Bonzo's War (18 page)

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.'

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: