Bonzo's War

by Clare Campbell

  A Mass-Observation interviewer covered Shoreditch in late September. ‘Animal pets are frequently regarded as important members of the family group,’ she noted and told this story:

  One man for instance preferred to stay at home with his cat and rabbit rather than to accompany the family to a shelter, although his house had been cracked across by blast, and said: ‘I know the missus and kids are safe so I don’t worry about them, but if I went to the Shelter too I’d be thinking all the time about how the animals were getting on.’

  But fleeing owners presented certain opportunities for abandoned pets. A Birmingham housewife recalled for author Norman Longmate ‘the shock of emerging from the shelter to discover that the cat had eaten the weekend joint’. A Bristol family recounted how they were starting on a frugal supper of cheese and biscuits when the sirens sounded: ‘We all dived under the dining table as we heard the first bomb fall, and on emerging found our dog had polished off all our suppers. He was licking his lips, and looking not the least ashamed.’

  Cats showed a universal will to cling to the wreckage. ‘Many piteous tales of cats seen roaming the ruins of their homes have reached us,’ reported Our Dumb Friends’ League. They appealed to the public via local newspapers to ‘take them home and wait for us to collect them’. But would-be rescuers just let the cats go again when someone failed to turn up pretty sharpish. ‘It is obviously impossible to collect cats in the dark,’ bewailed the League. The volunteers had little or no petrol. This well-intentioned initiative seemed doomed.

  One of the worst conundrums was the delayed action or unexploded bomb (unforeseen in ARP planning), which meant whole streets might be roped off for days with pets locked in houses or roaming piteously in search of food. There are many accounts of amateur rescuers defying orders not to help them.

  The long-established Hammersmith ODFL Shelter at Gordon Cottage, Argyll Place, stayed open during raids as a place for people to leave their pets whenever they themselves sought cover – with the express wish ‘to find new homes should anything happen to them’. ‘Sixteen dogs belonging to these unfortunate people [killed by bombing] have been so placed,’ confirmed the League’s end-of-year report. Meanwhile:

  A monkey had been left in a house while his owner went to a public shelter. The man was killed and the monkey would not let anyone go near him. After some time the staff of the League contrived to get him under control.

  The ‘no-pets in public shelters’ rule proved highly contentious. Neither were London pets allowed in the LCC-run shelters for bombed-out families, nor into the Tube system, unofficially colonized from the start of the bombing, although smaller animals were smuggled in bags or beneath winter clothing. ARP Wardens had their orders. There was much heated language (and barking) at shelter entrances. I know I could not abandon my own animals and wartime pet owners were clearly no different.

  In Manchester that October, Mrs Carrie Constance Hewitt was summoned for taking her dog to a shelter during an air raid and allegedly, ‘becoming abusive when asked to leave it outside’. When the offended ARP Warden gave his evidence, the magistrate, a certain Mr Pugh, had clearly already decided the prosecution was trivially vexatious. He asked whether it was forbidden to take ‘panthers or camels’ into the shelter. When the warden replied that it was not, the case was dismissed.

  It had been noticed from the beginning that dog walkers in parks were reluctant to leave their pets on the sounding of an air raid alert. The Canine Defence League sponsored a shelter for posh dogs in Kensington Gardens. On 26 September the first brick was ceremoniously laid by Sir Robert Gower, MP, accompanied by Sir Charles Souter, Chief Air Raid Warden for Kensington. The League hinted darkly at why it had taken so long, ‘because of the crass and blind attitude of people who work in secret in order to indulge their own petty prejudices’.

  ‘This air-raid dog shelter is not a great inspiration or a marvellous achievement in itself, but is rather a symbol of the sympathy which Britain extends to its dogs in a time of stress,’ said its proud sponsors. And it was. It would prove popular too.

  On the same fashionable side of London, a First Aid Veterinary Post had been established at Animal Defence House amid the elegance of St James’s Place with an air raid shelter for pets in its basement. There were signs posted in Green Park advertising its presence to Mayfair pet owners. It was under fire from the start.

  There was the case of a little cat who had been ‘a conspicuous and attractive inhabitant of a well-known restaurant which suffered disaster,’ according to the Duchess of Hamilton. The Society’s veterinary surgeon, Mr F. C. Holliday-Potts, searched for the creature, which he found severely wounded – ‘He was able to give a peaceful death, in his car, to this pathetic creature.’

  The Mayfair post was supposed to cover Westminster but its veterinary nurse, Miss Rita Cannon, clearly went to wherever she might be needed. Her adventures were remarkable. They were recorded in a dramatic pets-at-war Blitz diary published the following year:

  Everywhere the poor folk crowded round me, asking me to take dogs and cats. Many of the cats were so wild that they were difficult to catch, but the children were all helping me and, in the end, I filled the ambulance with animals.

  I have been up to [blank] Road with buckets of food and drink and went from street to street feeding the cats. As soon as I appeared they rushed at me twenty and thirty a time. They all but spoke. I have since paid two more visits to this district each time bringing away the cats. All I could do for them was to give them merciful release from their suffering.

  Each organization did what they could. The Camden Town branch of Dumb Friends’ reported the case of a dog found after being buried for six weeks in rubble: ‘He was a pitiful wreck, and they did not have many hopes of saving him, but with devoted care he pulled through.’

  In Sheffield after the attacks of 12–13 December, the People’s Dispensary rescue squads had to ‘clamber over ruins to collect cats where the owners were dead or injured. Thirty-one animals were dealt with, alas mostly to be destroyed, through owners forgetting to take their pets when they sought shelter,’ according to PDSA News.

  Rescuers found an old lady in a tiny house, the owner of a little dog with a cut foot. ‘He is all I have now, please help me do something for him,’ she implored. ‘Tears were close at hand.’

  In London, the Superintendent of the Our Dumb Friends’ League’s Chelsea branch in Bywater Street reported a cat buried in his basket in Pont Street at the back of Harrods. ‘Such is the cleanliness of these animals that this cat had washed himself constantly and when rescued was without a speck of dirt,’ she noted. She was called out again by the Royal Engineers to a half-demolished school where a ‘very wild bitch’ separated from her puppies was in the utmost distress – ‘She had also been wounded and it took several days of coaxing before she could be caught.’

  The Bywater Street superintendent17 next reported a call for help when a blast smashed the doors of cages in which chickens and rabbits were kept at the convent of Adoration Réparatrice in Beaufort Street. Seventy-two chickens and twelve rabbits were rounded up. The Mother Superior was advised that the accommodation was insufficient and the animals were evacuated. A few days later the empty coops received a direct hit.

  The Chelsea nuns were among the many new urban smallholders who had answered the Government’s call. Domestic livestock keeping had turned out to be a mixed blessing for pets. Goats provided milk, while rabbit meat could feed dogs and cats (but watch out for intestinal parasites). But that was really meant to feed humans. The trouble was that it was all too easy for the smaller ‘economic animals’ to become family pets themselves. Could you eat the one you loved?

  The official Domestic Food Producers’ Council Rabbits Committee had noted the ‘sentimental aspects’ at its first meeting on 27 March 1940, ‘that rabbits in small numbers in different households come to be regarded as pets and people are loath to kill and eat them’. And furthermore, people in some districts ‘pr
eferred the taste of wild over domestic rabbits’.

  By now, after over a year of war, rabbits and chickens were a part of city life. Labour Leader Clement Attlee, Deputy Prime Minister, kept a goat called ‘Mary’ at his Stanmore, Middlesex, home. The genteel sounds of the wartime suburbs were supplemented by grunting, meh-ing, clucking and crowing. Not everyone was happy, though. The neighbours of a Middlesex woman objected when she installed two dozen chickens in a garden run – half of them cockerels given to loud crowing at dawn. But they were soon ‘wholly won over being given three eggs a day in rotation and the promise of a chicken for Christmas, and were soon willingly contributing scraps to feed the birds’.

  Egg-laying chickens might be spared the chop for a while but rabbits had only one way to go. A single tame rabbit could yield 2 lb of meat.18 The skin could get you money off the rag-and-bone man.

  Official guidelines for amateur poultry farmers were to have new pullets (young females) every year, which meant the older generation would then be heading for the oven. Were they pets or dinner? Mr F. G. Imm of Stafford recorded the dilemma.

  At the end of their first laying season our birds were in a condition fit for the oven. [But] how could we eat Brownie, Spotty, Hoppity or Blackie after they had given us so many eggs to supplement our rations? I did not have the courage to wring their necks so I asked the milkman to do it for me.

  Some families were tougher-minded from the start. In one memoir: ‘Chickens were killed for food as soon as they stopped laying eggs. We would all go and watch Dad wring a chicken’s neck, and then we would sit in a circle and pull out the feathers.’

  Avril Appleton, a wartime evacuee from Hull, hated their backyard poultry. They attracted rats, ‘and once there was this dead rat in the nest and [my parents] made me get it out’. And not all rabbits were lovable. She remembered:

  Then my mother got these rabbits that were called Flemish Giants, for the meat and so she could make clothes from the fur. Awful things, horrible great big things, you couldn’t make a pet of them. But when they did get killed and mother sent it away, it cost her no end getting this fur cleaned and all it made was a small pair of mitts for me, which I promptly lost.

  Norman Longmate’s epic collection of Home Front memoirs recorded a Liverpool factory worker whose cousin kept rabbits – ‘One day one was killed and prepared by the butcher. And when dinner was served – ‘one by one the plates were pushed away untouched’.

  A Hull woman who had ‘never skinned a rabbit or plucked a hen in her life’ quickly learned how to do so with the aid of The Smallholder magazine. ‘I never ate any of our own rabbits,’ she told Longmate, ‘but my husband enjoyed them.’

  ‘Phoebe’, ‘a large, fat, white rabbit’, nearly escaped the pot when a Dagenham schoolboy discovered neither his mother nor sister could face consuming her. At last he was sent with the rabbit to an aunt in Southend, ‘where Phoebe was speedily converted into stew’.

  And in an Internet memoir, a Southend woman recalled a family wartime story: ‘My mum (as a very young girl) was told that their pet rabbit had run away with the cat next door. She found out some years later that they’d actually eaten it.’

  Eating pets was hard enough for grown-ups. Telling the children what was really for dinner was impossible. Or you could always blame Hitler.

  17 The freehold of 20 Bywater Street had been left to the League by Mrs Lily Susan Brockwell of Chelsea, who had died on 4 December 1938, on condition it was used as an animal shelter. That is how many pet shelters were established.

  18 Recipe for Rabbit

  Pie Prepare a rabbit and cut into joints, Make a mixture of a tablespoonful of flour, a teaspoon of curry powder, salt, pepper and a pinch of mace. Roll the pieces of rabbit in this mixture then place them in a pie dish. Pour in enough stock to keep the pie moist and add a few neatly cut root vegetables. Cover with suet pasty and cook in moderate oven for about 2 hours.

  The Field, 1942

  Chapter 14

  The Comfort of Pets

  The compassion shown by humans for animals under fire was tangible. It fitted the heroic narrative of the Blitz generally but the animal charities were keener still to promote pets themselves as heroes. The vet H. E. Bywater, the likely writer of the anonymous West Ham chronicle of the great pet-killing panic of September 1939, reflected on the mood of a year later after intense bombing had begun:

  Readers may conclude that animals were an unjustifiable liability during the Blitz on our town but that would be unfair. Many a tale could be told of animals giving aid to their owners, of dogs leading them to shelters before the siren sounded or as bombs had fallen, or leading rescue squads to trapped persons or standing guard over the bodies of their departed friends.

  He reflected too on how animals kept up morale. ‘Many a weary person has found solace and courage from contact with a pet,’ he wrote. That is how it was for him:

  The writer has an old ginger cat. Night after night in the early days of the war, the writer and his wife, tired out after a long day, crawled back to an empty house for the children had been evacuated. An empty house? No! Ginger was always there to welcome them and keep them sane amid the injustice of man’s mad warfare.

  The companionship pets gave, especially to women whose husbands were called up, the reassurance they offered in the blackout, were all cited whenever anti-pet sentiment erupted, that dogs especially would bite or go berserk in air raids. A housewife’s Blitz testimony given in The Dogs Bulletin provides a good example:

  I am suffering through raids and am having severe turns of collapse and am often alone till midnight, as my husband is a bus-driver. When coming out of these attacks of mine, I find the little female pup, aged 10 months, banging her little nose on my knee. She will not leave me until I am all right. Dog-haters should learn what friends our dogs are. Well, are they a danger in raids? To me they are a comfort.

  But the dog haters were as loud as ever. To draw their sting, in October the Canine Defence League announced a splendid scheme to collect dog-hair combings, ‘which will be spun into yarn by voluntary corps of spinners and thereafter knitted into service comforts’. The spinning would be done ‘by Highland crofters under an agreement made with Miss Dorothy Wilkinson, co-principal of the London School of Weaving’. How could dogs be thought unpatriotic now?

  Were pets comforting humans or was it the other way round? Mrs C. Tavener of Crouch End in north London had taken in the kitten of ‘Mrs P.’, her bombed-out next door neighbour. But every time the little cat heard the children’s calisthenics programme, Music and Movement, on the wireless, the ‘swish’ sound that the presenter made to tell bemused children they were in some scary storm-battered forest, meant the ‘kitten seemed terrified’.

  Swish, swish! ‘Every time there is a swish sound, her eyes went round and her ears pricked up,’ wrote Mrs Tavener. ‘Is it her terror at the fall of the bomb and the crash of the house?’

  The kitten had decided to use the Mass-Observation diarist, ‘as her refuge’ and ‘won’t leave my lap and sleeps on my bed at night,’ she wrote. It seems an ideal arrangement to me.

  Some pets even sought to aid and comfort other pets. RPSCA rescuers reported cases of ‘cats going back into a burning house to find their kittens and giving their own lives in the endeavour’. There was the story of an inspector who ‘went to a house soon after a raid in search of a stray cat’. He searched everywhere but could find no sign and was just about to leave when ‘he suddenly saw a furry form dive beneath the rubble’. He discovered four ten-day-old kittens with the stray nursing them as her own.

  In another sentimentalized (nothing wrong with that) account, an RSPCA Inspector recalled the rescue of ‘a very frightened and bedraggled tabby from a ruined building’.

  But puss would not leave the debris. She even tried to re-enter the hole through which he had just pulled her, so the Inspector made further excavations and found a little black dog, badly wounded, crouching there in the bomb hole. It wa
s gently lifted out and tended, to the evident satisfaction of the cat.

  Like the story of Faith, the mother love of pets was especially moving. The RSPCA reported a heroine cat who carried her kittens one by one in her mouth from an upstairs bedroom in a bomb-damaged house, by way of the telephone wires to a place of safety in the garden shed.

  Dogs too. In October, the story of ‘Nelly’, buried for five days in the rubble of her home, was in the papers: ‘Underneath her, covered by her body were her five puppies, she whined now and then to guide the rescuers.’ Mother and pups were alive and well – ‘Starving herself she had fed her puppies throughout.’

  The People’s Dispensary was perhaps the keenest to promote hero pets. PDSA News told the story of ‘Beauty’, a Wire Haired Fox Terrier belonging to a dispensary caravan driver, Mr Bill Barrett. On their emergency call-outs, Beauty ‘stands with her paws on the edge of the window next to the driver’s seat, barking with approval. With her keen nose down she hunts everywhere and as soon as she detects a buried dog or cat, her barking soon brings the rescuers to the spot.’ Dog World Annual gave her star treatment:

  Her sharp senses will often detect the presence of a dog or cat in the midst of the debris and she stands on the spot ‘pointing’ and giving off a volume of barks until somebody starts digging. Beauty has more than twenty rescues to her credit, and some of them even include cats!