Mr Bridges Webb made some extraordinary admissions. He had designed the NARPAC badge and had had it registered at Stationer’s Hall. Legally it was his property. He himself ‘had taken over the staff at Harrison, Barber & Co. and the Merton Bone Company’, and was ‘now disposing of animal carcasses at a profit by reducing them to their by-product.’ At least the money was going to a good cause.22
Harrison, Barber & Co.’s West Ham rendering factory had itself been blitzed and ‘could only dispose of the bodies of dogs three times a week’. The Dogs’ Home, Battersea had resorted to burying hundreds of animals that it had lethalled in ‘a large hole’ in its own garden. ‘It is essential that continued pressure be brought to bear to obtain a dump or series of dumps within a reasonable distance of London,’ the secretary, Edward Healey-Tutt, told Scotland Yard on 1 November.
Five days later he confessed to having ‘climbed out of further difficulty’ by disposing of the carcasses at a secret site at Longfields, near Dartford in Kent. The local authority did not know about it, and there would be ‘considerable trouble’ if they did.
Food and petrol were short. He was getting horsemeat from Harrison, Barber & Co. but was now eating into reserves of biscuits. He was meanwhile ‘finding homes outside London for any dogs worth keeping but a large proportion are puppy bitches, which nobody wants, or diseased mongrels’.
By mid November NARPAC’s cash situation was critical. Trying to salvage blitzed farm animals was difficult and costly. With grim humour, a country vet in Hampshire, Mr J. F. Tutt, demanded some sort of official incorporation into the ARP so as to ‘prevent an undertaker being presented with a dead cow and a butcher with a specimen of homo sapiens for salvage’. He despaired at the futile attempts to run the organization on some kind of ‘quasi-military basis’.
By now more than 4,500 ‘Parish Animal Stewards’ had been appointed and 3,500 food animal carcasses salvaged. But pet welfare groups were subsidizing it all. Farm animals were not their concern. A total of £90,000 (£3.95m) was needed immediately. Creditors were clamouring. When the issue came to a head at a conference of regional veterinary officers there was a motion that the Government should be asked to bail them all out (the ODFL and PDSA voted against). But still the Treasury said no.
The travails of Britain’s ‘Ministry of Pets’ reached neutral America. The New York Times reported the refusal of dogs and cats to react to bombing in the way His Majesty’s Government thought they would. ‘Instead of going mad, they adapted themselves quickly to new conditions,’ wrote The NYT’s London correspondent. ‘The noise of sirens bothered them at first, but a few days after the start of the Blitz they began to understand what the noise meant and led the family procession to shelters. Similarly horses took the noise as a matter of course.
‘Herr Hitler’s introduction of the time bomb, however, has created a big problem with thousands of people forced to evacuate their homes, unable to take their pets with them.’ The same problem was true of those evacuated from ‘invasion corner’ on the south coast, ‘the problem now is to find a temporary refuge for hundreds of thousands of pets.’
‘Special animal shelters have been built in parks and private canteens have been set up to feed stray dogs,’ he wrote. ‘While the British Government does not like the idea of feeding dogs food that has to be convoyed into this island, the British people in their usual humanitarian fashion are seeing to it that as few pets as possible are destroyed.’
Clearly the American journalist had been briefed by insiders on what he called ‘The National Pet Register’. To function it depended on telephone calls to the capital when it was often impossible to get the call through. ‘Consequently hundreds of thousands of pets had to be destroyed and officials are now trying to meet this problem by decentralizing their organization and letting each city take care of its own register,’ he wrote. ‘The problem of financing this new machinery came up before the officials today.’ This was a carefully spun version of the truth.
Nevertheless, New Yorkers were treated to a vision of a nation of humane pet lovers to whose aid neutral America must surely come:
The trouble to which the British people and officials have gone for their pets is simply staggering. Hundreds of voluntary workers, including veterinary surgeons all over the country, are giving their services free of charge and risking their own lives every night to take care of these animals.
The top vet Henry Steele-Bodger found all this bending of the truth most unpalatable. He burst into a rage on 4 December about a BBC broadcast, ‘in which certain of the animal welfare societies have been wallowing in for their own benefit and self glorification, something the veterinary medical profession cannot do’.
He was finding the animal welfare advocates increasingly wearisome. In communications with the Ministry, Mr Steele-Bodger was by now questioning whether their love of animals had gone beyond reason.
The second Christmas of the war was coming and the intermittently fed goose was not getting especially fat. Backyard poultry breeders eyed up ‘Henrietta’ and ‘Blackie’ for the chop. For Britain’s pets there were mixed reasons to celebrate the festive season under fire. Perhaps the charities would bury their differences in the spirit of goodwill. Our Dumb Friends’ League led the way by hosting a Christmas party for bombed-out dogs at its headquarters near Buckingham Palace.
Mrs Maria Dickin published a moving tribute in the Christmas edition of PDSA News: ‘That plaintive cry, the faint moan,’ she wrote, ‘how it rings in the ears and tears at the heart of the PDSA staff who, often at great personal danger, toil hour after hour to rescue the animals trapped under the debris.’
Mrs W. Slater of Birmingham was one of them. ‘I have rescued hundreds of cats,’ she told the Daily Mirror in early December, ‘even while a house is burning, a cat will remain there. I throw the lasso cord over its neck and drag the cat out.’ Her fiercely independent Harborne Home and Dispensary for Animals was the designated NARPAC detention post. ‘Many of them are so badly injured they have to go into the lethal box immediately,’ she said, ‘and last week three lorry loads of dead cats were taken away from the city’ [the heaviest attacks on the city were in late November]. Mrs Slater and her family had voluntarily become vegetarians, it was reported, ‘so that the many cats she has rescued can have meat at her home’.
There was more upbeat news as well. During the Christmas Blitz on Manchester (22–24 December) it was reported: ‘At midnight, a goat was found by the police at the Odeon Cinema in Oxford Street. This bewildered animal had luckily been registered with the National A.R.P. Animals Committee, and a telephone call soon resulted in restoration to its Longsight owner’.
Mancunian Animal Guards seemed terribly keen. After the festive-season raids they were reported to be touring the city on foot and by bicycle organizing relief for the ‘wild, starving cats’ of the city. Scraps of meat and fish from caterers and abattoirs had been collected and mixed with dried cat food stockpiled by the committee.
‘Thirty volunteer women reported the cats’ whereabouts and distributed baskets of food to approved animals,’ it was reported. ‘They carry rope lassos to catch stray dogs and cat waifs are brought to the lethal chamber.’
Mr J. T. Beilby of the Committee’s North-west Region said, ‘These cats are wild and elusive and we have to leave the food out for them to take. But I am convinced it is the cats who get it and not the rats.’
Since the Christmas 1940 raids, 500 cats had been destroyed by their owners and the same number more saved from ‘hungry vagrancy’ (by being destroyed by PDSA mobile squads), so it was reported. It was perhaps better for Manchester cats to stay clinging to the ruins if they were to survive.
In a round-up of evacuee tales, The Dog World told the story of a woman in a provincial town who broke down in tears because no one would take her in with dog and her baby – until ‘the kindly owner of a local boarding kennel offered free shelter for the Westie [West Highland White Terrier] thus simplifying her search for
lodgings’.
Cats too charmed their way into places of warmth and safety. The Cat told the story of the church cat of St Magnus the Martyr in the City of London: ‘“Puss” placed her four young kittens in the manger with the Bambino. A little lad visiting the church during Christmastide saw the kittens and with much delight shouted: “Baby kittens with mother Jesus!”’
And in Chester Cathedral during the festive season another correspondent saw ‘a huge black Tom curled up very cosily upon the straw within the manger. He was not the official church cat, but may have been invited in by the resident puss – one never knows.’
22 War was good for business. The Times recorded, ‘Harrison, Barber & Co. (animal slaughterers) – A profit of £8,607 is returned for 1940 (against £3,471 for 1939).’
Chapter 17
Non-essential Animals
In spite of all its troubles, by the start of 1941 the protecting veil of NARPAC had been spread over the whole country. Britain’s cities continued to take a pounding as the pet lovers’ militia now stood sentinel, supposedly, over all the nation’s animals. Its committee members had been released from pending bankruptcy meanwhile by the intervention of the Ministry of Home Security. All sins had been forgiven; the Animal Guards were back. Whether this would actually help animals under fire had yet to be seen.
That early spring, a Ministry of Information photo session for the US press featured Mrs Olive Day of Drayton Gardens, Kensington in: ‘A Day in the Life of a Wartime Housewife’, where she was seen knitting a balaclava and preparing for her naval officer husband to come home on leave. Her agreeable black cat, ‘Little One’, accompanies her throughout, prominently wearing a collar with its NARPAC badge. The collar ‘was to ensure, should he stray in Blitz or blackout, he will be returned safely to his owner’. How thoughtful.
There was a triumphant rally of Animal Guards in Manchester on 13 January to mark the first anniversary of the North-western region. Captain T. C. Colthurst, general secretary of the Registration Branch, was introduced as ‘the original organiser of animal guards’ and he told how just sixty guards had been registered in October 1939. Now there were three million nationwide, he boasted. It was an astonishing figure and entirely untrue.
‘Throughout the country, 5,000 animals a week are being returned to their owners,’ Colthurst claimed. He told the story of ‘Dusty’, a cat from Leigh-on-Sea in Essex found by a guard in Bloomsbury with a NARPAC collar and how within a few hours his delighted owner had learnt by telegram that his pet was safe. How the Essex cat had got to central London was inexplicable, but the registration system worked admirably.
There were complaints from the floor that in some areas police and ARP were obstructing rescue work for animals, but the Chief Constable of the city, Mr John Maxwell, was known to be sympathetic to pets (he was indeed a PDSA member). The number of cats still being destroyed was deplorable, said Captain Colthurst. Only recently he had ‘seen an advertisement saying that there was a big demand for cats’.
By now the urban Animal Guards were joined by their rural comrades, the Parish Animal Stewards. Was there really anything for them to do?
The Yorkshire Evening News told the stirring tale of how war ‘came viciously’ to the East Riding when a 1,000-acre farm found itself in the firing line and sticks of incendiary bombs fell on stables and cattle-sheds.
Farm foreman Tom Swift, ‘un-tethered the horses one by one, and let them gallop to safety. With the help of other farm workers, he released 80 head of cattle, and then, twice thrown from his feet by terrific explosions, he ran to save the farmhouse,’ recounted the story. ‘Tom Swift did no more than many a townsman has done since the Blitz came to England, but this is written so that posterity might know of the equal heroism of country folk.’
An anonymous correspondent for the Manchester Guardian sent a graphic despatch from the Lincolnshire fens ‘where farmers have found that homeward-bound German bombers like to jettison any remains of their cargo before they reach the sea’.
A bomb dropped at Pyewipe Pasture had ‘killed two good plough horses, and the farmer’s proper down about it’. The NARPAC vet had given gas and raid instructions to all the cowmen and stablemen of the neighbourhood. A farmer from Mintin’s Ear was the Parish Animal Steward, ready with his team of local butchers ‘to proceed to any farm where badly injured beasts need to be destroyed’.
Pets had not been overlooked either. The village chemist had been ‘besieged for the powders recommended as a sedative for noise-frightened dogs and cats. The transformation of packing-cases into gas-proofed dog-boxes has become a favourite weekend job.’
The blacksmith’s wife was a canary fancier. The couple’s son had brought back three such birds from Belgium, ‘through the inferno of Dunkirk, ransacking abandoned shops for bird-seed to feed them.’ Now, acting on instructions from the vet, a blanket soaked in hypochlorite stood ready in the parlour to shield the cage of ‘Blitz’, ‘Gort’23 and ‘Victory’ from gas attack.
‘In many kitchens you will find pinned to the wall one of the leaflets issued on war-time feeding for domestic pets, badly needed now that dog biscuit is a luxury and table scraps are consumed at table and no longer discarded,’ wrote the anonymous correspondent.
‘The totemic NARPAC identity discs had been dispensed by the rector’s daughter with instructions to ink them in with the animal’s name and owner’s address. The decoration is highly popular and is being worn by the postman’s rooster and Mrs. Yeats’s two nanny-goats as well as by the whole canine population and three babies.
‘We shall take good care of our animals, if only to prove the veracity of the Frenchman who said, “that in England it is lovely to be a dog”.’
Such bucolic harmony was not universal, however. When it was announced that rationing of livestock feed would start on 1 February 1941, the gloom had deepened. ‘Owners of urban horses including mules, asses, jennets, and donkeys,’ it was announced, ‘must now use ration cards to get their nosebags replenished.’
Domestic animals were not to be included in the livestock scheme. There would be no ration books for pets. Sir Robert Gower, MP, the RSPCA Chairman, complained in Parliament. He was told with some logic that ‘A rationing scheme for dogs and other domestic animals would be impracticable owing to the great variety of breeds and the extent to which these requirements are usually met by purchased foods and by scraps respectively.’
They must continue with what they could get, but strictly no human food and rely instead on the many diets being promoted by the charities and by NARPAC too. The observer of Fenland pets had further written: ‘I fancy these leaflets, with their excellent charts on the quantities of protein and carbohydrate for different breeds, will do something towards reducing the waist-line of those unlucky animals whose owners think of a dog as an ever-open mouth for titbits.’ That might not be the general opinion of dogs.
On 1 January 1941 had come a new humiliation, an order ‘that all meat which is unsuitable for human consumption must be dyed green’. ‘The special dye is stated to have no harmful effect upon the animals to which it is fed and the colour cannot be boiled out of the meat,’ it was reported. It was all deeply unappetizing.
Out in the countryside, the huntsmen of England faced deepening anguish. Some were realistic. A former Master of Fox Hounds declared that the food being eaten by hunters should indeed be given to cattle – ‘Five couple of hounds should be the maximum held by any hunt; these should be kept by farmers and fed on refuse. The rest ought to be put down.’ But a diehard replied that the time to destroy hounds was when ‘all pet dogs had been made into glue’. That day might be closer than he thought.
Miss J. A. Boutcher, master of the Courtenay Tracey Otterhounds of Andover, Hants, admitted to the Ministry that her pack (now reduced from seventeen to ten couple) consumed the same as Foxhounds. Could she please have more food for them?
Major Cecil Pelham, the Hon. Sec. of the Masters of Fox Hounds Assocation, wrote to the Ministe
r of Agriculture to say that: ‘Seven thousand eight hundred hounds have been put down since the start of war. Masters and hunts have done their best to play the game.’ And, in the context of what had happened to urban dogs, they had.
Thus it was that much-diminished hunts carried on through a second wartime winter without giving up entirely. There were fewer cars in the countryside to spoil the scent but also fewer open fields over which to ride. Every scrap of land was being put under the plough. Fox coverts were being buried under aerodromes. Tenant farmers, emboldened to defy their hunting landlords, simply went out and shot foxes.
But it was the Government machine in Whitehall that would decide the fate of hunters and hunted – as indeed of everything else. Farmers and landowners had lost their last few freedoms when Britain became a siege-socialist state after Dunkirk. The Ministry’s County War Agricultural Executive Committees (‘County War Ags’) had dictatorial powers to decide land use, issue ‘plough-up’ orders, direct what livestock would get what to eat, to direct gangs of labour (including Land Girls) and to eradicate what (and how) it decided were ‘pests’, all backed by emergency legislation.
On 6 February memos flew to and from the Ministry of Food exiled in Wales ready to brief the Civil Defence Committee meeting due to be held the next day in London on the question of animal feeding. The Principle Assistant Secretary teleprinted: ‘We suggest that hunting should be stopped, it is impossible to justify.’ And furthermore what about racehorses? With U-boats24 slashing at the Atlantic lifeline, some big gesture was needed to let the public know just how serious things were. Officials asked how could the embattled island propaganda play in neutral America when horse racing merrily continued?
It was all about perception. Not much later it would be noted that, ‘The general public, who for very good reasons cannot be given the true figures [on dwindling food stocks], are not going to believe the seriousness of the situation if race meetings continued.’
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