The very first rocket hit Chiswick in the southwest of the capital on the evening of 8 September. An engineering worker’s wife was alone in a house in Wilmington Avenue, about 300 yards from the impact. Home from work, she had put down a bowl of food for her cat, ‘Billy’ – ‘large and white and not particularly friendly’. Billy ignored supper and, unusually for him, tried to jump onto his owner’s lap. She recalled:
I stood up and lifted him up in my arms. He was quite still for a second then suddenly he leapt from my arms and rushed out and through the cellar door, which was just outside. Before I could gather my senses there was an almighty explosion. The cat would not come up out of cellar, not even for his food.
A nurse living in Balham observed the family cat, ‘Junior’, asleep on a chair. Suddenly he jumped up in the air, ‘gave a wail of terror’ and rushed under the sideboard in the corner of the room, just before the ‘terrifying explosion’ of the first local V2. Junior was to show the same prescient power on two more occasions. Quite soon pets themselves would intervene in the ‘revenge weapon’ episode in a quite remarkable way (see p.308–14).
There was a happier event in the rocket-blasted autumn of 1944, but one still shrouded in the deepest mystery. Our Dumb Friends’ League reported: ‘At the request of the Palace authorities, the League collected two kittens that had been born at Buckingham Palace. They were found good homes.’
The Royal Family, as far as is known, had had no cats since the time of Queen Alexandra (who adored Siamese). But there were plenty of dogs. Since the thirties, the favoured royal breed had been Corgis, starting with Golden Eagle, known as ‘Dookie’, a Pembrokeshire acquired in 1933 from the Rozavel Kennels in Betchworth, Surrey, of the breeder and pre-war supplier of pets to top Nazis (see p.116), Mrs Thelma Gray.
Dookie died shortly after the outbreak of war and a second dog, ‘Rozavel Lady Jane’, was run over in Windsor Great Park at Christmas 1943. As a replacement for ‘these two little oddities’ (as The Times had unkindly called them on their first public appearance), Princess Elizabeth was given her own Corgi for her 18th birthday on 21 April 1944. The two-month-old puppy was named ‘Susan’.
So where did these mystery kittens come from? The Palace has stayed silent for seventy years. At the time the Daily Mirror sniffed out the story and reported on 17 November: ‘Puzzle of the Palace Kittens. “Belinda” and “Jane”, born in the Silver Room of the palace, have lived in the royal presence for ten weeks before being given to the Our Dumb Friends’ League ten days ago.’ The newspaper pursued a wildly ambitious stunt to have them adopted by the President of the United States.46 Described as ‘a diplomatic feeler’, it did not stand a whisker of a chance.
Sally, the London Zoo tabby, meanwhile had had her two litters in the spring and summer, for which staff had just about managed to find homes. Then, remarkably, she had gone back into the reptile house (perhaps it was warm) and had a third litter of seven. They were found by Keeper Poole, who described them as ‘a colourful batch’.
Sally herself was ‘a friendly creature but the kittens bit, hissed and scratched’, it was reported. Zoo staff were now ‘looking for homes for them’ and they were on offer to the visiting public, ‘as we cannot have too many cats in the gardens, they would be a menace if they got into the aviaries’.
The seven kittens were reduced to two (it was not spelled out exactly how). One day Sally strolled in and ‘was mooching about as usual’ – but without her two tabby kittens. The next day Sally herself disappeared. It was assumed that she had led them off into the Park whence she herself had come back in the early spring.
Two weeks later she reappeared, ‘bedraggled’, with ‘two kittens tumbling behind her and settled down by some hot water pipes in the boiler room’. Presumably the cold had driven her back. But her dramas were not over: Sally and her young family were in the basement of the Alligator House!
‘She is too fond of romping about the reptiles,’ said the keeper. ‘We had a cat before who was prone to getting near the alligators to get bits of meat. But one day a nine-foot alligator snapped and almost got her.’ The alligators missed out again this time. Sally and her kittens were rescued from reptilian peril. One can only hope they found safer accommodation in nearby fashionable Primrose Hill.
45 The Blue Cross medal, originating in 1906 for humans and from 1940 for animal bravery, never quite achieved the same kudos of the subsequently far better known Dickin Medal of the PDSA. In 1945, the RSPCA instigated the red collar and medallion ‘For Valour’.
46 The loopy feline plan was advanced, so Life magazine reported later, by the Mirror’s ‘beauteous’ New York correspondent, Georgina Campbell, along with Madison Avenue adman Robert Kendell, president of the American Feline Society. The plan was frustrated by the fact of the existence of ‘Fala’, the Presidential Scottie, and Mrs Roosevelt’s reported dislike of cats.
Chapter 28
Finest Hour
Pets recruited for the services were about to write a new chapter in military history. The War Dog School-trained patrol dogs sent to North Africa and Italy had had a tough time of it. At Northaw meanwhile, experiments had been in hand since early 1944 preparing dogs for action in the invasion of the Continent. A canine gas mask was developed, which in tests47 dogs found to be ‘perfectly comfortable’, but rendered them useless in action because they could not smell anything.
That special doggy sense was paramount in a parallel programme to train former pets to sniff out land mines48 working with Royal Engineer clearance teams. In choosing the right dog, it was noted:
Dogs with black eyes are surly and erratic, dogs with light eyes are generally wilful, dogs with hazel coloured eyes usually have the firmer character and should be selected.
The clever Mr Lloyd was in charge of training. The most difficult to deal with were so-called ‘Schu’ mines, antipersonnel devices packed in a wooden box.
Mine dogs, like all good war dogs, had a trusted handler who would mark with a flag the spot of a Schu mine, on which the dog was trained to ‘sit’. Results were mixed. In extreme weather dogs ‘merely pretended to work’. They disliked noise and the smell of dead bodies. A report from Normandy complained about ‘bitches in season being distracted by the vagrant French curs that abound in this area’. ‘Handlers are far too kind,’ noted a Royal Engineer lieutenant, ‘nevertheless the dogs are doing excellent work.’ However the unfortunate commander of a dog platoon had his foot blown off by a Schu mine that a dog had missed.
The mine hunter dogs had all once been dog’s home strays or beloved pets like Michael, the Golden Retriever who had been sent away in December 1943 in answer to the war dog appeal. At their chance railway station meeting, Dr Burnell had been told their former pet was being sent to France to search for mines. Had he survived? Would he ever come home? And would he recognize the family that had loved him?
Khan, the Alsatian from Tolworth, was now ‘Rifleman Khan’, having passed out of Northaw and been posted to the 6th Battalion The Cameronians, the famous Scottish infantry regiment, as a patrol dog. On the night of 2 November 1944 he and his handler, Lance-Cpl Jimmy Muldoon, were fighting their way onto the Dutch island of Walcheren, a V2 rocket launch site, when shellfire hit their assault craft. Dog and handler were pitched into the icy dark waters. After a desperate search, the fearless Khan grabbed his struggling master by the collar and paddled to the mud-flat shore. ‘Man and dog collapsed on the bank.’ It was not the end of Khan’s adventures.
Meanwhile the end of the war was in sight. The Third Reich, source of so much inconvenience for pets, was crumbling. Before too long, Adolf Hitler would retire into the Berlin bunker with Blondi, his pet German Shepherd.
Pet lovers in the services were now with the Allied armies on the German frontier. The concern of military vets was how to deal with the enormous number of enemy animals, horses especially, being taken ‘prisoner’. Pets meanwhile were thin on the ground.
Private John Keet, a peacetime member of
the Edinburgh General Terrier Club, was in an ENSA concert party entertaining troops. The retreating enemy had taken all the best animals, although some secretly hidden had survived, so he told Our Dogs of his canine observations in the winter of 1944.
The authorities in liberated Belgium were allowing ‘some meat, oatmeal and bread for dogs, cats and rabbits’ he reported. There were well-groomed Poodles on the streets of Brussels. Dogs were non-existent in famine-gripped Holland apart from occasional toys – Papillons, Pekes and Griffons.
Mrs Sugden of St Brelades, Jersey, would tell Tail-Wagger Magazine that the Germans were quite nice to the dogs on the island, giving them scraps of food, up to the end of 1944 when suddenly they all disappeared. She supposed they had been eaten.
Private Gunnar de Wit was in a cellar on the banks of the River Maas that winter, ‘a far cry from the Tooting dispensary of the PDSA’ where he had been a volunteer worker. ‘Animals over here have had a raw deal,’ he told PDSA News, ‘Horses and cattle have been killed by shellfire, caught while they were still chained up, sometimes in wrecked sheds or in open fields.’ He had to despatch a few pigs, which had been wounded by shrapnel.
‘There are crazy dogs in the villages (“slap happy” the troops call them) dashing around.’ He made sure they were ‘disposed of humanely’.
‘I have had to attend to several dogs with broken legs,’ he reported. ‘One of the chaps has one of them with him now, the pet of the battery.’ You can guarantee he was.
Rockets fired from northern Holland continued to torment southern England. Through the autumn and winter of 1944–45, British and American bomber fleets flew almost unopposed to wreck German cities from end to end. Japan’s cities burned. Pets were annihilated. Rescuers on all sides did what they could.
In London, the canine contribution to search and rescue work would be different this time. The amateur Terriers of the Blitz were yesterday’s dogs; for German Shepherds, this would be their Finest Hour.
There had been abundant evidence from the Blitz that dogs (and indeed cats) were natural rescuers. If they could smell out a Schu mine, they could find a buried body. Yet in spite of their widespread training as guard and ‘tactical’ animals, no official rescue dogs had been used in the flying-bomb summer.
There is a story that Lt-Col Baldwin had seen a dramatic documentary in a Cheltenham cinema – Heroic Stalingrad – about the battle and this had given him the idea that dogs could be trained to ‘point’ snipers. It was certainly more complicated than that, but the idea had developed into finding buried casualties. With London now under sustained rocket attack, some doggy people thought that they might still be useful, as indeed they were.
Two ‘lend-leash’ pet Ministry of Air Production (MAP) guard dogs were recalled to Gloucestershire for special training in late summer 1944. Among them was Jet, the Alsatian brought up on Government rations since he was a Liverpool pup, who had lately been guarding an American airbase in Ulster. After a month of rockets killing Londoners, there was a demonstration in Birmingham in early October, where RAF volunteers hid themselves deep under rubble from 1940-era ruins. Home Secretary Herbert Morrison watched it all with senior Civil Defence officials.
At the command ‘Find!’ all but one was found in less than three minutes. Jet led the way. After that, it would be said, ‘when Jet was satisfied that he had a find, then he would indicate it by starting to dig. He was never known to give a wrong indication, but frequently burnt his feet by the attempted digging.’
Unlike the Blitz, rockets fell arbitrarily on the giant dartboard of the capital. The outer suburbs, as well as the centre, were taking a pounding. Jet and his RAF handler, Cpl Wardle, arrived on 16 October 1944 to be based at Civil Defence Depot 1, Cranmer Court – a mansion block in Whiteheads Grove, Chelsea. Cpl Wardle’s first act was to take Jet to the mortuary at St Stephen’s Hospital – ‘He sniffed, stepped over the bodies and took no further notice.’ This was good. After all, he was supposed to be interested in living survivors. The next night in Norwood, south London, he found two under the rubble.
On the 19th ‘Thorn’ and MAP trainer, Mr M. Russell, and ‘Storm’49 with his trainer, Mrs Margaret B. Griffin of the famous Crumstone Kennels, arrived in London, driven urgently from Gloucester by Colonel Baldwin. Canine history was in the making.
From the correspondence files it is clear that veteran Civil Defence rescuers were deeply sceptical of these doggy amateurs turning up at ‘incidents’ in their little utility van. There was ‘strong language’ amid the dust, rubble and tangled limbs as the search went on for the living and the dead.
Mr Russell complained of ‘very poor cooperation’ at an incident at Hazlehurst Road, Wandsworth, on 19 November when the bodies of two adult males, a child and ‘particles of flesh’ were found (fragmentary remains were a common occurrence, something the dogs found difficult to deal with). But he predicted, ‘It is only a matter of time before there is complete harmony at every incident.’
He was right. The suspicion of the old hands turned to a sense of near wonderment at what the dogs could do. Four more dogs had arrived by early November and been posted to depots in Hendon and Lewisham, expected to learn on the job. It would take a month. Mr Russell and Mrs Griffin were enrolled as part-timers in the Civil Defence and given uniforms. Margaret Griffin set up an extemporized kennel in Station Road, Loughton, in suburban Essex to cover northeast London with six dogs, including two rather special ones, ‘Crumstone Irma’ and ‘Crumstone Psyche’. They would become very famous dogs.
Reports of the dogs in action sent into the London Civil Defence Region headquarters in the bombproof basement of the Geological Museum in Exhibition Road make harrowing reading. Bodies in a workers’ canteen at Erith, Kent hit by a rocket were so fragmented it was impossible to number the casualties. In Epping, Essex, the dog discovered ‘blood marks in a garden hut and later small portions of a human body. This accounts for the missing child,’ as the incident report put it.
By 14 December, Irma and Psyche were ready for work. Working together in Southgate, northeast London, they found a large mound of rubble in a ruined row of houses, where Irma became excited. ‘A call for silence was sufficient for a rescue officer to hear a cry from a woman saying she and her sister were in a Morrison shelter,’ the incident report recounted. They were dug out, although the sister was dead. Rescue dog ‘Peter’ (of whom more will be heard) found three further bodies in the rubble.
The story of Miss Hilda Harvey, a schoolmistress, appeared in a newspaper the next day concerning a ‘V-Bomb incident in southern England.’ In very dramatic terms she told how she had been buried in rubble but could hear the ‘jumbled cries of rescuers in the darkness’. Then she heard a dog sniff. ‘A woman’s voice said, “Leave him alone, he’ll find somebody alive down there”.’ She heard ‘the sniff again and then the bark, then the rescuers broke through the debris’ and lifted her out.
No one needed further convincing. More dogs were set to training in the rubble. At the Hendon depot, the Misses M. and D. Homan were in charge of ‘Rex’ and ‘Duke’. Mrs Griffin, now with eight dogs at the Loughton kennels, required 60 lb of meat a week to feed them and proposed getting it from the local butcher. She was informed instead she must obtain condemned meat from the Caledonian cattle market in Islington. The Waste of Food Order still applied. Rescue dogs or not, they were civilians.
Photographs show Margaret Griffin at rescue sites with her dogs, wearing a swaddling blue-serge Civil Defence greatcoat, leather gauntlets and a floppy beret with an Alsatian’s head badge and shoulderflash. She is utterly magnificent, enough certainly to convince the Germans firing their beastly rockets at London that their space-age endeavour was doomed.
Mrs Griffin’s own accounts are full of admiration for her animals. Irma ‘had a special bark when she located someone she sensed to be alive (her “living indication”).’ In one incident she refused to leave a scene for two days until two young girls were found alive in the rubble. Psyc
he could also find pets as well as people, including ‘a nice Red Setter,’ badly injured but alive in a ruined house.
Mrs Griffin recalled, ‘I feared his heart would give out and he could not stand up by himself. We gave him some hot tea and wrapped him in a blanket, left him quiet and telephoned for the PDSA van.’
Psyche and Irma would regularly work together. At one incident, the dogs dug around two-and-a-half feet down and found ‘a lovely cat’. Irma kept giving her ‘live’ signal. Digging further down, rescuers ‘found an old lady, her daughter and her sailor fiancé, all dead’.
‘When anyone who was found by Irma was brought out dead,’ wrote Mrs Griffin, ‘she would try and lick the lifeless face or a hand and look up as if entreating that something more should be done.’
Mr Keith Raven was a baby when a V2 fell on Chingford in suburban Essex. With Irma and Psyche, Mrs Griffin was soon on the scene. Five years later, Raven met the heroic dogs and their trainer at Crufts and made a visit to the Goring Kennels, where he was told the story of how he survived the drama of 5 February 1945.
The row of houses in which his family had lived had been pulverized. Irma made a ‘live indication’ in the rubble and, as he recalled much later, ‘After about 20 minutes’ work, silence was called for, they could hear a baby (me) crying, after more digging and tunnelling, a way was made in and voice contact was made with our mother.’ The family were buried in the Morrison shelter. Keith and his brother were found wrapped in an eiderdown and both brought out unhurt. Their mother had lost consciousness and now lay dead in the rubble.
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