this way from being put down owing to the death of their owners, or because of their home had been destroyed.’ An RAF squadron was presented with ‘two Siamese cats’ by the wife of Inspector Quigley.
The Whitechapel Shelter of Our Dumb Friends’ League was in Venice Street, a little way north of the East India Docks and in the front line. Its end-of-1940 report recorded: ‘19,864 cats, 2,255 dogs and a considerable number of fowls, pigeons, rabbits, birds and guinea pigs have been collected or brought to the shelter,’ most of them since the air attacks on London had begun in September. The tales were harrowing:
One dog was brought in by the police with a piece of shrapnel through an eye, another was found in the Mile End Road, badly cut by a bomb splinter, a cat was found in some ruins, having lost one hind leg and the lower half of his jaw, a dog was found wandering in the East End, but he had his name and address on his collar showing that he came from north west London, having been bombed out of his house, and travelled in his fear, all that distance.
Another dog was rescued after being buried for two days, but his experience was too much for him, he developed hysteria and was humanely put to sleep.
Then there was the story of a cat who was evacuated from Bethnal Green to Dagenham, and ‘after an absence of three weeks found his way back to his old home, but as the owner of the property who resided on it kept birds and refused to have a cat, so he had to be put to sleep.’
Every day the League’s Whitechapel staff found a host of ‘deserted animals, their owners have gone away with no thought at all for the creatures living with them’. But there were some Londoners who clearly felt the very opposite. The story was told of two elderly sisters living in a bombed street in a working-class district of south London, along with two Pomeranians, ‘Bimbo’ and her daughter ‘Flossie’. ‘Neither of them is afraid of the guns,’ explained Miss Fanny Dyer, 90. ‘We never go to a shelter. I believe we are the only people on the street who stay put. When the raids are on, our dogs snuggle up close and we don’t mind for if a bomb came down, we should probably all go together.’
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